THE NBA: 1994-95 PREVIEW : He’s Del, Not Dull : Those Who Know His Background Insist New Laker Coach Del Harris Is Anything but Bland and Have Examples to Prove It

“Have you heard about the story where I dumped a drink on a guy at a game?” Del Harris says.

No.

“That was in Houston, the bad year,” the new coach of the Lakers continues. “There was this one goofy fan who kept on me the whole year, and he was so loud and there wasn’t a lot of noise there anyway because we were losing all our games so people weren’t there.

“When we were exiting at the end of the game, it was my first chance to really get a good look at him. He had just been a big ol’ voice from the balcony before. Now, the voice has got a face and he’s all the way down on the court. Not only that, he’s got a drink in his hand.

“Well, as fate should have it, as we were walking off the court after the final buzzer, I had an itch on the back of my neck. I reached up to scratch it. As one of my arms went up, I hit the cup and the drink flew all over him. As much as I tried to pass it off as an accident, I ended up making a public apology to the guy in the paper.”

*

Have you heard about how he got nicknamed Dull Harris and all his friends and family laughed?

Try selling that one in Tennessee. That’s where he went to school, at Milligan College, which is so small that his graduating class had about 55 people. They saw how focused Harris could be. One day, for instance, he was thinking about something so intently that he pulled up to the post office, left his ’49 Ford running while he went inside, came back outside, then walked back to school.

Try Indiana. Delmer William Harris was born there 57 years ago and got his first big-time coaching job there, at Earlham College. The Earlham team, legend has it, was so bad before his arrival in the fall of 1965 that his predecessor, knowing it was the end of the line after going 2-19, didn’t even bother to attend the awards dinner.

Harris didn’t merely take Earlham, long a gimme on opponents’ schedules, to a 14-8 record that first year and a Hoosier Collegiate Conference title by the third season, he was doing Bobby Knight before Bobby Knight.

That time he stepped on the court and took the charge on Michael Adams, his famous blooper-reel move years later with the Milwaukee Bucks? It was nothing to anyone who had seen Harris running down the middle of the floor during a game to have words with a referee.

“He can get upset with people, although you’d really have to push him past his limit,” said Ron DeMao, who covered Harris’ Earlham teams for the newspaper in Richmond, Ind., and became one of his closest friends. “He’s a fearless guy. I know one time when we were in a near riot after one game. . . . Del turns to me and says, ‘Let’s take our belts off and wrap them around our hands just in case.’ We didn’t have any problems, but we were ready. He’s got a lot of guts.”

Good thing Harris was a minister--he was ordained by the Christian Church in 1958--or he might really have gotten riled.

They won’t go for that Dull thing in Texas, either. He spent four years there as coach of the Houston Rockets, upsetting the Lakers in the 1981 mini-series en route to a Western Conference title.

The next season, Tommy Henderson was taken out of the lineup because of a weight problem, although the guard denies he added pounds, and later was reinserted, after slimming down. Robert Falkoff of the Houston Post tried to play it down the middle and wrote that Henderson was playing again because he allegedly lost weight.

Harris called Falkoff over in the locker room.

“Allegedly?” the coach said pointedly. “That’s a word used in criminal cases.”

“Your team wins seven in a row and you get cocky?” Falkoff retorted before walking away.

Harris, a pitcher who played semi-pro baseball until he was 32, fired an orange slice at the back of Falkoff’s head. Strike. And you already know about when he gave that fan a drink to go.

Wisconsin? That’s kind of a mixed bag.

He spent four years as a scout and an assistant to Don Nelson in Milwaukee before becoming coach in 1987-88, and players say some of his practice and pregame speeches were l-o-o-o-n-g and drier than Salt Lake City during Prohibition.

But then there was that 1989 first-round playoff matchup against Atlanta, after the Hawks had won all six regular-season meetings and had the home-court advantage.

Harris predicted that the Bucks would come home with at least a split and then spent about $1,000 on tickets and gave them to charity because the locals weren’t going to sell out Game 3 on their own.

The Hawks won the opener by eight points, before the Bucks responded with a 10-point victory in Game 2. The coach was right.

Then he bit off even more: If the fans would come to the Bradley Center and support their team, he said, the Bucks would win there too. For good measure, he told them to bring cowbells, in honor of living in the dairy state.

Harris didn’t get the sellout for Game 3. Bells, he got. Lots of bells. He also got a victory. But after a tough loss three nights later, the doubters took the wheel of the bandwagon again as the series shifted back to Atlanta for the deciding game.

This time, there were no predictions, not with two starters, Paul Pressey and Terry Cummings, out because of injuries, and a third, Jack Sikma, hobbled with problems in both ankles.

There was, however, a 96-92 victory and afterward, after a masterful coaching job, Dull Harris went to the podium at the postgame news conference and did the strangest thing. He got tears in his eyes.

“Similar to what they must feel when they win Miss America,” he says now, a feeling that getting swept in the next round by eventual NBA champion Detroit could not diminish. “How come those people always cry? I had put myself on the line in that series.”

Los Angeles is in a wait-and-see mode. The players already have felt the effects of his classroom sessions during two-a-days in Honolulu--one came out asking if they could start putting coffee in the Gatorade--but he made another kind of impression the first day into his three-year contract. At the news conference in May to announce his hiring, Chick Hearn asked the new coach what he thought the Lakers needed.

“I think we need a new broadcaster,” Harris said, breaking up the room.

The Dull thing will always shadow him, no matter how many of the people who know him best--family and close friends like DeMao, Jerry West and Virginia Commonwealth Coach Sonny Smith--swear to the contrary.

He is meticulous. He is intelligent. He is humorous. He is great about remembering names and people he hasn’t seen in dozens of years. But, no matter what, no matter whether it’s deserved or not, he is forever Dull Harris.

“I think sometimes he tries to fight that, but against nobody who’s really fighting with him,” said son Larry, a scout and video coordinator with the Bucks. “He brings it up when nobody else brings it up. You may interview him after one game and he’ll say, ‘Hey, that’s not bad for Dull Harris.’ He’s always been that way. He’s confident, but he does like reinforcement, just like anybody else does.

“I think he’s always kind of on the defensive a little bit, wanting people to know what he’s accomplished and what he’s done.”

Said Del, “I think that’s probably accurate enough. There is a certain aspect of coaching a professional team that leads one to paranoia because there are a lot of times when you feel like there’s just you and your dog. But it’s not something that gets out of hand, I would say.”

And then there are times when you don’t even have the dog. Harris was there in the late ‘60s, having revised the original plan of being a coach and a religion teacher at some small college to wanting to become a big-time coach, only to realize one important factor: No one knew he existed.

He didn’t have anyone to open doors for him. He didn’t belong to any cliques. He was from a small town, had gone to a small school and worked at a small school. Funny how this is the same guy people would eventually be calling a retread.

“Del was one of those people who had to keep people aware of Del,” said Smith, a college teammate and close friend ever since. “That kind of thing is done more by people who start that far down. I don’t think he would have done that if he was a disciple of Bobby Knight or was a former NBA player or something. He wouldn’t have needed to.”

Harris spent six summers in the Puerto Rican Superior League and coached against Doug Moe, Jack McKinney, Paul Westhead, Tom Nissalke, Bernie Bickerstaff, Gene Bartow and Rollie Massimino. Soon, Smith introduced him to West, and Harris quickly relied on the recently retired Laker star as a mentor as much as a friend, even though West was about a year younger.

Then Nissalke became Harris’ doorman, hiring him away from Earlham to become one of his assistants with the Utah Stars of the American Basketball Assn. When Nissalke went to Houston a year later to coach the Rockets, he took Harris along. When Nissalke was fired after three seasons, Harris inherited the position. He would never be an outsider again.

Harris sweated that rookie season because he had a one-year contract and thought he would be fired if the Rockets didn’t at least get out of the first round of the playoffs. They did, beating San Antonio, and followed that in 1980-81 with one of the most improbable runs in league history, going from a 40-42 record and a second-place tie in the Midwest Division, 12 games behind the Spurs, to the Western Conference title. He got fired there after the 14-68 collapse in 1982-83--the bad year.

The end with Milwaukee was different. There, the walls collapsed around him the first month of the 1991-92 season. There he was, trying to hold an injury-plagued veteran team together for one last run, after having had a gall bladder operation and a vasectomy that summer; a cyst that developed after the vasectomy was really bothering him; he was doing double duty as coach and club vice president, and he had a year-old son at home. He simply wore down.

He lost sleep and dropped below 200 pounds for the first time in 15 years. Then Magic Johnson announced that he was HIV-positive and Harris worried about the possibility of other players making similar disclosures. He anguished over Johnson’s plight and became depressed. Then the Gulf War came and he was transfixed by the events on television, even though he didn’t have any friends or family serving, and he became even more depressed.

“He gets so involved and he works so hard on (coaching), he will start to lose his voice and start coughing,” DeMao said. “He just gets so emotionally involved, it’s scary. His close friends really get worried sometimes.”

Said Smith, “Every once in a while he needs to step back and take a long look, yes.”

Finally, 17 games into the season, immediately after an 18-point victory over Indiana and a 32-point trouncing of the Lakers, he stepped down as coach, but remained in the front office. When Mike Dunleavy decided to go back to Milwaukee, in the same dual role Harris once had, he became expendable.

That turned out to be the last regular-season game Harris coached--Dec. 3, 1991. Against the Lakers.

*

Have you heard the story that he thinks he can be what the Lakers are looking for?

Yeah, the guy with the white hair and, of all things, a track record. The non-Riley, non-Dunleavy, non-Pfund, non-Johnson. The old look as the new look.

“Kind of, you know, old fashioned,” point guard Nick Van Exel said. “He doesn’t seem like the typical Laker coach.”

Said owner Jerry Buss, “He seems professorial.”

To West, he seems like part of the solution.

“To be honest with you, we probably did not hire him before because he was such a good friend,” West said. “I have always felt that should never interfere with a job position or people’s relationship. It shouldn’t inhibit the hiring or the not hiring based on that. But, still, there is always some reluctance to hire a friend because of the volatile nature of this business.

“I think in our situation here, we don’t have those kind of marquee names playing like we did before. We have so many young players. We thought that someone who had a lot of experience, someone who has been around the block before, would have a much greater impact with the team than another young coach. Just looking at our situation here, we felt this is the thing that maybe we should have done even before.”

Only in this setting--and with this person--could familiar be so different.

“Who knows who’s right for this or that,” Harris said. “You know only in retrospect. But if they’re looking for somebody who knows the game and works hard at it and is willing to teach young players what he knows about the game, well then I’m the right guy. If our players get better, and secondly if getting better translates into wins, then I’m the right guy. If they don’t get better and we don’t win, then I wasn’t the right guy.”

Del Harris in the NBA

REGULAR SEASON

Year Team W L Pct Pos 1979-80 Houston 41 41 .500 2 1980-81 Houston 40 42 .488 2 1981-82 Houston 46 36 .561 2 1982-83 Houston 14 68 .171 6 1987-88 Milwaukee 42 40 .512 4 1988-89 Milwaukee 49 33 .598 4 1989-90 Milwaukee 44 38 .537 3 1990-91 Milwaukee 48 34 .585 3 Totals 324 332 .494

PLAYOFFS

Year W L 1979-80 2 5 1980-81 12 9 1981-82 1 2 1987-88 2 3 1988-89 3 6 1989-90 1 2 1990-91 0 3 Totals 21 31