Whitlock Excels After Learning a Difficult Lesson : Basketball: No longer just getting by, ex-Loara standout making grade at Hawaii.

Tes Whitlock stories are plentiful.

There was that time at Loara High School when he long jumped 21 feet, barefoot and wearing blue jeans.

Or the day when he threw a football 60 yards while messing around.

And remember the 1991 Orange County All-Star game, when he scored 13 points in 90 seconds?

Those stories seemed destined to carry the tag, “What ever happened to him?”

The University of Hawaii is not the place most people expected to find Whitlock. He was suppose to have vanished long ago. He was scripted to be one of those high school legends.

Whitlock had another ending in mind.

“I have this dream about buying a house for my mother,” said Whitlock, 22. “In the living room, on the wall, is my college degree. Sooner or later, I had to settle down and get it done. I thought it might as well be now. I sort of made peace with life.”

Life had been at war with him long enough.

Whitlock danced in the limelight with a personality demanding attention, then hid in the shadows. Few knew his life off the court.

For the most part, Whitlock was left on his own.

He said his parents, unemployed and on the move, never had time to push him in the right direction and that he groped his way solo, stumbling many times.

He skated through high school, barely graduating, then tumbled at Arizona State.

First came Proposition 48 and athletic Purgatory. Then he completely washed out. Oblivion seemed to be the next stop.

Instead, Whitlock landed at Saddleback College, rebuilt his academic record and re-established his athletic dominance.

He then looked for a place as far away as possible and found Hawaii.

“It’s like being in another country,” Whitlock said. “I wanted that. I wanted to be where I had to maintain and survive on my own. There was no going home this time.”

*

Whitlock was close to home Saturday night when Hawaii played at San Diego State. Whitlock is Hawaii’s leading scorer, averaging 18.8 points.

Few doubted he could play on the Division I level, but those who did have received a refresher course in Whitlock’s abilities.

He was brought in to replace the graduated Trevor Ruffin (Phoenix Suns), who was the Western Athletic Conference’s third-leading scorer last season. Whitlock was asked to fill that void and didn’t need to be told twice.

“Coach (Riley) Wallace said he wanted me to shoot and score,” Whitlock said. “It didn’t take me long to go bug-eyed.”

Whitlock, a junior, scored 22 points against St. Bonaventure in the season opener, then lit up Seton Hall for 37.

He was named Western Athletic Conference player of the week in December.

Yeah, basketball has worked out just fine.

“He has better range than Trevor,” Wallace said. “But he’s not just a shooter. There have been a couple times where Tes drove by people and dunked. He gets back and plays defense. He’s just a great athlete.”

That has never been the question.

Whitlock also completed 15 units during the fall, in what Wallace said was Whitlock’s “best academic performance.” That might not be saying much considering his past, but the fact is that Whitlock is on track to graduate, according to Wallace.

School, it seems, has worked out as well.

“I needed to be somewhere far away from home,” Whitlock said. “A place where I couldn’t fly home on weekends. It’s a brand new life for me.”

The old one was tough to overcome.

*

Whitlock gets uneasy talking about his childhood. He says there were good memories, to be sure, but many bad ones as well.

“It’s nobody’s fault,” he said. “Everything happens for a reason.”

There was a reason Whitlock’s parents, Sheila and Eddie Whitlock, moved from Chattanooga, Tenn., to Orange when Tes, their oldest son, was 13. Work was hard to find.

Whitlock says there was a reason he enrolled at Loara, that it was the school closest to the motel where he lived with his mother and brother, Tony.

And there was a reason Whitlock gravitated to basketball. He found success.

“(My parents) went through a bunch of financial problems,” he said. “What it came down to was we didn’t have any money.

“Basketball, to me, was my way out.”

Whitlock made the varsity as a freshman and scored 2,064 points in his four-year career, fifth-best in Orange County history. He scored 805 points as a senior, fifth-best in county history.

“He scored 54 against Los Alamitos one night and it was the most exciting performance I have ever seen from one player,” former Loara Coach Jerry Halpin said.

Later that season, Whitlock scored 68 points against Saddleback, breaking the county’s 80-year-old single-game record.

But Halpin, now a vice principal at Los Alamitos, saw other things. He knew Whitlock was having trouble in school. Whitlock stayed eligible, barely, but was not taking college prep classes.

“We tried real hard to get him going in the right direction academically,” Halpin said. “But there came a point where if he didn’t have basketball, we might lose him. If he didn’t have basketball, he wouldn’t stay in school. Maybe we let him take it easy, I’ll take the blame for that. But we were looking at Tes as a whole person, not just Tes as a basketball player.”

Trouble was, Whitlock saw only basketball.

“Every Wednesday and Friday, I was going to get attention,” he said. “Basketball was my way out of having social skills. It was my way out of financial troubles. It was my way out of report cards.”

The report cards kept coming, but Whitlock said there was no one home to read them. His parents--who were unavailable for an interview--bounced around a lot, looking for work and finding little.

Whitlock found himself home alone. Choosing between going to the gym and studying was no choice at all.

“I had some pretty bad habits,” Whitlock said. “Usually, you break those by a certain age. But I didn’t have that type of parenting. I didn’t have anyone saying, ‘Come in and do your homework.’ No one was there to say, ‘Spell these 20 words before you go out and play.’ To make a long story short, I grew up by myself.”

It worked for a while. Whitlock signed with Arizona State.

*

Whitlock couldn’t make the necessary 700 score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, even on his second try. Still, Coach Bill Frieder wanted him. Frieder’s wife, Janice, tutored Whitlock and even talked him out of leaving school during his freshman year.

Everything seemed to be working out. He squeaked by, but Whitlock was eligible. He averaged 6.3 points in 28 games as a freshman in 1992-93.

“He was going to blossom into a big-time player for us,” Frieder said. “He was the type of kid who was always ready to play and he could shoot.”

The good times didn’t last. He was ruled academically ineligible after the 1993 season.

“Tes would always tell my daughter that she better be going to class,” Frieder said. “Then he wouldn’t follow that advice. He grew up raising himself and didn’t have a lot of structure.”

Said Whitlock: “Air fare to Southern California was $48. I was home almost every weekend.”

So he returned in the spring of 1993.

“I wasn’t surprised he was back,” Halpin said. “But I could see something different in him.”

Said Frieder: “As you grow up, you start to hear the clock ticking.”

Whitlock knew a last chance when he saw one and enrolled at Saddleback that summer.

In one respect, Saddleback was just another athletic venue for him. He averaged 20 points and scored 41 in a game against Irvine Valley.

But the school was also a place for him to improve academically. Coach Bill Brummel and assistant Tom McCluskey saw to that.

“Tes had no confidence in the classroom,” said McCluskey, now Golden West coach. “He could fall off course without someone nagging him all the time. That’s just because he had no stability in his life. But once he found success in class, he realized he could be productive away from basketball.”

Whitlock not only stayed eligible, he got his associate of arts degree last year.

Wallace came to Saddleback last season to look at forward Antoine Jefferson. He left impressed with Whitlock.

“He had a couple steals and a dunk and was hitting everything he shot,” Wallace said. “But I didn’t think we would have a chance at him. He was talking big time.”

But Whitlock was thinking something else.

“Coach Brummel had sent four or five players to Hawaii,” Whitlock said. “He thought it would be the place for me. Coach Brummel saved my life after Arizona State, I had to listen.”

*

In some ways, little has changed with Whitlock.

People still ooooh and aaaah about his athletic ability. Stories are plentiful.

Like that 17-point first half against North Carolina.

But a lot has changed for him.

“I’m more mature now,” Whitlock said. “I have more structure to my life. I’m still the same old, talkative, crazy Tes. But I’m different. I always struggled in the classroom. It was always hard. But it’s important to me now. I’ll have my degree.”

Possibly hanging on the living room wall.