Complicated Coach : UCI’s Baker Might Be Hard to Define, but His Influence Is Certainly Great

As defining moments go, Rod Baker probably would like to be remembered for the last 10 minutes of UC Irvine’s victory over St. John’s in New York earlier this season.

Brooklyn native Kevin Simmons, the kid he recruited away from this storied Big East powerhouse and many other big-name schools, was slicing to the basket for key layups.

Baker was playing the bold and brilliant strategist. He gave his best player, point guard Raimonds Miglinieks, a 4 1/2-minute breather during crunch time and freshman Lamarr Parker, another New York prep star who ended up at Irvine, came in and made two key steals as the Anteaters rallied.

And all the while, the imperturbable--did Baker sweat when he was a player?--former Seton Hall assistant was back in front of the New York media, looking as if he just stepped out of a GQ ad. The way a suit hangs on Baker makes Pat Riley look like a guy who buys off the rack.

He termed the victory “satisfying,” but surely it’s a moment Baker cherished. He was in command, in control . . . and most of all, winning.

Unfortunately, Baker’s tenure at Irvine has been riddled with more gore than glory. The Anteaters have suffered through horrible losing streaks, blown big leads and sometimes under-achieved their way to a 42-83 record during his four-plus seasons as coach.

Now, Baker and the Anteaters face a litmus test. After winning an average of only four Big West Conference regular-season games under Baker, this is the crucial season for Irvine.

Baker, 43, signed a two-year contract extension in 1994 that will keep him on the payroll through the 1996-97 season. But all-conference point guard Miglinieks, rated among the 15 best at his position in the country by some experts, is a senior. So are starting forward Shaun Battle and sixth-man Michael Tate.

“This is a pivotal year for us, no doubt,” Irvine Athletic Director Dan Guerrero said. “It’s a year we expect to do very well. We believe we have the capabilities of competing for a conference championship and positioning ourselves for postseason play.

“And the [contract] extension was provided to allow for the opportunity for that to occur.”

It sounds as if the onus to win is on Baker, but he denies it’s weighing heavily on his psyche.

“To be honest, I don’t think about it,” he said. “I didn’t sit down before the season and say, ‘I need to be able to do to this to be able to do that.’ It’s just not the way I operate.”

They say a program reflects the personality of the head coach in an inexorable trickle-down effect, but who is Rod Baker? Is he more Andre Agassi or Pete Sampras? Is image everything or is there real substance behind that dapper exterior?

It’s a puzzling riddle, made more difficult by Baker’s reluctance to share his feelings. He rejected numerous requests to be interviewed for this story before finally agreeing to talk.

He is a very private man. Some guys wear their emotions on their sleeves; Baker keeps his locked up in a drawer.

Is he a good guy?

A bad coach?

A good coach?

A bad guy?

Two of the above?

None of the above?

The answers vary depending on whom you talk to--those who know him, think they know him or don’t want to know him--but there’s no what-you-see-is-what-you-get simplicity.

Rod Baker is an enigma.

Good Guy?

Baker’s childhood in Philadelphia doesn’t qualify for a mean-streets angle, but he could have been influenced by a variety of role models, ranging from the priests in his parish to gang members in the streets.

Both parents worked as bartenders and he spent “an awful lot of time in bars.”

“I always went trick-or-treating in bars,” he said, “and one of my favorite days was going in on a Sunday before Christmas to decorate and stencil on the mirror behind the bar.

“I also can remember my dad getting robbed right before closing on Christmas Eve when I was 10 or 11. He was OK, but they emptied out the till.”

A pretty-good athlete, Baker used church-sponsored sports as an oasis. “It allowed me a haven,” he said. His parish school burned down and when they built a new one, they included a gym.

“I worked there on Saturday and Sunday when we had roller skating,” he said, “so that and sports kept me busy. And there were times when I turned the corner on my way home and walked into some situations where the people involved knew who I was and let me turn around and take another route.”

Baker considers himself lucky to have had the kinds of influences that helped him make good choices in his youth, so he tries to help increase the odds for other kids in similar situations.

Last month, he spoke at six elementary and middle schools and two weeks ago, he took the entire team to the Orangewood Children’s Home and Emergency Shelter to visit and play with the kids.

Simmons, raised by a series of foster parents in one of Brooklyn’s seediest projects, has had to settle for father figures all his life. Now, he has settled on Baker.

“He’s definitely a different kind of coach because he understands what a player wants,” said Simmons, who was Big West freshman of the year last season. “A lot of these other coaches really don’t care what happens off the court. He checks up on us, makes sure everything is OK, makes sure you go to class.

“He really cares.”

Baker can be a fierce disciplinarian about academics. He does everything in his power to ensure players get a degree.

He went to college to become a teacher. He got into coaching after he injured his knee during his senior season at Holy Cross and began helping out with the junior varsity. He “fell” into his first assistant coaching job when a position opened at Brown and he was in the right place at the right time.

“I think the most important role of a coach is to send kids back a little better than you got them,” he said. “You need to expose guys to different ways of life and put them into positions where they have to make decisions and live by the consequences of their decisions.”

A member of the Black Coaches Assn. since its inception in 1987, he strongly backed a threatened boycott in 1994 when the NCAA refused to add one more scholarship for men’s basketball.

“Guys on radio talk shows say, ‘Who would get that 14th scholarship, anyway?’ ” Baker said, “but the quality of the athlete is not the point. It’s a chance for a lot of minority players to get an education, to get an opportunity.

“There were a lot of people 20, 30 years ago who put a lot on the line so I would be able to vote, be able to go to college, be able to have this job. And there comes a time for each of us when there are things you have to do because if you don’t, you can’t face yourself in the mirror in the morning.”

George Blaney, who coached Baker at Holy Cross and tried to hire him as his associate head coach at Seton Hall two years ago, says he attempted to discourage Baker from becoming a coach.

“He’s way too smart to be a coach,” Blaney said. “There are a lot of coaches who are only good at coaching, but Rod Baker could be good at a whole lot of different things. He’s very personable, he’s a great communicator and he’s a very, very bright man.

“But what I like best about him is that when it’s crisis time, that’s when he’s at his best. Whether it’s a people crisis or a game crisis, he’s very, very good under the gun.”

Eric Eisenberg, Simmons’ coach at Brooklyn Tilden High, saw many of the same attributes in Baker. He had heard criticism of Baker’s game-night coaching, but it didn’t stop him from urging the highly recruited Simmons to enroll at Irvine. And he’s still certain Simmons made the right decision.

“I can’t say enough good things about Rod and what he’s done on the human side,” Eisenberg said. “Look, basketball coaching is always subjective. The guy’s a great coach or a bad coach or whatever, it’s all in the eye of the beholder.

“But I can tell you one thing. As a person, he really worked hard to help this kid and he’s stuck with him. And for that I’ll be forever grateful.”

Baker’s urbanity sometimes projects an air of remoteness, but Tchaka Shipp, a transfer from Seton Hall who is recovering from a near-fatal 1994 car accident, says you don’t need to hug Baker to learn from him.

“Coach Baker has helped me to learn a lot about what’s wrong and right, on the court and off,” Shipp said. “The advice is there, but he never lectures. Maybe in some ways he doesn’t even intend to do it, I don’t know, but there are a lot of things you just take note of. I listen and later it soaks in.

“It’s sort of like taking the seeds home with you and then growing them yourself.”

Bad Coach?

There are some who don’t see Baker as the master of game night. Fresno State Coach Jerry Tarkanian frequently was critical of Baker’s game management when he was a commentator on Big West telecasts in previous seasons.

Tarkanian second-guessed strategy, substitution patterns and decisions on when to call timeout. But former Irvine Coach Bill Mulligan, a longtime friend of Tarkanian, thinks the criticism is somewhat unfair.

“I know Tark rips him, but I’ve seen a lot of their games over the years and I don’t see any glaring mistakes,” Mulligan said, shrugging. “I don’t recall seeing anything that terrible.”

Blaney also sloughs off Tarkanian’s aspersions as merely a sign of our TV times.

“I wouldn’t take much stock in that,” he said. “That’s what analysts get paid to do these days, to be critical. And it’s easy to find fault in pieces of game management by all of us. You could do it with me, you could do it with [Kentucky Coach Rick] Pitino, you could do it with anybody.”

Subjective appraisals by fans and second-guessing of coaching decisions by the media are a given, but the bottom line is always decided by balancing the victory and defeat ledger.

And a pattern has emerged with Baker’s teams. The Anteaters have been decidedly horrid during the conference regular season (17-55) and amazingly successful in the Big West postseason tournament (6-4). In the last two tournaments, Irvine is 5-2 with losses in the 1994 championship game and the semifinals in 1995.

“We’ve done well in the tournament and that’s been a real positive for the program,” Guerrero said. “On other hand, our inability to do it during the course of the regular season has been a concern for us. Rod’s aware of that.

“Ultimately, the job of a coach is to translate those successful experiences into a season-long situation whereby game in and game out we can play with that kind of consistency.”

The Anteaters were 2-0 and way up after victories at St. John’s in the season-opening Joe Lapchick Tournament, a tournament the Red Storm had won 20 times in a row. They came back to earth with a loss at Oregon State--a team picked to finish last in the Pac-10 preseason coaches’ poll--a narrow defeat against USC in the Sports Arena and crashed after leading by 16 Thursday night at the University of San Diego. Still, Irvine (3-3) has shown much promise.

Last season also began with high expectations, however. Irvine had Miglinieks, Simmons and senior guard Chris Brown, who had led the nation in three-point shooting as a junior. But Brown, an unrepentant pouter who would sit on the bench with a towel over his head if his shots weren’t falling, ended up seventh on the team in minutes played and averaged only eight points.

“I genuinely feel badly that Chris Brown was not able to realize whatever it was that he wanted to realize here,” Baker said. “But I’m not willing to take full responsibility for that. If you went back through my five teams here, I don’t think I’ve held anybody back from doing things.

“In fact, I’ve probably gone the other way and let some guys try to do too much.”

Baker says he hasn’t altered his basic approach to get a team made up many of the same key players to turn things around this season.

“I haven’t tried to change my philosophy or my personality, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “I have tried to simplify things a little. I think we have some pretty good basketball players, guys with a decent sense for the game, so we’ve put them in a position to just go play.”

Good Coach?

After he landed Simmons and beat out Arkansas and Seton Hall for community college transfer Miglinieks, no one has questioned Baker’s ability to recruit.

“Rod has done a very good job bringing in quality players,” Guerrero said. “He cares very much about his student-athletes and I believe it’s a major reason why people choose to play for him.”

Blaney says Baker has always been a great recruiter--a skill he perfected while bringing in the players who helped Coach P.J. Carlesimo and Seton Hall make it to the Final Four in 1989--because he’s “very logical and can articulate that logic during a very emotional time for a recruit,” and because “he’s not afraid to go after things that may not seem possible to achieve.”

Asked what his greatest strengths and weaknesses are as a coach, Baker was typically philosophical.

“It’s a difficult question on both sides, but I think my greatest strength and my greatest weakness are the same thing,” he said. “I have this sense of flexibility that can be helpful at times and at other times it can be a problem.

“Understanding other people’s shortcomings and strengths and adjusting is generally positive, but it can be a bad thing when you become too forgiving of someone’s inability to get certain things done.”

Guerrero, who declined to comment on criticism of Baker’s strategic abilities, clearly had no complaints about Baker’s decisions during the 1994 Big West Tournament. The Anteaters, seeded last in the 10-team conference, upset UC Santa Barbara, Utah State and University of the Pacific before losing to New Mexico State, 70-64, in the championship game.

After the tournament, Baker said he hoped Irvine’s run at the conference’s automatic NCAA berth was “more than just four days of divine intervention.” Guerrero apparently thought so. After signing Baker--who was considering Blaney’s offer to return to Seton Hall--to the two-year contract extension, he said Baker had demonstrated “the real ability to make the adjustments necessary to put a product out there that will be competitive game in and game out.”

The recruiting coups, Guerrero said, were “just icing on the cake.”

But then came a disappointing 1994-95 season that included six consecutive losses to open the Big West regular season.

Bad Guy?

One of Baker’s colleagues at Irvine, who asked not to be identified, said he was taken aback when Baker congratulated him after a big victory. “It was a first,” the coach said. “He’s always seemed totally aloof to me.”

Leland Quinn, a record-setting volleyball player at Irvine who played basketball and volleyball at Ocean View High, has participated in hundreds of pickup games with Baker’s players. After listening to their complaints, he believes Baker exudes an air of superiority that creates an uncomfortable distance in the player-coach relationship.

“I don’t think he’s bad intentioned, but he doesn’t make his players feel like they are worthy of him coaching them,” Quinn said. “He treats them with a great deal of disdain and some of the guys don’t think he respects them as players.”

Baker says he doesn’t really understand why he might come off as standoffish or superior but he’s not going to spend much time worrying about it.

“Aloof? I’m just not sure what that means,” he said. “I don’t know what other people’s expectations are, so I can’t tell you if I meet their expectations or not. I certainly don’t dwell on how other people perceive me or what they want me to be.

“I’ll say this though. I would be a lot more concerned if people said I was frivolous.”

Baker is well-read, well-versed on a number of subjects and has a sharp, wry sense of humor. After a game--win or lose--he’s insightful and analytical.

But for a guy who grew up in Philadelphia and has coached in the Big East Conference, he is remarkably thin-skinned when it comes to disparaging comments from the media.

Before a game last season, he angrily chastised a sportswriter for quoting Miglinieks in a recent story. Miglinieks had responded “leave me out of that” when asked whether coaching had played a role in the Anteaters’ six losses of games they led at halftime.

“You can write whatever you want about me,” Baker said, “but leave my kids alone.”

Said Quinn: “When does that guy smile? He’s miserable and he makes his players miserable. For my part, I’d rather see a less-talented team that was having some fun out there. I think that would sell more tickets.”

Maybe, but a 17- or 18-victory season would probably have a more-lasting impact on attendance in the Bren Center and Baker’s future at Irvine.

And if Baker is in a panic about his future, no one will ever know.

“We’re going to go out and try to win as many games as we can,” he said, “because that’s what we do and not for any other reason.”