Making a Name : McLinn Joined CSUN Without Fanfare, Then Endured to Become Team Leader

He is playing defense. Tight defense. So tight that his opponent’s eyeballs are fogging.

Brooklyn McLinn’s hands are up, groping. His feet are firmly positioned, every muscle tensed, ready to pounce.

His man jumps, preparing to shoot the basketball. He leaps with his man, leaning, his fingertips straining to brush leather.

The ball takes flight and he turns, just in time to see it arc through the hoop and gently graze the bottom of the net.

McLinn, a senior guard at Cal State Northridge, used to play pickup games against the likes of Kevin Franklin (Taft) and Steve Ward (Calabasas), former area high school hot shots.

“My hands would be up, slapping him in the face and he’d just keep making them,” McLinn recalls of his duels with Franklin. “He’d just light me up.”

McLinn is smoldering all right, but now he owns the red-hot shooting hand. In Northridge’s last eight games the 6-foot senior is averaging 15.5 points and has connected on 24 of 46 shots (52.2%) from three-point range.

Often, like so many outstanding shooters, he makes scoring look effortless. Defenders hover, all but mugging him, and he floats the ball just above their reach, dropping it softly through the basket.

Oh, he can make it look easy. He can deceive you that way.

Very little about McLinn’s basketball career at Northridge has come without trial and tribulation, yet here he is, a fifth-year senior and a team leader, a likable young man who has overcome much, including the death of his father, to become admired equally for his athletic skills, academic accomplishments and charm.

He came to Northridge as a career reserve at Taft High who didn’t start in high school until the sixth game of his senior season. A year later, after making the Northridge team in 1989 as a freshman walk-on, he quit, only to beg his way into another tryout.

McLinn’s second stint has lasted three full seasons and in that time he has become a fixture in the Matadors’ lineup. He plays an average of 31 minutes a game, most on the team. He is second in steals, assists and free-throw percentage. His 12.2 scoring average is third best, and climbing.

Going into Northridge’s game tonight at 7 against UC Irvine at the Bren Center, McLinn has scored in double figures eight games in a row.

Shudder to think where the Matadors would be without him. Even worse than 2-10 certainly, and feeling a heckuva lot more glum about it, too.

McLinn is said to be as fast on the draw with a one-liner as he is with a three-pointer.

“He is very quick-witted,” Northridge Coach Pete Cassidy says. “You definitely don’t want to get him on a roll.”

Among teammates who delight in bagging on each other, McLinn is lead box boy.

No one, not even Cassidy is safe from a barb.

Near the end of a recent practice, McLinn made a typically glib remark to a teammate.

Cassidy scolded him. “Get down and give me five,” he said, meaning for McLinn to do five pushups.

Instead, McLinn sat down and, using his fingers, very deliberately counted to five.

Bad timing. “OK, now give me 10,” Cassidy retorted.

McLinn did the pushups.

“Normally,” Cassidy says, “he has better sense than to do something like that during practice.”

Despite McLinn’s mischief, Cassidy all but cries when discussing his player’s career at Northridge. “He is a great example of what one can accomplish with a lot of hard work,” the coach says.

Initially, the relationship was not nearly so warm.

When McLinn quit after playing only 28 minutes in eight games as a freshman, he was quoted in a November 1990 newspaper article as saying he would try out again only if Northridge hired a new coach.

At the time he was part of a mass exodus. Cassidy had prepared for Northridge’s first season of Division I competition with a little housecleaning. In all, 10 players with remaining eligibility left the team, either at Cassidy’s urging or because of academic or personal difficulties.

McLinn, angered by the plight of a few of his friends, reacted accordingly. Although he contends that his comments about Cassidy were taken out of context, he recalls being frustrated by his lack of playing time.

Looking back, he says, “I was a freshman. And a walk-on. How big of an impact did I really think I was going to have?”

As the 1991-92 season approached, McLinn weighed his options with the help of his father, Lloyd, and decided to ask Cassidy for another chance. He wrote a letter, explaining why he had quit and why he would like to rejoin the team.

Cassidy wrote back, welcoming him to try out.

“I understood all the things that went on during that time,” Cassidy says. “Youngsters band together with their peers and when they leave the office upset and feeling like they got screwed, they’re going to express how upset they are.

“I think Brooklyn, in retrospect, looked at the situation and said, ‘That’s them. This is me, and I want to play.’ ”

In McLinn’s first game back, as a sophomore, he scored 15 points in the second half of the Matadors’ opener against Butler.

By midseason he was a starter.

Always a dangerous shooter, McLinn has improved his ball-handling skills and is considered a top defensive player.

“You look at the areas he has improved and it’s all because he has wanted to improve,” Cassidy says. “He’s never been one you need to urge or coax or pull or tug on to work hard. With Brooklyn you simply show the way. He takes that and goes with it.”

McLinn is averaging more than two steals per game, a product of his quick hands and tenacity.

Defense, he says, “is mental. You have to want to play it.”

His soaring shooting percentage is attributed to long hours of practice and improved concentration. Last season, McLinn rarely hit a long-distance jumper with a defender in his face.

Of late, the defense hasn’t mattered.

“Right now I feel like if they give me an inch I’m going to make it,” McLinn says. “I’m that confident. It’s like I don’t even think about scoring. It just happens.”

With his hard-earned success, McLinn also has two regrets. First and foremost: His father is no longer alive to see him play.

In November 1992, one week before the Matadors’ season opener, Lloyd McLinn, his son’s confidant and inspiration, died of a heart attack at age 49.

“I still can’t believe it today,” McLinn says. “I still go home to my mom’s house and expect my father to be there.”

Lloyd McLinn never attended a four-year university, but the education of his five sons was his prime concern. He encouraged Brooklyn, his second youngest, to enroll at the local university rather than go to a junior college. Academics came first, athletics second.

His father also encouraged him to give basketball at Northridge a second chance.

Lloyd McLinn had suffered mild heart ailments before, but largely ignored his doctor’s orders. “If he couldn’t live his life the way he wanted to, then he didn’t want to live at all,” Brooklyn says. “He smoked and he drank every now and then and he worked a lot. He really needed to exercise.”

The loss hit hard.

“His dad was pretty much everything to him,” says Andre Chevalier, Northridge’s point guard and a close friend. “When his dad died, it was like everything just left him.”

Cassidy saw the effects, too. “He would drift sometimes, which is natural,” Cassidy says. “You’d see him sometimes and you just knew he was hurting. I’d say, ‘You OK?’ And he’d say, ‘Yeah, I’m all right.’ He handled it very quietly.”

And with a great deal of determination.

McLinn made a greater commitment to school and basketball in honor of his father. A Pan-African studies major who is pursuing a business career, McLinn has a 3.1 grade-point average and already has parlayed a successful family investment in 1-900 phone lines into part ownership of a Burbank restaurant.

However, he still is happiest on the hardwood despite his second regret: Northridge’s dismal record.

McLinn hoped that the climax of his athletic career might coincide with a postseason tournament berth for the Matadors.

“I hate to admit it but maybe we did, you know, put our expectations too high,” he says. “Maybe we took for granted that things were going to be easier for us because we had better players.

“The tournament, the NIT or whatever, is out. And a winning record, unless we start winning some serious games, that’s pretty much out, too.”

So what, pray tell, is left?

“I’m playing for respectability,” McLinn says. “I guess this team, in a way, is like me. I’ve been trying to prove myself in basketball for sooo long.”