Grand Time for Roundball Round-Table

A roomful of basketball coaches--young or old, retired or just hired, any description you want--beats a roomful of lawyers, or hockey owners, any day. Just feed them lunch, promise them a captive audience, point them to the microphone and your afternoon’s entertainment is set.

“This year’s team will be probably our best offensive team I’ve had since I’ve been at Mater Dei,” Gary McKnight said, getting the program at the Orange County Sports Assn.’s monthly meeting rolling. “A very good group of guys and they really score the points.

“Defensively, I don’t know if they can guard me in a phone booth. We may have to play a little zone at times, I don’t know.”

Preseason expectations. Every coach has his cross, and it’s a bear.

“After reading the paper the last few weeks,” Long Beach State’s Seth Greenberg said, “I didn’t know if you wanted me to speak with you or my athletic director, Dave O’Brien, who has us in the top 20 and put out all those great ads--’We’re not going on strike, we’re not moving.’ Or (assistant AD Bill) Shumard, who said in the paper today that, basically, if we don’t win this year the coaches screwed it up.

“So I wasn’t sure who was supposed to speak--Mr. Shumard, Mr. O’Brien or myself. In fact, I think Oct. 15, I’m going to go in and push some papers around on my desk and let them take the first practice.”

Bob Hawking’s first practice as head coach at Cal State Fullerton is Saturday morning, scheduled for 12:01 a.m., and, “as you know, I’m taking over at an unusual time. Coach (Brad) Holland decided to move on to the University of San Diego just a few weeks ago, so things have been very hectic around our campus.

“And we’re all looking forward to the challenges ahead. And we know that we have a few. At this point, the alumni and the boosters are completely behind us, win or tie, they’ve said. As long as we come out with a win or a tie, we have their full support.”

Boosters. Alumni. Oh, Jerry Tarkanian can tell you stories.

“Going from Long Beach to UNLV was a real experience,” Tarkanian noted. “At Long Beach, if you lost, the only ones who got mad were about 12 boosters and maybe my wife. That’s about it.

“I went to UNLV and my first game, they had so much excitement about me coming they sold out the arena, it was ‘Tark’s First Game’ in the headlines. I had a radio show for the first time in my career and I thought, ‘God, this is really wonderful.’ I never could get a radio show at Long Beach.

“I lost my first game and the guy cancels my radio show. The very first game and he cancels my radio show. That’s a true story.”

That got Alex Omalev, former Fullerton College and Cal State Fullerton coach, thinking about his first game at FCC more than three decades ago.

“I signed on as a drama teacher at Fullerton College, that was my background,” Omalev said. “Two weeks later, the basketball coach dropped dead. The superintendent called me in his office and said, ‘Well, you played college ball, you’ll be the coach.’

“So Don Johnson, who coached at Cypress, who just retired, was a returning letterman and he came to see me. He said, ‘Coach, when do we start practice?’ I said, ‘There will be no practice until each one of you guys sells 100 tickets to the fall play.’ I wanted to make an impression--I was still the drama teacher.

“And we sold out Plummer Auditorium. And Don Johnson got to start because he sold 200 tickets.”

Commercial break.

Mike Bokosky of Chapman University stood up to extol the virtues of Division III hoops.

“I think you’d really enjoy the experience if you ever came over to Chapman University to see a Division III game. There’s not a lot of dunks. There’s not a lot of guys blowing by you really fast. What you see are a lot of guys doing the same thing you see on ESPN, except they don’t make the basket as often. So in a lot of ways the games are a little bit funner.

“I think you identify with the players more, if you’ve ever gone out and played a pickup game yourself. So if you have any time this winter, especially if the NBA goes on strike, come out to a Chapman game.”

Rod Baker of UC Irvine got up to plug UC Irvine basketball, which hasn’t gotten anywhere near the preseason publicity of Big West rival Long Beach, not with its sub-top 20 aspirations and non-triangular nine-year-old arena.

“We’re gonna still play in the same building we’ve been playing in,” Baker announced. “It’s not a pyramid. I don’t know what it is, but we’re going to play there anyway.

“We do have seats. We do have a floor. So if you do want to see a game, you might want to stop by the Bren Center.”

Tarkanian got back up to say a few words on behalf of his longtime assistant, Tim Grgurich, who is expected to be named as Rollie Massimino’s successor at UNLV any hour now.

“I want to see Timmy Grgurich coach,” Tarkanian said, “and I want to be his biggest supporter. I want to fly on the airplane with his team, and sit behind the bench, and watch Timmy suffer.”

Tarkanian called Grgurich “the hardest-working coach I’ve ever been around. He’s 1000% loyal. And if he takes the UNLV job, like I think is gonna happen today or tomorrow, UNLV will be right back where they were. Overnight, they’ll be a top 20 team.

“If Timmy steps on the floor, they’ll be a top 20 team this year. And after that, they’ll be a top 10 team forever.”

What, no comeback by the Shark?

“No, I don’t want to coach,” Tarkanian said. “I miss the associations with the players, I miss the associations with the coaches and I miss practice, but I don’t miss the games at all. The games were brutal on me. I’m really enjoying myself not being real nervous anymore.”

So he turns out for lunches such as this, to sample the best of both worlds.

All the fun, all the banter, with only a fraction of the indigestion.

* COACH McGUIRE DIES

Frank McGuire, 80, who helped bring big-time basketball to the South, dies. C2 (Home Edition)

* GRGURICH NEXT AT UNLV?

Tim Grgurich is the front-runner to succeed Rollie Massimino as coach. C2 (Home Edition)