COLLEGE BASKETBALL : Don’t Worry, Henderson’s Not Coasting

The father with the large, searching eyes and quiet voice looks at the son and sees--who else?--himself.

Nonchalance, it seems, is hereditary.

“I’m the exact same way,” Milton Henderson, Sr., says. “My wife, she used to get mad. She’d say, ‘Oh, no, now there’s two of you in the house.’ ”

The son with the spindly 6-foot-9 frame and quiet grace looks at the father, and--what else?--shrugs his shoulders and offers a benevolent smile. As with everything else, he understands.

“For instance, my dad, he drives his car,” says Milton (J.R.) Henderson, Jr., “and the gas gauge, it’s like on the ‘E,’ it’s right there. He always drives like that.

“He’s like, ‘Well, don’t worry about it.’ And we’re going down the Grapevine. He’s saying, ‘Don’t worry about it, we’ll get there.’

“That’s kind of my attitude too. I got it from him. But even I don’t know about the freeway, no gas . . . he didn’t even stop, he just kept going.”

Then J.R. Henderson, the most productive freshman basketball player at UCLA since Don MacLean, laughs a little.

Then he is silent again, cocking his head, listening.

In a look-at-me sports world full of fireworks hair and bloated, cartoon super-egos, Henderson is serene, lean and multidimensional.

When everybody else on the court looks bug-eyed and frantic, Henderson looks like he’s just looking for a quiet place to doze.

“It’s much easier to take a calmer approach to things,” he says. “You’ll come out, I think, better.”

His teammates have compared his facial expression to a coma, and his coach says he wondered if Henderson was maybe a bit too peaceful in the moments before his first college start at Oregon State earlier this month.

“I thought he was going to sleep at the jump ball of the Oregon State game,” UCLA Coach Jim Harrick says. “I looked out there, I said, ‘Is he going to be awake?’ ”

Although he knows it is not his nature, Henderson says he has tried to open up.

“Sometimes I wish I could be more talkative or outgoing,” he says. “I try to, but I just can’t . . . It won’t come out of me.”

Don’t worry, just keep going. We’ll get there.

*

Ask the members of the Bruin coaching staff if they are surprised Henderson won a starting spot seven games into the season, if they expected to rely on him so much so soon, and they shrug too.

In his second college game, Henderson came off the bench against Kentucky, guarded star Rodrick Rhodes, and made two free throws with six-tenths of a seconds remaining to give the Bruins a one-point victory.

Heading into UCLA’s crucial Arizona trip, Henderson is averaging 7.3 points and 3.8 rebounds per game, but, most importantly, he gives the Bruins flexibility because he can play anywhere on the floor without getting out of control.

Against Kentucky’s pressure defense, Henderson brought the ball up court, slicing through guards almost a head shorter, without crisis. Against Oregon State, Henderson worked the baseline and under the basket for a career-high 16 points and did a solid job defending the Beavers’ star forward Brent Barry.

“I honestly thought he should’ve been, in everybody’s opinion, one of the three best players in the country (coming out of East Bakersfield High),” says assistant coach Mark Gottfried, who, along with fellow assistant Lorenzo Romar, recruited Henderson. “Lorenzo and I used to always say that.

“But he developed kind of a reputation of not always playing hard and some things. . . . But the entire time we felt he had the chance to be a great, great player.”

In the summer of 1992, preparing for his junior season at East Bakersfield, Henderson was voted the No. 1 junior player at the ballyhooed Nike All-American camp in Indianapolis.

Although he led East Bakersfield to the state Division II title game, he came to the same camp the next year hobbled by minor injuries, was not impressive, and, with observers seeing his stolid personality as a sign that he did not care, his stock plunged.

“Most people didn’t know at that time he had turned his ankle real bad a couple times,” his father says. “People make all these judgments off of that kind of stuff. But when it came down to money time, playing for the state championship, all that kind of stuff, he was there.”

In his senior season, Henderson averaged 27.3 points, 14 rebounds, five blocked shots and 6.3 assists a game, and East Bakersfield won the Division II title.

But by then, other seniors like Jelani Gardner and Tremaine Fowlkes, both Los Angeles area players who ended up at California, had seized the spotlight, and Henderson, who chose UCLA over Cal, was a quiet afterthought.

He’s not a wild dunker or a three-point demon, and he never shakes his fist in anger or celebration. So who could figure him?

“Because he doesn’t show a lot of outward emotion, people get the wrong understanding,” Milton Henderson says. “They don’t understand the difference between smooth and not playing hard.

“You see some other guys, maybe you can tell by their emotions, OK, that guy’s hustling. Then you look at him, he can glide along, most people say, ‘Oh he’s lazy, he’s not working hard.’

“But that’s just smooth. A lot of people don’t understand the difference between smooth and lazy.”

Says Gottfried: “You know, I played in college with Derrick McKey (at Alabama). And Derrick was the SEC player of the year, but he was very quiet and introverted. That’s just his personality. And J.R.’s the same way. He’s not real outgoing, but since he’s been here, from Oct. 15 to now, he’s done everything you’ve ever dreamed of him doing.

“Playing on the road, his first start at Oregon State didn’t faze him. One, because he has great poise. But two, because he has great skills--ball-handling, passing, shooting, rebounding, and now we’ve learned his defensive ability. He’s now the guy we’re putting on the opponents’ best offensive player. There’s not a whole lot he’s not doing. “

From the first day of practice last October, Henderson has never looked out of place or off-balance. He scores at times, he rebounds, he passes--never in bunches, usually exactly when the time is right.

“He’s just very poised and calm when he plays--not out of control at all,” says senior forward Ed O’Bannon, whom Henderson credits as an inspiration and model. “He has a point guard’s mentality, and that helps.”

With years of drilling from his father, who played at West Texas State and is the varsity coach at East Bakersfield, and Gil Dominguez, who was varsity coach when J.R. played there, Henderson came to UCLA fundamentally sound and ready to listen.

“Learn the basics--that’s what I’ve always stressed to him,” Milton Henderson says. “All this other fancy kind of stuff, you can do that later on. But if you learn the basics, learn the fundamentals of basketball, learn them well, it doesn’t matter where you go, who you play against, it doesn’t matter, you can play with anybody.

“You need some emotion to play the game, but personally, I think you have to be in control of yourself out there. You get carried away, you lose track of what you’re doing.”

Says Harrick: “He’s kind of a sponge. I know at eight o’clock on Oct. 15 I told him something and I still see him doing it today. He absorbs everything.”

With guard Toby Bailey getting significant minutes, also, and front-line players Kris Johnson and omm’A Givens flashing their potential in limited time, the class of ’98 looms large.

Henderson already says that he has every intention of staying all four years, despite the temptation to skip to the NBA early after such an auspicious, early start to his college career.

“I’ve only seen one (freshman) that I’ve coached, that’s Don MacLean, who’s come in and just played at the kind of level that J.R.’s played at,” Harrick says. “Other freshmen need a bit of time, go through some growing pains, but he didn’t seem to.”

*

You can admit it now, someone tells Henderson. You can say that yes, you really were nervous on the line, down by one to Kentucky, with less than a second remaining at The Pond of Anaheim.

You’d have to be nervous, right?

“I would never say I was nervous,” Henderson says evenly, “because I’d be lying.

“What’s surprising too--I don’t get nervous on tests. Even if I know I’m going to do bad, I’m still not going to get nervous. I just go in there and take the test.”

The father, though, had it harder than the son during those two free throws. He felt the nerves jangling.

“The first one I was,” Milton Henderson says. “And that’s probably the first time I’ve ever been nervous. I was. My wife was sitting next to me, she was a nervous wreck. And maybe that rubbed off on me.

“But then I kept watching him, as he got up there, he just looked real confident. He made the shots.”

And he has just kept going.