Father Figure : To George Raveling, winning is temporary, and so is losing. What lasts are the men he molds on his USC teams.

IN THE LIFE OF A BASKETBALL TEAM, THERE IS A TIME TO plant and a time to reap. And then there is a time to motivate.

“Fellas, this is the team that laughed at us last year,” George Raveling drawls, his Philadelphia parochial-school accent heading south into storefront-preacher territory. “It’s our turn to laugh tonight. This is our house.”

Framed by a locker room full of inspirational slogans (“I’m One Mean Trojan--You’ll Feel the Pain!”), the 56-year-old USC men’s basketball coach is pacing around his seated players, sweat already starting to soil his crisp white turtleneck. A big, voluble man, he’s pumping up the volume, preaching his pregame sermon as his Trojan team prepares to take on Arizona State University, a rugged conference rival.

“Let’s get the house rockin’!” Raveling hollers, his broad, 6-foot-4-inch frame looming over his players’ heads. “Let’s get ‘em excited! Let’s fire this crowd up ! This is our house! Nobody’s gonna be laughing and pointing at us!”

The pep talk pays off. Charged with emotion, USC starts the game off on a 9-0 run. By halftime, the team has a comfortable 41-31 lead, thanks to Lorenzo Orr’s unerring shooting and Mark Boyd’s tenacious rebounding.

In the locker room, the team is sky-high, whooping and shouting, stoked on adrenaline. Twenty more minutes of winning basketball and they’ll be 4-1 in the Pac-10. It would be a sweet spot for any team, but especially for perennial underdog USC, whose men’s basketball program has languished for decades in the shadow of UCLA, the colossus that once beat its cross-town rival 19 times in a row.

But talk of a Trojan dynasty will have to wait. USC’s sizzling first-half play in the Jan. 20 Arizona State game turned out to be the high-water mark of the season. Twenty minutes later, at game’s end, the team was back in the locker room, heads hanging down, tears welling up in some of the players’ eyes. Led by a stocky, sharpshooting guard named Stevin (Hedake) Smith, Arizona State turned the second half into a rout, outscoring the Trojans 56 to 21. With Trojan point guard Burt Harris on the bench with a leg injury, backup guard Damaine Powell was forced to guard Smith. Overmatched, Powell had a dreadful game. Smith made 10 of his final 15 shots, including seven three-pointers, as ASU cruised to victory.

In the locker room after the game, there is stone-cold silence. Slumped in a chair, Powell sits by himself, the team avoiding him like the plague. Only Mark Boyd, the team’s senior leader, makes a point of coming over to give him a hug and a hushed pep talk. For several agonizing minutes, Raveling stands in front of his players, staring at them, rocking on his heels, wrestling with his emotions. Everyone, especially the team’s freshmen, seems stunned by the finality of the defeat.

When Raveling finally speaks, his voice is low and sorrowful, a weary father trying to console his grieving sons. “We had the game right where we wanted it, but we couldn’t play as a unit,” he says. “We’re all going to have to look inside ourselves and see what we can do to improve.” After a quick glance at Powell, the coach continues: “It’s not gonna do any good to blame one individual. If you want to blame someone, blame Rav. That’s what I get paid for.”

After a tough loss, some coaches scream obscenities, pound lockers and throw chairs at the walls. Others sulk and pout, snapping at reporters and shooing their players into the showers. But when the team gathered for practice the next morning, Raveling told them how much he believed in them. Before anyone knew it, tears were streaming down his cheeks.

“Coach was very emotional,” Mark Boyd recalls. “He started crying, right in front of us. He said he felt terrible, not because we lost but because only one person had taken the initiative to go over and talk to Damaine. He knew that if someone else had been the one to have a bad game, Damaine would’ve been the first to come over and comfort them.”

Boyd falls silent, trying to properly express the moral of this story. “Coach wasn’t mad about losing,” he says finally. “He was upset that we hadn’t helped each other out as a team.”

ONE OF GEORGE RAVELING’S FAVORITE QUOTATIONS IS FROM JAMES BALDWIN, who wrote: “These are our children. We will all profit by or pay for whatever they become.”

Every so often, a fortunate son like Harold Miner or Duane Cooper will go on to play in the NBA. But for most of the coach’s surrogate children, basketball provides only a momentary glimpse of the spotlight. In Raveling’s eight years at USC, only four Trojans have played in the NBA. Even Miner, the most successful, doesn’t start anymore. So far, no one has lasted more than three years.

To Raveling, the lesson is clear. Many of his players will struggle to find another career path. As Raveling likes to say, “Athletes live a life of illusion.”

“Winning basketball games just helps you keep your job,” he says quietly one morning, writing out defense strategies on a yellow legal pad. “But keeping your job helps you work with these kids about the real challenges of life, which all happen away from the court. I know there’s an enormous demand around here to win. But I don’t want someone to ask me what I accomplished in my life and for me to say that I won this amount of games or took a team to some tournament. If at age 56 all I can say is that I taught a kid how to shoot a jump shot, well, that’s not good enough. These kids come out of underprivileged, inner-city areas, and I’m just wasting my time if I haven’t put something of substance into their lives.”

USC fans surely applaud these lofty ideals, but they don’t come to the Sports Arena to watch the school’s debating society. Like any coach, Raveling’s job is to win basketball games. It’s an immutable law: Lose enough games and you lose your job.

In his tenure at USC, Raveling has shrewdly peddled lowered expectations, positioning the Trojans as scrappy underdogs, an easy task at a school where football has always been the high-profile sport. But this year was supposed to be different. Buoyed by a highly touted class of high school recruits, Raveling boasted to reporters that his Fab Four Freshmen--6-foot-11 center Avondre Jones, 6-foot-4 guard Stais Boseman, 6-foot-3 guard Claude Green and 6-foot-5 swingman Jaha Wilson--were “as talented as any group I’ve ever coached.”

Expectations began to run high after USC started the season by winning 10 of its first 12 games, even if some of the victories were over such easy marks as Tennessee-Martin and Sacramento State.

Then came the Arizona State debacle. Following that loss, the Trojans found themselves trapped in a horrific downward spiral. They lost eight of nine Pac-10 games, including a blowout at UCLA and an embarrassing defeat at home against Washington, which was a woeful 3-16 going into the game.

The morning after the UCLA game, the Daily Trojan ran a smart-ass headline that said it all: “USC BLOWS 2-0 LEAD, 101-72.”

Each game brought an agonizing new low. With the exception of consistently hard-nosed play from senior forward Mark Boyd and 6-foot-5 junior Tremayne Anchrum--and some dogged hustle from Stais Boseman--the team, in a word, stunk.

Lorenzo Orr, the team’s leading scorer, was painfully inconsistent, rarely bothering to play defense. Point guard Burt Harris took bad shots instead of making good passes. Brandon Martin would sink three straight jumpers, then go cold. When Claude Green launched a three-point shot, fans in the first row ducked--you never knew what he might hit.

Against Stanford, Jones made a quick exit, drawing five fouls in five minutes. Against UCLA, the team was caught with six men on the court. Against Washington, Orr fouled out without scoring, while Jones and Green sat on the bench in street clothes, suspended after not showing up at the hotel the night before. USC would muster a dramatic overtime victory against UC Berkeley--which twice vanquished UCLA--late in the season. But largely the Trojans had become Raveling’s worst nightmare: a team that couldn’t play as a team.

As Boyd dresses in the locker room after the UCLA game, the team’s blue-collar leader sounds dispirited. “If I was a coach, I wouldn’t recruit one of these high school All-Americans,” he says disgustedly, applying lotion to his legs and a splash of cologne to his wrists, as if trying to wash the stench of defeat from his limbs. “All you get is ego problems. We’ve got a lot of immature players, too many guys who don’t have their heads in the game.”

A star forward himself at Villanova, Raveling takes losing hard, too. Nearly every nook of his USC office has a basketball on display, inscribed with the score of one of his big wins as head coach at Washington State, Iowa and now USC. But Raveling recalls the big losses as well. “I’ve had my heart broke so many times I can’t even count anymore,” he says the morning after his grim UCLA defeat, eating a losing coach’s breakfast--a Coke, two chocolate-chip cookies and three Bufferin. “It never gets any easier. I’ll know it’s time to get out when we play a game like last night and it doesn’t eat away at my innards.”

Perhaps what makes Raveling different from other coaches is his sense of perspective. After a crushing loss, most coaches spend the next day barricaded in their office, staring at game films. The day after his team lost to Washington, Raveling went out to see “Schindler’s List.”

THE PRESSURE TO WIN TAKES ITS TOLL ON COLLEGE COACHES. AFTER A nerve-racking one-point loss last month, Temple Coach John Chaney spun out of control, screaming and making death threats at opposing Massachusetts Coach John Calipari. Northwestern Coach Ricky Byrdsong had to take a leave of absence after he began behaving erratically, leaving his bench in the middle of a game to shake hands with opposing fans in the stands.

In January, Georgetown’s John Thompson charged a referee and was thrown out of a game. And last December, Indiana’s volatile Bobby Knight tried to kick his own son, Pat, who’d thrown the ball away at a crucial moment in a game against Notre Dame.

After 32 years in coaching, Raveling has adopted a Zen-like attitude: Winning is temporary, he says, and so is losing. Even after a tough loss, Raveling keeps his cool, always taking a few minutes to compose himself--and his team--before meeting the press for postgame interviews.

Maybe some USC fans wish Raveling had a more fiery temperament. After all, Bobby Knight and John Thompson win national championships. Raveling’s teams have never gone beyond the second round of the NCAA tournament.

Yet his supporters say he has plenty to boast about. He took his Washington State team to the NCAA tournament for the first time in nearly 40 years. At Iowa, he won 20 games two years in a row. At USC, he’s made a weak program respectable, thanks in large part to his recruiting of Harold Miner, a local high school star who led the Trojans to two consecutive NCAA tournament appearances before turning pro after his junior year.

After the 1992 season, when his team went 24-6, USC rewarded Raveling with a five-year contract extension reportedly worth as much as $150,000 a year. But when you’ve never gone to the Final Four, the question is always asked: How good a coach are you?

“If you asked writers to name the best coaches in the Pac-10, you wouldn’t see George’s name at the top of the list,” says Bob Cohn, a veteran sportswriter for the Arizona Republic. “He’s not a great coach in the Bobby Knight-Mike Krzyzewski master-strategist mold. But he’s got other things going on in his life, and I think that’s just as admirable as winning basketball games.”

What makes Raveling unusual is the impact he has on his players away from the court. Miner recently began giving USC back its $60,000 in scholarship funds and donates free basketball tickets to kids participating in a reading-improvement program. When Duane Cooper, another ex-USC star now in the NBA, is downcast about his lack of playing time, he calls his old college coach for a boost.

Always lugging a duffel bag full of books and magazines on road trips, Raveling concludes practice each morning by giving players a sheaf of clippings from newspapers and magazines. One day it might be a business story about money management or a successful entrepreneur. Another day it’s an excerpt from a story about former Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, who is quoted as saying: “You don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.”

Last year, when the team traveled to Atlanta, Raveling took them to visit the Martin Luther King Jr. center. More recently, concerned about his players’ social skills, he conducted an etiquette seminar, staging a practice dinner to give his players lessons in place settings and handling silverware, then taking them out to a nice restaurant to hone their skills.

“The kids who spend four years with George come out as better people than they were when they went in,” says Cohn. “A lot of coaches say that, but with George it’s not lip service; he really has an impact on their lives.”

When pressure began to mount on Miner to turn pro, Raveling didn’t stand in his way. “He was USC’s biggest star in years,” recalls Washington Post reporter Mark Asher, who covers off-the-field sports issues. “But George is the kind of coach who’ll put the best interests of the player ahead of what might be best for George’s win-loss record.”

For many of his players, inner-city kids who’ve grown up without fathers, Raveling’s broad horizons and position of power make him an appealing substitute. Mark Boyd says that when he first arrived at USC, he couldn’t take his eyes off his coach. “Never having a father in my house, I just got this immaculate vibe from him,” Boyd recalls. “I’d watch everything he did, what he’d say, how he acted with people.”

Raveling seems determined to offer his players what he thirsted for in his own youth: a glimpse of the bigger horizon that looms outside the familiar landscape of cheering-crowd arenas. “I wish I could put these kids in a car every week and show them an art museum or take them to Santa Barbara,” he says, walking through campus one day, offering hearty greetings to passersby like a politician on the campaign trail.

“These kids are so naive about what life’s about,” says Raveling, whose own marriage ended in divorce years ago. “As much as my heart aches after losing to UCLA, it aches even more about how little preparation they’ve had to compete in today’s society.”

Of the 12 players in uniform on most USC road trips, 10 are black and five are from the Los Angeles area. Except for senior guard John Masdea, all are at USC on athletic scholarships. Many grew up in neighborhoods where sports was considered the only visible avenue for success.

“My opportunity--my escape-- was basketball,” says Boyd, who grew up in a cramped household where he never had a bed of his own. “Almost everybody on our team comes from a low-income, broken household. For us, basketball is a chance to get a college degree, to get somewhere in the world.”

Getting the scholarship is just the beginning of a long--and very public--struggle. It took Stais Boseman three tries at his SAT tests to earn the minimum 700 score needed to qualify for athletic eligibility. Whenever he appeared on the court against UCLA, the Bruin student section sent up a nasty jeer: “Stu-u-upid! Stu-u-upid!”

THESE HARDSHIPS ARE CONSTANT REMINDERS OF RAVELING’S OWN youth. He grew up in Washington, D.C., a heavily segregated city. His family lived on top of a grocery store in a two-room apartment. They shared a bathroom with four other families on the same floor.

Raveling’s father died when George was 9, but the son didn’t see much of the father even when we he was alive. “He was a horse trainer and was away from home most of the year,” Raveling recalls. “Whenever my dad would come back, he’d bring me home a silver dollar. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world.”

A talented basketball player and a diligent student, Raveling went to Villanova on an athletic scholarship, where he captained the basketball team in 1960, his senior year. College had a huge impact on Raveling, who as a young man was woefully lacking in social skills. “I’ve always felt like a sprinter who’d slipped at the starting box and was 20 yards behind everybody--I’ve been in a mad dash to catch up with everybody ever since,” he says. “My mom worked two jobs when I was a kid. There were no books in our house. Nobody envisioned that I’d graduate from college. No one even encouraged me to go to college.”

Raveling has the air of a man making up for lost time. His Ladera Heights home has a library of 3,000 books. At USC, stacks of books lurk everywhere, a literary obstacle course for anyone trying to find a seat in his office. One mound is topped with Richard Reeves’ recent J.F.K. biography, another with “Quotations to Cheer You up When the World Is Getting You Down.”

Next door, associate head coach Jack Fertig’s office has a shelf packed with self-improvement books, all pass-alongs from his boss, each full of passages Raveling has highlighted in yellow ink.

Raveling is always soaking up new facts. Even in the locker room before a game, he’s leafing through the New York Times, clipping out a story about a study finding racial disparities in doctors’ warnings to pregnant women (“These are the kind of things that make me paranoid,” he says wryly). Discovering a story in the Los Angeles Times View section about U.S. Presidents, he immediately challenges his two assistants, Fertig and Charles Parker, to a trivia contest. Who can name the four Presidents who were assassinated? And how about the four who died in office?

Raveling’s only son, Mark, a USC junior who’s not on the team, shows up just as his father ducks back into his office to take a phone call. “Try those questions on him ,” Raveling says to Fertig. “Tell him it’s worth $50 if he gets the right answers.” After about 10 seconds, Fertig hollers into Raveling’s office: “Your money’s safe!”

IT IS 5:45 IN THE MORNING. EXCEPT FOR A LONELY STREET-CLEANING truck rumbling down Figueroa Street, the USC campus is deserted.

Look up in the sky and you can see stars. Look inside the North Gym and you can see the men’s basketball team practicing for an upcoming game. Nearly every weekday morning the Trojans are here--yes, at 5:45--sprinting, stretching and running plays, hustling through a grueling two-hour practice session under the coach’s watchful eye.

Claude Green pulls up for a silky 18-foot jumper but spends so much time admiring his shot that his man slips past him downcourt for an easy layup. “See that?” Raveling barks. “You were stylin’, looking at how pretty that shot was.”

Rav wiggles his hips like a cheerleader, sliding his voice up into falsetto range: “Ooh, what a pretty shot.” Then the bark is back in his voice: “And you got beat on the break.”

The 5:45s. They’re Raveling’s way of getting his players’ attention before they’ve struggled with a pop quiz or had a fight with a girlfriend, or, as Raveling puts it, “before there’s any garbage in their pail.”

All of 21, Boyd is the team leader, a self-possessed economics major who’s one of the team’s last links to the Miner glory years. The freshman players look to him for advice, impressed by his blue-collar work ethic on the court as well as his stylish dress off the court. To his coach, he’s a surrogate son. “My mother always said there’s some people who are 50 going on 20,” Raveling notes proudly one day. “And then there’s people like Mark, who are 20 going on 50.”

Raised by a single working mother in Atlanta, Boyd grew up in a small two-bedroom house. His mother had one bedroom; his two sisters had the other. He slept on a couch in the living room. “I never had a bedroom my whole life,” he says. “I was ashamed of where I lived. When my friends wanted to come home with me from school, I’d make up excuses because I didn’t want them to see I didn’t have a room.”

Boyd says it’s difficult for him to go back home and see his old friends--the ones that are still alive. “Half of them are dead, six feet deep, or in jail or out on the corner selling drugs,” he says matter-of-factly. “I went home last Christmas and had a friend who got shot dead at a party from a 9-millimeter. Another friend was shooting a gun in the air, and some guys driving by thought he was shooting at them, so they went after him and shot him with a hollow-point .44 Magnum. They blew a huge hole in his back.” A true urban youth, Boyd knows the caliber of gun that killed each of his friends.

Away from the basketball court, Boyd is eager to make contact with anyone who has prospered in the outside world. When he found himself seated next to a pair of affluent businessmen at a recent athletic banquet at the tony Jonathan Club, Boyd peppered them with questions about their paths to success.

“The UCLA players who were there just sat down on a couch and didn’t talk to anyone,” Boyd notes with surprise. “We USC guys were going around, trying to get to know everyone. Hey, if you sat down next to a pair of millionaires, wouldn’t you want to know how they got there?” Boyd takes the same approach at practice. Whether Raveling is teaching rebounding or pick ‘n rolls, Boyd is an eager pupil.

Many coaches use their best players as a team example. But when the Trojans are lethargic one day, Raveling points to John Masdea, a premed student who is a Division I basketball rarity--a non-scholarship player. “This guy ain’t even getting a scholarship, but he’s come out here for four years and practiced hard every morning,” Raveling says with fatherly pride. “He’s gonna be a doctor; someday he’s gonna be treating y’all. But he’s out here, giving his best.

“Do y’all ever think about him, practicing hard but not playing? Sometimes you can’t just look inside yourself. You gotta look outside yourself, too.”

Being on a team with kids who come from completely different social backgrounds has made Masdea look outside himself, too. On a recent road trip, he roomed with Boseman, a shy freshman from a gang-scarred neighborhood in Inglewood.

“It was real surprising,” says Masdea, a clean-cut Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity member who was his high school’s valedictorian. “I’ve played ball with inner-city kids, but I never thought much about their home life. Stais has gone through so much adversity--he didn’t even know his father, he lived in an area where there were lots of gangs.”

By road trip’s end, Masdea had invited Boseman to go deep-sea fishing--a sport he’d never imagined experiencing--with some of the SAE guys. And Stais plans to return the favor. “He said, ‘Hey, I’ll take you back to my neighborhood,’ ” Masdea laughingly recalls. “And I’m goin’--’I don’t know about that.’ ”

WHEN THE BLACK COACHES ASSN. launched its fight with the NCAA over more minority access to higher education, it quickly decided that George Raveling would serve as its spokesman.

A black man who moves easily in the world of white media and alumni powerbrokers, Raveling has become a lightning rod for BCA issues, especially when the association threatened a boycott of Jan. 15 basketball games. This was after NCAA convention delegates voted down a proposal to rescind its controversial 13-scholarship limit for men’s basketball. The boycott was postponed after the NCAA and the black coaches agreed to arbitration by the Justice Department. But the debate has festered since the opening game of the season, when Raveling and many other African American basketball coaches staged a symbolic protest, wearing all black to their season openers.

While far from the only issue, scholarship opportunities became the hottest topic of debate. When Raveling made his head coaching debut at Washington State in 1972, he says, each of the nation’s Division I colleges awarded not 13 but 20 basketball scholarships.

With about 70% of Division I athletic programs losing money--USC is not one of them--the NCAA leadership views this as an economic issue. But Raveling sees it as a fight over educational opportunities for young black men, men like himself. “I had two roommates in college who came under the same circumstances--athletic scholarships,” he says. “One became a multimillionaire in the greeting-card business. Another became mayor of New Haven.”

Raveling contends that to grasp such opportunities, today’s players must project a positive image. Even after a tough loss, USC players are unusually courteous and cooperative; no one snarls at reporters.

When it comes to mastering the media, Raveling’s players need look no further than their coach. Unlike many of his thin-skinned peers who keep the media at arm’s length, Raveling courts the press, chatting with reporters on the telephone or taking them to dinner on the team’s road trips. One morning, Raveling spends 20 minutes fencing on the air with Jim Rome, XTRA-AM’s sharp-tongued sports-talk host. The exchanges sometimes become heated, but when they go off the air at the end, Raveling gently strokes the talk-show host.

“Jim, I gotta tell you, I really respected you for asking me all the tough questions. I would’ve been disappointed if you hadn’t.”

These cozy personal touches pay off. UCLA Coach Jim Harrick has averaged 23 victories in his six-year tenure while Raveling has endured four losing seasons--and managed only one 20-plus victory season--in his eight-year USC coaching tenure. Yet, as Shannon Fears, a sportswriter for the Eugene, Ore., Register-Guard, succinctly put it last year: “It’s Raveling who is . . . adored by fans, media and his own administration, and Harrick who is considered distant, whining and ungrateful.”

Much of this rapport comes from Raveling’s disarming knack for laughing at himself, even after a bitter defeat. After USC was routed by UCLA in February, Raveling stood up before a room full of reporters and took his lumps, never showing any irritation. One writer asked the coach when he felt the game slipping away. Raveling’s instant quip: “At the tip.”

BUNDLED UP IN MAROON USC sweats, Lorenzo Orr tentatively sticks his long-limbed 6-foot-7 frame into Raveling’s office, testing the waters. Coach has discovered that the team’s star has been late to his meetings with his academic tutor.

“Don’t get on that girl’s bad side,” Raveling gently cautions him. “She’s in your corner. You don’t want to lose her. You gotta keep up.”

Raveling has good reason to worry about his players’ academic status. While recruiting scandals tend to grab the most headlines, many college athletic programs have also been under fire for lax academic standards, especially for their embarrassingly low graduation rates--low in some cases meaning zero.

From 1986 to 1990, the first four years of Raveling’s tenure, only 35% of USC’s freshman and junior college-transfer players ended up earning their degrees. However, if you exclude the players who left school early, either to join the NBA or to play for another college basketball program, the graduation rate jumps to 65%, virtually the same percentage as USC’s overall student-body graduation rate.

NCAA rules stipulate that to remain eligible to play, athletes must earn 18 credit units (out of a possible 24) after two semesters of school. USC rules also hold that any athlete whose grade-point average drops below 2.0 goes on automatic probation.

Faced with an influx of athletes who are often woefully unprepared for college-level academics, USC built a $3-million Academic Resources Center, located in the basement of Heritage Hall, the school’s athletic program center. Equipped with computer terminals, study rooms and counseling offices, the center serves as a support system for most of the 290 students on USC athletic scholarships.

Once you see Cynthia Cardosi at work, chairing a weekly tutors meeting, you begin to understand the difficulty of judging academic achievement simply by grade-point average. Wearing a turtleneck and black jeans, the veteran academic counselor is worried about the Trojans’ losing streak. She knows that in times of stress, many young players begin to tune out academics.

“The young ones, especially the freshmen, are going to be down,” she cautions her tutors. “So you have to remind them that they can’t let their frustrations take control and stop them from going to class and studying.”

A woman of great zeal and boundless energy, Cardosi prods the tutors, asking if their kids are coming in prepared and digesting their studies. The tutors are uncharacteristically silent. “God, you’re really quiet this week,” Cardosi says, studying their faces. She volunteers a positive reaction: “I heard one of our students, a real introverted kid, say: ‘Hey, my tutor’s really cool.’ ”

Cardosi beams. “I don’t hear that very often. That’s a good sign. It means the tutor made an impression on him.”

Cardosi doesn’t wait for the players to seek her out. Last year, when the basketball team went to Arizona on a road trip, she traveled with them. She came away with a renewed appreciation for Raveling’s impact on his players. “When they were on the team bus, every one of the coaches was reading a book or a magazine,” she reports. “I think that sets an incredible example for the kids.”

That doesn’t mean Cardosi always sees eye-to-eye with the coaches. “Coach Raveling and I have some matches,” she says spiritedly. “I go into his office and say what’s on my mind.” She laughs. “When I come through his door, he looks up and goes, ‘What now, Cardosi?’ ”

Nothing bothers Cardosi more than a player blowing off a tutorial appointment in favor of a shoot-around. “The coaches need to understand that these kids feel they have to be at practice,” she says. “So they don’t always hear the coaches tell them that they can’t miss a class or a tutor appointment.”

Cardosi considers Raveling an ally. “I like the way he deals with his kids,” she says. “We just have different philosophies. To me, basketball is a game. To George, it’s something bigger.”

IT’S A CLASSIC SNOOP DOGGY Dogg-style rapper’s voice: a sinewy, singsong tenor skating atop a languid rhythmic groove, joined by a whiny synthesizer that sounds like a snake charmer’s flute.

The lyrics are half hoops patois, half hip-hop braggadocio. “When I’m upset, I’m strong as heck, like Popeye the sailor, I bank you and make you see All-Stars, like Chuck Taylor, a legend like Elgin Baylor, Elizabeth my Taylor, your girl is like a video game, I like to play her.”

Avondre Jones is demonstrating his rap prowess, gyrating his spindly legs, towering over a mountain of sound equipment in his bedroom as he blasts demo tapes of his group 3Wayz’s songs.

“We can go three ways,” explains Jones, whose bedroom is decorated with pictures of Ice Cube, Charles Barkley, Malcolm X and Avondre himself, the last from a recent issue of Sports Illustrated heralding him as one of the country’s most promising freshman players. “On the gangsta tip, the smooth stuff or something wild, that you’d play at a party.”

Still wearing his No. 44 jersey and basketball shorts from a late-afternoon practice, Jones is trying to teach his roomie, fellow Fab 4 Freshman Claude Green, the art of rap deejaying.

“Is Claude Green in the house?” he playfully shouts as he hands the turntables over to his roommate, who nervously fumbles with the controls.

Jones is overcome with the giggles. “Amateur!” he shrieks gleefully. “They’d kill you out on the dance floor.”

For now, Jones’ rap career is sort of on hold, thanks to a stack of arcane NCAA rules about professional contracts. It’s his basketball career everyone’s worried about. While Jones’ Artesia High teammate Charles O’Bannon has blossomed at cross-town rival UCLA, the highly touted Jones has been an enigma, playing sparingly, averaging less than five points a game.

Relations with Raveling were rocky, even before he gave Jones a one-game suspension. One week into the season, Jones and his parents had a closed-door meeting with the coach, unhappy over Jones’ lack of playing time. Before the pivotal Arizona State game, Jones came to see Raveling in his office. They stepped out into the hall for a private chat--and within moments were shouting at each other.

Jones admits that his game isn’t up to par yet. “I know I can play better,” he says, fondling a huge ninja sword that he keeps by his bed. “I’m just not used to losing. And I’m not used to sitting. I’m used to being the go-to man. In high school, I was the star.”

From Raveling’s perspective, that’s part of the problem. Ever since the University of Michigan nearly won the 1992 national championship with its heralded Fab Five, incoming freshman have had visions of overnight success on the basketball court.

“The Fab Five was one of the worst things that ever happened to college basketball,” Raveling complains at one of his weekly lunches with local sportswriters. “These kids come in thinking they’re gonna win right away. It’s a problem--athletes live a life of illusion. What did Avondre say in that Sports Illustrated article? ‘I want to be a point guard.’ Come on!”

That earns a big laugh from the assembled writers, but Raveling seems genuinely troubled by the naivete of his freshman players. “These kids come out of an environment where everyone expects instant gratification,” the coach says later. “That’s what our society preaches every day--the quick fix.”

On the record, Raveling is cautiously optimistic about Avondre’s progress. But in private, the coach broods about his 19-year-old protege’s work ethic and level of maturity. At practice, Raveling treats Jones with kid gloves, often whispering advice in his ear instead of shouting it out across the gym.

You get the feeling Raveling hasn’t gotten his message across yet.

“I know basketball is going to pay off in the end,” Jones says one night, sorting through his shelves, most of them filled with boxes of high-top sneakers. “But if you came to me with $5 million and said I could have a record contract and I could give up basketball . . . .”

Avondre is silent, staring up at the posters of his heroes, looking first at Barkley, then at Ice Cube. He wags his head. “Well, I don’t know what I’d do.”

ONE MORNING, RAVELING IS ON the phone with Duane Cooper, a talented three-point shooter at USC who’s now a reserve guard for the Phoenix Suns. Raveling sounds excited. With several of the Suns’ stars out with injuries, Cooper is getting more playing time.

Still, the USC grad sounds worried about sticking with the team. “It’s like anything else, Coop; the longer you’re with ‘em, the more respect they’ll have for the things you can do,” Raveling says, giving him a pep talk. “I know it’s a cliche, but good things happen to good people.”

As Raveling gets up to leave his office, the phone rings again. It’s a junior college coach calling with a tip about a potential recruit. Although recruiting is a big part of Raveling’s job, it’s largely an off-season pursuit. So he is only mildly interested until the coach reveals how many points the player scored the night before.

“Fifty!” Raveling exclaims, his interest level rising. “Where’d you say he’s playing Saturday?”

As soon as he’s off the phone, Raveling rushes off to confer with his assistant coaches, eager to see what they know about the kid. When he returns, he has an extra bounce in his step. “I don’t care who you’re playing,” he says. “Scoring 50 is tough to do.”

Suddenly Raveling spins around and heads back to his assistants’ offices. He forgot to tell them about the earlier phone call. It’s a moment when the two sides of his coaching life come together. He’s discovered a hot prospect just as a new door is opening for one of his old players.

“Hey guys, guess what?” he booms with paternal pride. “Coop’s starting tonight!”