Impatient Mulligan Making Quick Strides : Basketball: Irvine Valley coach, on the mend from a stroke he suffered two months ago, says he’ll be back on the bench.

When an inch still matters, the basketball coach isn’t through coaching yet.

The word is, Bill Mulligan has a 6-foot-10 kid coming to Irvine Valley College next season.

“Six- 11 ,” Mulligan says. “And he says he’s still growing.”

Mulligan, the irrepressible, often irascible coach who has been a fixture in Orange County since he arrived at Saddleback College in 1975, suffered a stroke eight weeks ago, his second in 10 years. In the last decade, he also has undergone two arterial surgeries and a hip operation.

In 1991, he retired from UC Irvine amid the bitterness and frustration brought on by losing, then went stir-crazy looking for things to do, then unretired in 1992 to start the basketball program at Irvine Valley College because he couldn’t stand the boredom.

Now, despite a stroke that has forced him to practice his own signature, Mulligan, 64, says he’ll be back on the bench--or pacing beside it--at Irvine Valley this fall.

He is still as wry as ever--”The stroke didn’t affect my voice or my logic,” Mulligan says, eyes dancing. “My wife might say different.”

But the bitterness that threatened to overtake his ebullient personality in his last years at UC Irvine has subsided. He’s steadily overcoming the stroke’s effects, and he counts himself a fortunate man.

Mulligan was at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange when he suffered the stroke April 13, the result of surgery in which a section of a groin artery was grafted to repair a 90% blocked carotid artery. Doctors had warned of the possibility, and when his right arm fell limp and all but useless he knew what had happened before they did.

This one was worse than the 1984 stroke and subsequent arterial surgery that forced him to miss UC Irvine’s season-opener against the University of Colorado in Boulder--the first game he had missed in 29 years of coaching. That time, when he came back to watch his team play, it was with this memorable line: “I came here with a pain in my neck,” touching the scar on his neck. “and now I’ve got a pain in my gut.”

This time the surgery was more involved.

“The last time, the doctor cleaned it out like Roto-Rooter,” Mulligan said. “This time, they took five inches of artery from my groin. He told me if it’s any consolation, I won’t have to get it done again for another 25 years.”

Mulligan spent six days at St. Joseph, and another six at St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton as he began his rehabilitation. (Gene Murphy, the Fullerton College football coach and Mulligan’s fellow Irishman, stopped by the hospital with a pair of Mulligan’s trademark saddle shoes as a gift).

Mulligan still goes to St. Joseph three times a week, two hours at a time for rehab. But he is able to move his arm so well he’s swimming laps in the pool in University Hills, where he and his wife, Dorothy, still live. It’s the smaller tasks that Mulligan is still struggling with, and he looks disapprovingly at the piece of paper on which he has been writing his name and address over and over again in a shaky hand.

“I think probably the hardest thing is I’m very impatient,” he said.

Impatient? Mulligan? Could Wayne Engelstad and Jeff Von Lutzow disagree with that?

Mulligan has been helped through his rehab by his family, with Dorothy chauffeuring the back-seat driver and with one of his three sons, Brian, one of his assistant coaches at Irvine Valley, handling much of the planning for a big fund-raiser last week.

“During the stroke, (Brian) was amazing, getting everything done,” Mulligan said.

Billy, the couple’s oldest son, has helped, too.

When Mulligan fumbles when trying to turn the pages of the two newspapers he reads every morning, he thinks of Billy, who uses a wheelchair, unable to walk or speak clearly because he has cerebral palsy.

“My real hero in all this is Billy,” Mulligan said. “He reads the paper down on the floor. When I think of everything he’s gone through and all that you take for granted. . . .

“He had the classic line. He uses his talking board, and after the stroke, he said, ‘Better you than me.’

“When I consider that he graduated from college even though he can’t walk or talk. . . .”

As smooth a recovery as it seems Mulligan has had, he says it has been difficult.

“I was down a lot, but you don’t tell anybody,” he said. “Who would want to come talk to you or see you if you’re crying, ‘Why did this happen to me?’

“It’s been very difficult, but you have to decide that, ‘Yeah, I’m going to do everything they want me to do.’ I’m going to miss one session to go to Palm Desert, and the therapist said, ‘Make sure you take a deck of cards,’ because I have to take the cards and put all the aces in a pile and kings in a pile and queens in a pile, things like that.”

Queens, Kings and Aces he has mastered. In a trip to Las Vegas after the stroke, he won $1,400 on a royal flush.

He’s still likely to be seen massaging a wad of putty, working his fingers. And though it wasn’t always certain, he says he will coach next year.

“I have four assistants, I don’t have to do too much,” he said.

One of the things that will bring him back is the opening of Irvine Valley’s new gym. The first two seasons, he and his team were vagabonds, practicing at night in other team’s gyms. Mulligan would get home at 10:30 or 11, and he and Dorothy wondered if that was the way they wanted to spend their evenings.

He’ll coach at least one more year.

“I want to do it, since we can practice in the afternoon. If we were going to be doing that night deal, there’s no way I’d do it.”

He and Dorothy, who before the stroke were planning to make their first trip to Ireland this summer, plan to go after another basketball season.

So Mulligan looks forward to seeing how Keon Clark, the 6-11 player steered to Irvine Valley by Temple Coach John Chaney, will do--and toward another community college season, where the kids are the same as ever and the only irritating press is the other team’s.

“If the big kid comes around, he’s probably as talented as anybody I’ve ever had. John Chaney told me he’ll be in the NBA in three or four years,” Mulligan said.

The lure of the game remains.

“I don’t know how much longer I’ll do it, what the hell.”