Leary Admits Making a Titanic Error : Basketball: Cal State Fullerton wanted to build an offense around him, but mistakes put an end to that.

Unforgiving brick walls just a few feet beyond the court. Wooden backboards. Rickety, worn-out bleachers. An electric fan by a corner doorway, straining to pump air from outside into a tiny, sweat-box of a gym.

It’s OK by YMCA standards, but when you’ve sank three pointers in Pauley Pavilion and the Thomas & Mack Center, when you’ve dished off on the break in the Pan American Center and the Thunderdome, it’s a bit of a letdown.

Heck, even rinky-dink Titan Gym looks like The Pond of Anaheim next to this place.

“This is awful,” Don Leary said in the steamy Anaheim YMCA last week, another in a seemingly endless string of recreation-league games behind him. “This is something I don’t want to do forever.”

It’s places like this and games like this--an ugly, 94-46 blowout against a rag-tag collection of over-the-hill hackers--that motivate Leary to return to college.

And make him wonder why he ever left.

Leary seemed to have everything going for him in the spring of 1993. He quickly established himself as one of the Big West Conference’s best outside shooters in 1992-93, setting Cal State Fullerton records for three-pointers (89) and three-point percentage (.443).

He had one memorable game, making a school-record eight three-pointers and scoring 25 points in a 90-82 loss at UCLA, and was the Titans’ leading scorer in five other games.

Four seniors from the 1992-93 team would be moving on, and Titan Coach Brad Holland was already busy devising ways to build the 1993-94 offense around Leary, who averaged 13.4 points as a junior.

But summer came and Leary disappeared, and Holland, to this day, isn’t sure why. In fact, Holland hasn’t talked to Leary since he left and had no idea what happened to him.

Holland tried calling Leary’s father in Long Beach last summer. No luck. He tried calling Leary’s mother in Banning. No luck.

He knew Leary, a former Banning High School and Mt. San Jacinto College standout, would have to attend summer school and take extra courses in the fall of ’93 to remain eligible.

But Holland never had the chance to help his shooting guard map out a course. It was as if Leary had simply vanished, kapoof !

“We never heard from the guy,” said Holland, whose inexperienced team slipped to 8-19 last season.

Turns out, Leary was alive and not so well and living in Indio. He has spent the past year unemployed, living with a sister in the desert, playing rec league basketball five nights a week and regretting the events that led to him dropping out of school.

“I miss college basketball a lot,” Leary, 22, said. “Knowing I could have been pretty good, that the coach would have based the offense around me my senior year, hurt. I let a lot of people down, including myself.”

Leary accepts full blame for his downfall. He did well enough in his first semester at Fullerton to maintain athletic eligibility, but soon after the second semester began, Leary said he became a regular on the nightclub scene and a no-show in the classroom.

Holland believes it’s no coincidence that Leary stopped going to class around the time his stepbrother, Dante Moore, moved in with Leary and former teammate Todd Satalowich.

“He wasn’t a student at Fullerton, he was just living with them,” Holland said of Moore. “He wasn’t working or doing anything. That’s when things went downhill.”

Leary claims Moore wasn’t a bad influence, but he does admit he often went out with Moore, and that strange things began happening around the house after he moved in.

“Things came up missing, like a gold chain, that my other roommate complained about,” Leary said. “He (Satalowich) told the coaches, and he also told them what I was doing outside of school, and I didn’t appreciate that.”

By the end of the semester, Leary’s relationship with the Titan coaching staff had deteriorated, and when grades were issued, it was obvious Leary was in deep academic trouble. But instead of confronting his problems, Leary ran from them.

“I just didn’t feel like dealing with school any more,” Leary said. “I didn’t want to talk to the coaches because we were on bad terms. I felt I’d just leave and save everyone the trouble, which was wrong. I should have handled it a lot better.”

Leary said his problems stemmed from immaturity.

“I was probably trying to hang out too much, do too much partying,” he said. “It was my first real college experience, my first time away from home, and I didn’t handle it correctly.”

Now, Leary wants to relive that experience--the college part, not the partying. He has applied for financial aid at Cal State San Bernardino and if accepted, he hopes to enroll in the Division II school and play basketball this fall.

He’ll need to hit the weight room--at 6 feet 2 and 175 pounds, Leary has dropped about seven pounds since his Fullerton season and appears to be lacking in upper body strength. But the smooth release, the high arc and the soft touch of his jump shot have not dissipated.

Leary walked into the Anaheim YMCA right at game time Wednesday night and hit his first three-pointer from the left corner without even taking a warm-up shot.

“I’ve been playing in a bunch of rec leagues in Palm Springs, San Bernardino and Anaheim and I’m in great shape,” Leary said. “I feel I still have it.”

That’s encouraging for the San Bernardino coaching staff, which was surprised to hear Leary was considering the school.

“We’re not really in need of guards, but Don’s the type of guy any Division II school would love to have,” said San Bernardino assistant Tim Murphy, who coached at UC Irvine when Leary was at Fullerton. “He was an unbelievable shooter. He’d be amazing to have.”

To the Titan staff, he was the one who got away. For that, Leary is sorry, and he says he will eventually call Holland to explain.

“I feel nervous about it, but I do want to talk to him,” Leary said. “I regret what happened with the coaches there, and for that I apologize, but right now I’m just hoping to go back to school and get my life back together.”