Miglinieks Finds His Opening : Basketball: With a few assists, he goes from Latvia to UC Irvine.

The Red Army captain, a Russian making no attempt to hide his contempt for the Latvian conscript seated in his office, wasn’t smiling when he said it.

“I see you are an athlete, but I think we will send you to Afghanistan anyway.”

For Raimonds Miglinieks, a young man whose life had revolved around the basketball courts of the Soviet sports-school system as a member of numerous junior national teams, the officer’s words instantly gave new meaning to the term “shooting.”

“My sweat went over my forehead,” he says, managing a smile six years later. “It was like a job interview. They want to know if your parents are agents of the United States or England so they can send you to Siberia. It was a scary time.”

For a recruit from the Baltic States in the late 1980s, almost any post in the Red Army was dangerous. A Latvian soldier might just as easily die at the hands of his brothers in arms as Afghan rebels.

“I had friends who were beaten up nearly every day,” Miglinieks said. “Others were killed.”

But because he could dribble, shoot and pass better than most of his countrymen, Miglinieks benefited from a system he was learning to despise. He ended up being stationed less than 200 miles from home and his stint as a soldier was unpleasant, but uneventful.

“I was lucky again because of sports,” he says. “We just marched. They didn’t really teach you anything. They just abuse people.”

After his discharge, Miglinieks and his wife, Krista, talked often about the prospects of a better life. They decided that the “United States is the best country in the world to have an opportunity to go to school, get a job, live a good life.”

While playing with a goodwill team made up of Russian and American players, Miglinieks met his conduit to a new future, former UC Irvine player Wayne Englestad.

Miglinieks came to visit Englestad in Irvine and never went home to Riga, Latvia, again. While playing in a pick-up game at UC Irvine, he met Maz Trakh, then an assistant at Riverside City College, and within a few weeks was enrolling at Riverside.

After four months of study at the Wayne Englestad School of English Syntax, Miglinieks flew his wife over, packed his Russian-English dictionary and moved out of Englestad’s house and into the house of a 72-year-old Latvian benefactor in Riverside.

“Raimonds spoke very little English then and the first couple of months were an extremely difficult transition for him,” said Trakh, who is now an assistant at UC Irvine. “But then you also have to understand that he came into this with a completely different perspective than most young men. This was a new lease on life for him and he was going to do whatever it took.

“Now, the guy has a 3.5 GPA.”

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Those weren’t the only impressive numbers Miglinieks brought to UC Irvine when he accepted a scholarship this spring. In two years at Riverside, he set an all-time assist record with 828 and he averaged 18 points and 12 assists last season.

“There’s a three-letter word that describes Raimonds on a basketball court,” Trakh said. “Ego. He doesn’t have one.”

Trakh came to that realization in a hurry. Miglinieks scored 30 points in a game early in his freshman year. In the next game, he took two shots.

“I asked him what was wrong with him, why he didn’t shoot more,” Trakh said. “He said, ‘Maz, we won by 20 points, I was making sure everybody got the ball.’ ”

So how does a foreign player who speaks very little English settle in with your average band of trash-talkin’ collegiate basketball players?

“At Riverside, they took some runs at him at first,” Trakh said, “but in two weeks, he was everybody’s best friend. Best way to make friends is to keep passing them the ball.”

Miglinieks is slowly getting to know his new teammates through the summer ritual of pick-up basketball. A teammate here, a Long Beach player there, maybe an NBA player mixed in. And always a measure of macho posturing.

“When I first came to Riverside, I had never heard people talk trash during game,” he said, “but Maz told me about it. Still, I was surprised first time I heard, ‘Go home to Russia,’ when I was at Riverside.”

“When you come first to team, there is all new players and we don’t know each other. Pick-up games are pick-up games. There are no referees and we have maybe some arguments. But that’s how it is in life, too.”

Riverside Coach Bob Schermerhorn, who expressed reservations about the Latvian’s abilities the first time he saw him play in a pick-up game, has since spun at least 360 degrees.

“He’s the most unselfish player I’ve ever coached,” Schermerhorn said. “I know it’s a cliche, but this guy really does make everyone else on his team play at a higher level.”

Schermerhorn has at least one excuse for his early reticence. It’s hard to look at Miglinieks and think basketball. Football, maybe. Hockey, for sure.

He’s 6 feet 3, a broad-shouldered 195 pounds and definitely looks out of place among the long, lithe bodies in the gym. But first impressions are soon replaced by visions of jump shots settling into the net and the blur of crisp, accurate passes.

“He doesn’t look like much,” said Irvine point guard Zuri Williams, who will be battling Miglinieks for playing time. “He’s just like a block. But he can play and he can really pass. He’s a great passer.”

Miglinieks whipped a few passes past the ear of former Irvine star Scott Brooks the other day during a pick-up game in Irvine’s Crawford Hall and the Houston Rocket guard was duly impressed.

“Raimonds? Yeah, he’s good man, really good,” Brooks said, wiping sweat from his forehead. “I think he can really help them.”

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There seems little doubt of that. Irvine’s improbable run to the final game of the Big West tournament last March after a dismal regular season is testament enough to the Anteaters’ under-achievements. A lack of consistency--from game to game and minute to minute--was their downfall.

Miglinieks, 24, could be the stabilizing force that unites the Anteaters into a cohesive group.

How much can he mean to a team?

Irvine Coach Rod Baker insists that senior Williams will “compete for the job,” but Schermerhorn also had originally planned to give Miglinieks about half of the playing time at point guard as a freshman. Within two weeks, Miglinieks was on the court almost the entire game.

He averaged 39 minutes last season.

Miglinieks made few moves, spectacular or subtle, that escaped the vision of Irvine assistant Greg Vetrone over the last couple of years, but Vetrone was hardly the only scout in the stands. The Irvine coaches desperately wanted him. But they weren’t alone, and these are the sorts of battles Irvine recruiters have lost so often in the past.

After all, Miglinieks had a couple of prime choices, such as Cal, which wanted him as a replacement for Jason Kidd. And Seton Hall. And Arkansas.

“I took Raimonds to a UCLA game last year,” Trakh said. “They were No. 1 and playing Arizona State. We had good seats and the crowd was going nuts and I’m thinking, ‘Man, this is the greatest.’

“I go, ‘So Raimonds, what do you think?’ And he shrugs and goes, ‘Maz, I don’t care so much about this. I just want to go somewhere where I can play.’ ”

Irvine offered a place to play and some of the comforts of home. The Southland’s small, but closely knit Latvian community has embraced the Miglinieks.

“My wife and I have many friends here,” he said. “There is a big Latvian church near Dodger Stadium. And we meet every Sunday in Riverside and talk about what is happening back home and the political situation.

“That always feels like going home and it’s only 45 minutes, if there is no traffic. But, you know, 91 is worst freeway.”

He is, after all, a quick study. Even though he admits that he still doesn’t get 100% of what his professors are saying--”If she says a 15-word sentence and I understand 10 or 12, it is enough,” he says--Miglinieks was able to make the dean’s list at Riverside City College.

And while he says the American school system presents obstacles, it also has wondrous advantages.

“Before I come here, I never had a test of multiple choice,” he said. “We always take oral test or writing test. And here there is true and false. It’s 50-50 chance.

“Like I say, United States is land of opportunity.”