He Gets Little Glory When UCLA Wins and Much of the Blame When UCLA Loses, but Ultimately, for the Bruins to Be Successful... : Dollar Has to Be the ONE

His teammates take the shots, Cameron Dollar takes the hits.

Toby Bailey and Charles O’Bannon are the rock-the-rim stars, Jelani McCoy and J.R. Henderson lock down on the post and eye the NBA millions, Kris Johnson is instant offense, and Dollar is the senior point guard counted on to handle them all, keep them under control and run the whole thing.

No dunks, little thanks, and when it bogs down, it’s time to holler about Dollar.

“It’s weird, you know,” Dollar said this week, “my boys, they get the glory, they get the clippings. But when things go wrong, it’s on me.”

Call Dollar UCLA’s if-only player. . . . If only Dollar could score, if only Dollar could shoot, if only Dollar could break down defenses better off the dribble, if only he were as athletic as his Bruin teammates, if only, well, if only he were Tyus Edney or even Santa Monica Crossroads star Baron Davis, the thinking goes, all would be well in Westwood again.

Here’s the Big Dollar Question: No matter what his leadership skills are, can a 5-foot-11 senior who hasn’t yet proved he can make an open 15-footer lead a talented team to glory?

Dollar and the rest of the Bruins point to his eight-assist performance in the fast-paced 1995 national title game victory over Arkansas when Edney was hurt, and to UCLA’s Pacific 10 title last season as proof enough of his ability.

“I don’t need to prove anything to anybody,” Dollar said. “All those people who say I can’t play said the same thing before the national championship game. I’ve never been the kind of player people said could do all those things.”

Said junior swingman Johnson: “I get kind of mad when they say we don’t have a point guard. Cameron Dollar’s definitely a good point guard, and he serves a purpose.

“He does his job, he’s tough on defense, gets everybody going. He’s the perfect complement to this team. We’ve got five other guys who get playing time who are straight scorers. He’s not in the position where he really needs to score.”

Dollar, the Bruin with his feet on the ground and the ball in his hands, doesn’t fly at the hoop or fancy himself as a future NBA star, and he clearly isn’t going to be a 20-points-a-game hero.

That can hurt UCLA (3-2) in a half-court battle, like in the Princeton loss in the NCAA tournament’s first round last season. But that game also featured poor passing by the other Bruins, and way too many turnovers.

Playing with injured hands most of last season, Dollar made only 37.2% of his shots and averaged 4.1 points. This season, Dollar is shooting even worse--28.6% from the field (six for 21)--and averaging 4.8 points.

He leads the league, though, in watching his teammates barrel toward the basket--and trying to make sure things are settled enough to play coherent basketball.

“It’s kind of fun, you kind of control things behind the scenes,” Dollar said. “And when I see we’ve got five guys in double figures, and everybody’s loving that, I’m kind of sitting back and thinking, ‘Yeah, that’s good, everybody got taken care of tonight.’ I can go home and my boys are happy.

“My friends and family, they’re on me all the time, telling me I need to worry about myself out there. But I’m just not that way. I’m always thinking about what the team needs to do, what my teammates want me to do.”

After UCLA’s struggling, turnover-marred start, interim Coach Steve Lavin gave Dollar even more control of the team on the floor than he already had--basically total responsibility for the tempo of the team.

If it all collapses, Dollar knows, it’s on his hands.

“There will be some times where I could easily kind of join the melee and put up a little jump shot, try to drive in there and get something, but it’s beneficial for my team right now if I pull it out and wait, pass up a shot I might have been able to create,” Dollar said.

“There are going to be games where our scorers are going to have off-nights, and then, those games are when I have to be ready to accept that role, and I’m very confident in my abilities to be able to do that.”

After the 96-83 Kansas loss Dec. 7, Dollar, as is his custom, took on the role of team spokesman, saying that his teammates have to learn how to run the disciplined, swing-the-ball offense being taught by Lavin. But that’s going to take time, Dollar said, since they never really learned, or were taught it, before.

That was taken as an implicit criticism of Jim Harrick’s coaching style--a criticism Dollar says he did not mean to make. Dollar said he called Harrick after the quote was published and told him he wasn’t making a critique--and that Harrick said he didn’t take it that way.

“I’d never try to stab him in the back or anything, I just feel that we’re putting a lot more emphasis on it now,” Dollar said. “So now I’m going to try to stay away from the comparison, I guess.

“But when I pass it to the wing, I don’t want to have to be yelling for it to be coming back every time, I just want it to be known. We’re going to be running a lot more, and if a team tries to stop us from running, we’ve got to swing it bam-bam-bam, look, bam-bam-bam, look, and keep doing it like that. And that’s when we’re powerful right there.”

No matter how it was taken, the end result is the same: Dollar has taken on the role of the Bruins’ on-the-floor adult, the only one who makes sure he resists the easy temptations of flying around looking for tomahawk slams.

“No question,” said O’Bannon, UCLA’s other senior starter, “this is Cameron’s team.”

What he’s realizing, Dollar said, is that the 1995 senior triumvirate of Edney, Ed O’Bannon and George Zidek figured out how to play crisp offensive basketball the same way the current team is figuring it out--by trial and many errors.

“I think about it all the time, and I chart their progress and see how they came to the conclusions that they did, and where they ended up--and it’s easy to see,” Dollar said of the three departed Bruins.

“Their first couple years, they played with [Gerald] Madkins, [Tracy] Murray and [Don] MacLean, and [Darrick] Martin and [Shon] Tarver. . . . I mean, these are not the swinging-the-ball kind of guys, you know what I’m saying? It’s like you might need a couple more balls with all those guys.

“So, when you look at that, they go through all those years, and then when they’re on top, you see why they came to that conclusion.”

With Lavin’s loud emphasis, and the debacle against Kansas and previous mess-ups, Dollar said the lesson has been picked up.

“I think as young guns, we didn’t take that as seriously,” Dollar said. “We thought about it and we knew we should do it, but it was one of those things where, ‘Well, I can take this guy here,’ and you’re not trying to be selfish, but you’re not thinking about in the long run how much easier the percentages will be to swing it.

“But that’s something we now have learned, and Lav has really got on us about it.”

Dollar, whose shooting was like a shotput last season because of the hand injuries, has looked smoother this season, but the ball has not gone down.

He says he knows he can make the shots, knows he has to take them to get defenses to stop clogging the passing lanes. But Lavin said for right now, all he wants his point guard to do is forget about the stat sheet and remember the bigger goals.

“The tendency is for people to say he has to score a lot, they keep saying Dollar has to shoot more,” Lavin said. “To me, you play to your strengths.

“We have a team that has some prolific scorers on it, all these guys in high school were big, big-time scorers, and Dollar his whole life has been better at setting the table.

“He doesn’t need to score for us to be effective. I think he needs to make his open shots, there’s going to be times in the game where he needs to knock those down. And he needs to be able to make his free throws late in the game, because he’s going to be handling the ball.

“I mean, you’d rather have a point guard that can score, and Cameron can score--he’s shown the ability over the years to hit an open shot. But I don’t want that to be something that bogs him down. To me, the key to coaching and the key to players is playing to your strength.”