Hawking Seems Up to the Task

Bob Hawking was introduced at Wednesday’s Big West basketball media day as the head coach at Cal State Fullerton “except now without the ‘I’ word”-- interim --”in front of the title.”

Poor guy.

Hawking’s basketball team, and it’s all his now, is so young he says “if you walk into our gym on any given afternoon, you’ll think you’ve mistakenly walked into Kinder Care instead of ‘Cal State Fullerton, Division I Basketball Program.’ ”

His top returning scorer, junior guard Chris St. Clair, underwent knee surgery last spring to repair a torn anterior cruciate ligament and might have to be held out this season as a medical redshirt.

His only other players with Division I experience are sophomore guard Chris Dade, who shot less than 37% from the field as a freshman, and senior Chuck Overton, who at 6-3 will start for the Titans at very small forward.

He lost his projected starting center when David Frigout came out a year early to turn pro, which is unheard of for a Titan, until you read the small print: Frigout signed with Evreaux. Of the French professional basketball league.

He will attempt to replace Frigout with another European, Dirk Rassloff, who averaged 28 points for a club team in Offenbach, Germany, but only 1.9 for his first American college team, Fairleigh Dickinson.

His team plays in the worst facility in the Big West, is the unanimous preseason choice (Street and Smith’s, Athlon, The Sporting News, Big West coaches, Big West media, Big West cheerleaders) to finish last in the conference and will open the regular season on Nov. 28 on the road.

At UCLA.

“That will be the night they unveil the NCAA championship banner,” Hawking notes, “so I’m sure it will be ‘Feast On Fullerton’ night . . . The guy who made this schedule, by all accounts, should be shot. But since that guy is me, I think I’ll pass on that thought.”

Hawking also signed a contract last April to spend the next three years of his coaching career at Fullerton, hopeful that they won’t be his last three.

Season openers at Pauley Pavilion.

Long-term agreements to batten down the hatches inside the charred and scorched bomb shelter known, rather generously, as Titan Gym.

Funny, but during casual conversation, the 46-year-old Hawking exhibits no obvious signs of a self-destructive personality.

Masochist? Not quite. Hawking also scheduled games against Cal State Northridge and San Diego State.

Thrill-seeker?

Well, that one certainly is open to interpretation.

“This is an exciting opportunity for me, our staff and our players,” Hawking says.

“I’m very thankful I have this chance,” he also says.

To understand where Hawking is going with all this, first you must review where he has been. Last September, when Brad Holland abruptly sprinted out of Titan Gym and yelled, “Geronimo!” Hawking, the faithful assistant, was thrown a whistle and a roster sheet and was told, “Here. All yours. Until March, anyway.”

Hawking went 7-20 with Holland’s leftovers, but included among the seven were victories at UNLV and UC Irvine. Hawking had scarcely little to work with--and even less when St. Clair, Frigout and Dade sustained serious late-season injuries. The 1994-95 Titans shot 40% from the field and were outrebounded by nearly six rebounds per game but Hawking beat four Big West opponents on X’s and O’s--resorting at one point to the weave, against Irvine, and the Anteaters were either amused or confused into submission.

“We were one of the worst shooting teams on the West Coast, if not the NCAA,” Hawking said. “I look back and ask myself, ‘How did we win seven games shooting like that and getting outrebounded by 5 1/2 a game?’ ”

That kind of thinking was shared by Fullerton Athletic Director John Easterbrook, who extended Hawking the three-year contract after opening the job to outside applicants for a month.

Once Hawking signed, he said he could stop “walking on eggshells, so to speak.” As interim coach, Hawking felt “under the microscope. Everything you do is analyzed and evaluated. Now I can coach while knowing I’m no longer standing in line with a number, without a shadow over me 24 hours day.”

Twenty-four hours a day?

“You try not to address it,” Hawking says, “but I didn’t go a day without hearing about the situation.

“One of my assistants, George Fuller, had his family stay in Michigan the whole season because he wasn’t sure where he’d be the next year. I made a 160-mile commute from Simi Valley every day. And after the [Northridge] earthquake, some freeways were down, so I was surface-streeting it a lot of the way.

“I was putting in three or four hours a day in the car, driving back and forth. But I wasn’t about to pick up and move to Orange County, not knowing my fate after the season.”

Today, Hawking and his family live in Yorba Linda. “We bought a house six miles from campus,” Hawking says proudly. “I don’t put 160 miles on the odometer in two weeks now.”

So the team he has is roundly expected to go nowhere any time soon.

At least it’s Hawking’s team.

So the gym his team plays in needs new walls, new lights, new seats and new warm bodies in those seats, not just a few less lines on the floor.

At least it’s Hawking’s gym.

The idea, Hawking believes, is to lay down some roots--some radical manifesto, coming from a Cal State Fullerton basketball coach.

Roots take hold beneath the soil line. It’s dirty in the beginning, but it’s the only place Hawking knows where to start.