The House’s Not Rockin’ : Dog Days Are Replacing the Glory Days at Loyola as Program Tries to Regroup

Four years after the last days of Hank Gathers--a white-hot era of lore, loss and impending lawsuits--Loyola Marymount University has all but disappeared from the college basketball landscape.

Maybe it all worked out as planned.

Fame came hard and fast to this sleepy Westchester campus in the late 1980s, but the crash was harder.

The demarcation began on March 4, 1990, a Sunday afternoon, when an intoxicating burst of success gave way to excruciating grief as the team’s star, Gathers, lay dying of heart failure on the court at Gersten Pavilion during a West Coast Conference playoff game.

Sorrow turned to anger, then to accusations, then to litigation. The tiny school of 3,900 students, which had never bothered anyone before, found itself at the epicenter of scrutiny.

Loyola Marymount just wanted to curl up under the covers and turn out the lights. To a great extent, it has succeeded.

But no one is talking about Loyola basketball any more. ESPN hasn’t called in months.

Restore the Roar?

The Lions finished the regular season 6-20 and a last-place 4-10 in the WCC. When they defeated the University of Buffalo on Jan. 7, it ended a 19-game losing streak dating to last season, when the team finished 7-20 under first-year Coach John Olive.

It was never the intention of Brian Quinn, the school’s athletic director since 1985, to dismantle the program.

Who wants to lose? Quinn sits in the largely empty stands at Gersten and remembers the salad days.

“Terrible, terrible,” he says, describing the feeling he had watching an early season home loss to Wisconsin. “I turned to the fans and said: ‘Are we in Madison?’ It seemed like they had more fans than we had. It felt like an away game.”

But it was no accident that Loyola removed itself from the NCAA fast track in the aftermath of Gathers.

“The university was in turmoil,” Quinn says. “The death of Gathers had such an impact on the whole campus. It was so sad, so difficult. Basketball was in its glory. Then, suddenly, we were being criticized, and lots of things were thrown at us from all sides.”

Loyola Marymount was one of 14 defendants named in a lawsuit filed by the Gathers family after Hank’s death. The university ultimately settled for $1.4 million.

The publicity embarrassed academicians, many of whom did not appreciate their school being cast in such light.

“I think the school wanted to back it up a bit, move more conservatively,” Quinn says.

For most of its history, Loyola had never been a basketball high-roller. The school has had basketball teams, mostly mediocre, since 1923. Before 1985, it had 10 consecutive losing seasons.

Yet, Quinn, a venerable Loyola alumnus, couldn’t resist the crap-shoot chance to woo Paul Westhead into the fold.

The man who once coached the Lakers to an NBA championship was out of the game, teaching English in town, when Loyola came knocking in 1985 with its comeback offer.

It was a toss-up whether the school needed the coach more than the coach needed the school.

What happened next to Loyola, that rocket-burst to the top, could not have been predicted. It was a harmonic convergence of circumstances.

Two USC transfers, Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble, fell from the proverbial sky and landed on campus in 1987, a gift from the fast-break gods.

Westhead had already installed his never-before-seen, frenzied brand of break-neck basketball, a system that implored players to shoot until their arms ached.

Under Westhead, Loyola had four winning seasons in five years.

In the Bo-Hank years--1987 through ‘90--the Lions won 74 games and two WCC titles, scoring 100 points or more in 73 of their 95 games.

That 1989-90 Loyola team will be remembered for advancing to the NCAA tournament, riding the shoulders of Gathers’ best friend, Kimble, as the Lions made an emotional run to the Western Regional final before losing to Nevada Las Vegas.

Looking back, it was the beginning of the end.

Debate ensued over who might have been responsible for Gathers’ death. Having a known heart condition, should Gathers have been cleared to play? Should the doctor have moved him out of the gym, away from the crowd, before making attempts to revive him?

So many questions. Few answers.

Westhead, also a defendant in the Gathers’ family suit, ultimately left to become the latest unsuccessful coach of the Denver Nuggets. Westhead was eventually dismissed as a defendant.

“I have the fondest memories of my five years,” says Westhead, now at George Mason in Virginia. “They were good years for me, for basketball. The only hurt is the loss of Hank Gathers, and that supersedes all basketball. You can’t match that with other things.”

Initially, the school stuck with the style that made the program famous, hiring an Loyola assistant, Jay Hillock, to be Westhead’s successor.

But while Hillock’s fast-break teams managed two winning seasons, the Lions were eliminated in the first round of the conference tournament each time. Hillock’s contract was not renewed.

Now a scout with the Washington Bullets, Hillock looks from afar at the Loyola program with a sense of bewilderment.

“I’m shocked by the outcome of what happened there,” he says. “They have fallen off the end of the earth.”

Hillock, a Westhead disciple, was dismayed by Quinn’s choice of Olive to succeed him. Olive, with no previous head coaching experience, had come highly regarded as Rollie Massimino’s longtime assistant at Villanova.

Olive quickly scrapped Westhead’s offense in favor of a more conventional system.

Hillock says Olive’s two-year record of 13-40 speaks volumes. He says Loyola’s only chance of becoming a basketball power again is to hire a name coach such as Westhead.

“It doesn’t have to be Paul, but someone that’s bigger than the university,” Hillock says. “We created, with TV, with Paul Westhead, with 120-point basketball, kind of artificial reasons to come to Loyola Marymount. There is no draw there, there is no hook.”

It was not the first time Hillock has criticized the program, but Quinn declines to be drawn into the fray.

“I really like Jay as a human being,” Quinn says. “(The decision) was very, very hard. He had a two-year contract, it was not renewed. It’s that simple. I won’t discuss personnel matters. We wanted to go a different way from where we saw it heading.”

It became clearer that Quinn wanted a clean break from the Westhead legacy.

Quinn disputes Hillock’s notion that run-and-gun basketball was the only way to pack the stands at Loyola.

Despite the national television exposure Loyola enjoyed in the Westhead years, Quinn claims that Loyola was not attracting the athletes capable of running Westhead’s frenetic style of offense.

“They weren’t lining up (to come here),” Quinn says. “Maybe we got into homes we didn’t get into before, but they didn’t come. Where were they?”

When Hillock departed, Quinn stood as the last athletic department holdover from the old regime.

Westhead believes that what Loyola did in his five years was unique.

“What we had, it was just kind of an unusual group of guys,” he says. “The school was kind of alive and excited. Maybe it was one of those storybook things.”

Olive will not discuss Loyola in the past tense.

He does acknowledge that as an outsider, he felt his hiring at Loyola was “the passing of the era, putting everything that transpired to that point behind.”

To show how committed Quinn was to building a program from scratch, he gave Olive a five-year contract, unusual for first-year coaches.

But nothing much has gone right since.

No poor season unfolds without explanations. To be sure, the Lions lost their best player, forward Zan Mason, to a season-ending knee injury on Dec. 30 against Texas A&M.; Ross Richardson, a senior guard and one of the team’s best three-point shooters, sat out several games because of an ankle sprain.

A promising freshman forward, Mike O’Quinn, was declared academically ineligible after the fall semester and cannot compete the rest of the season.

Now, guard Bill Mazurie, a leading reserve, will sit out Saturday night’s WCC tournament opener against Gonzaga at Santa Clara because he was ejected for fighting in last Saturday’s loss at St. Mary’s.

The Lions have done nothing to “Restore the Roar,” the credo in Loyola’s media guide, but the team has been competitive.

Loyola has lost three overtime games. And in a Jan. 14 home game against St. Mary’s, they blew a 16-point lead with seven minutes left and lost, 82-77.

“It’s frustrating, definitely frustrating,” says Wyking Jones, the team’s star junior forward. “In the future, we’ll win those close games. No one’s giving up.”

Last Tuesday night, they did win a close one, rallying from nine points down in the last four minutes to defeat Cal State Sacramento, 73-71, on Jones’ tip-in at the buzzer. There’s only one catch: Cal State Sacramento had won only once this season, and none on the road in three years as a Division I program.

The game was supposed to have been a rare breather for the Lions, who, some suggest, need to downgrade a nonconference schedule structured as if Loyola was still a top-25 program. This season, the Lions were thumped by UCLA, Wisconsin and UNLV.

“Looking back, I think we overscheduled,” Olive acknowledged. “We probably should have played some easier teams early to get a couple of wins under our belt.”

But Loyola is close to completing a deal to play Notre Dame at home next season.

An obvious problem with the program is that Loyola has the wrong players for Olive’s system.

Several of them, including Jones and forwards Rahim Harris, Robin Kirksey and Mason, were recruited by Hillock to run the Westhead fast-break system.

“Those kids don’t want to play slow,” Hillock says. “They’re skinny runner-jumpers, and when you get into a half-court game, you don’t have to be Albert Einstein to see those kids can’t play half-court basketball.”

Quinn doesn’t argue the point, but says that’s even more of a reason that Olive must be given time to develop the program.

“John’s got to get his own players,” Quinn says. “It’s going to take three or four years. He’s got to see his freshmen through to their senior years before you can judge.”

Jones, averaging 19.9 points and 8.1 rebounds, was the player most affected by the coaching change.

Having played at nearby St. Bernard’s High, he was a former Loyola ballboy in the Westhead years.

But Jones is not complaining.

“It’s been an adjustment,” he says. “But I don’t see it as being too much of a setback. Coach Olive came in and stressed defense, and I don’t see that as a setback. I wanted to learn more about that part of the game.”

But what of the glory of Hank and Bo?

“I say that ‘Yeah, they went to the Final Eight,’ but they had great players, not just a system.” Jones explains. “Those guys, in any system, were going to win games.”

Despite the mounting losses, Jones says there is no dissension in the ranks. Rather than drifting apart, he says adversity has brought the team closer.

Players still go to Olive’s house for barbecues and picnics. Jones has no regrets.

But losing is lonely.

“Obviously, you like to win,” says Mel Hebert, a 1957 Loyola graduate and president of the school’s “Tip-in” booster club. “I think the main concern is how are the kids reacting, and the coaching staff reacting. Frankly, I’ve been very impressed by both. I think we’re rebuilding. This is a phase we have to go through. This is where you find out where your loyal fans are.”

Few remnants remain from past glories. The nucleus of the glory teams--Kimble, Jeff Fryer, Per Stumer--are playing professionally overseas. Terrell Lowery is pursuing a baseball career with the Texas Rangers. Tom Peabody did stick around, to attend law school at Loyola.

There are no Kimbles on the horizon.

Hillock says Loyola had better get used to it.

“I think they’re down for the count,” he says. “I just don’t see anything ever bringing it back to above .500 in (conference play).”

Recently, out of the blue, a young man wearing an Loyola baseball cap walked into Westhead’s office at George Mason and thanked him for the glory years. Westhead says the man was an Loyola student in 1990.

Maybe that was the best it was ever going to get.

Quinn is hedging his bet.

The Lions have signed two promising recruits in the early signing period, 6-foot-7 forward Ben Ammerman from Sacramento, and Calvin Patterson, a 6-2 guard from Fremont High.

If Loyola has made a retreat, Quinn says, it’s only to regroup.

“We want to win the league, we want to go to the playoffs, we want to compete in the NCAA.”

But, he implies, don’t expect miracles.

“People will come if we win,” Quinn says. “They didn’t come before, they came when we won, and they’re not coming now. This is L.A. They didn’t come to UCLA two years ago. It’s tough out here.”