BAD BLOOD : Tonight’s Featured Matchup, USC’s Bibby vs. Arizona’s Bibby, Goes Way Beyond Basketball

By way of cosmic intersection and hoops happenstance--O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!--the private lives of the Henry Bibbys will be put on public display tonight, for the cost of admission.

Arizona versus USC, a story of love, betrayal and a crossover dribble, comes as close as college basketball gets to Shakespeare.

Such as the Globe Theater is not available, the game will be played at the Sports Arena, in two halves instead of four acts.

“It’s terrible,” Virginia Bibby says quietly over the phone from Phoenix. “I hope the adults realize it’s a kid out there.”

The kid is her son, Mike Bibby, Arizona’s phenom freshman point guard; quiet as a mouse, hard-working humble and the best player Wildcat Coach Lute Olson ever recruited.

The father is King Henry, USC’s basketball coach. To give you a sense of the relationship, Henry called Mike last year to rekindle a standing scholarship offer. You know, father and son, sort of together again?

“No,” came the stern reply.

“And that was the extent of it,” as Henry remembers.

And there is Virginia, who will squirm courtside as she implores her son to knock the Trojans back to Troy one month shy of divorce court proceedings with Henry.

“Oh, I won’t skip this,” Virginia says with anticipation. “He can’t keep me away from this.”

Unlike her ex-husband to be, who can count on one hand the number of games he has seen Mike play, Virginia has never missed a game.

Take away the referees and the ballboys, and tonight’s game amounts to one family’s open wound.

The Bibbys saw this collision coming last March 15, the day USC removed the “interim’ tag and named Henry coach for 1996-97.

Mike, a three-time Arizona player of the year at Phoenix’s Shadow Mountain High, had long before committed to Arizona.

Jan. 16 has haunted the Bibbys since.

Virginia suspects Henry of orchestrating the public confrontation out of spite.

“When the kid signed [at Arizona], we didn’t know he [Henry] would end up in this conference, to make it what it is today,” Virginia says. “I think he did this on purpose. I think Henry looked for this this way. I think Henry is putting pressure on the kid. I wish he [Henry] was somewhere else, I really do, just to avoid having the kid go through this. But I guess this is how it worked out.”

Through the USC sports information office, Bibby declined a request to discuss his son and respond to his wife’s comments.

Last week, on a conference call with Pacific 10 Conference coaches, Bibby said he thought Mike would have been better off at USC.

“I think I could give more knowledge than probably anyone in the Pac-10 in what a point guard should do,” said Bibby, a former All-American guard at UCLA. “But he’s at a very good school, he’s with a very, very good coach, and I’m pleased to see him progress the way that I thought he would.”

Stuck in the middle of this mess is Mike, by all accounts an innocent kid who comes not to praise his father but to figuratively bury him at center court.

One gets the sense this won’t be a problem for the younger Bibby, who directs the nation’s sixth-ranked team.

Olson has tried to keep this circus under the tent. He saw Jan. 16 coming too and prohibited Mike from conducting pregame interviews.

“I know this young man better than you do,” Olson told a reporter requesting an interview. “And I’m just telling you it’s in his best interests [not to talk]. This thing has been over and over and over again. And I just don’t think it’s fair.”

Mike’s feelings about his father, however, are public record.

Arizona beat reporters recently asked Mike about the comparisons.

“That kind of upsets me,” he said. “They don’t have to say ‘Henry Bibby’; they just need to say Mike Bibby. But every time after my name . . . there’s his name.”

Bibby has made a point in interviews to credit his success to his mother, noting she was the one who made him shoot jump shots every day after school at a bent rim.

Asked once what was the biggest misconception about him, Mike replied: “How people thought my dad was always there for me.”

Father is, in fact, pictured with his son in this year’s USC media guide--but it is with his oldest boy, Hank Jr., a USC student.

How did it ever get to Jan. 16?

Nineteen years ago in May, Virginia delivered the couple’s third child, Mike, in Cherry Hill, N.J. After winning three NCAA titles at UCLA in the early 1970s and an NBA crown for the New York Knicks in 1973, Henry was playing out an NBA string with the Philadelphia 76ers.

Virginia recounts her husband’s role in Mike’s 1978 birth as follows:

“With Mike, he dropped me off at the hospital and went home, I guess,” she says, “then came back after he was born. . . . I know he wasn’t there for the actual birth.”

Mike was 2 when the family moved to Phoenix and Henry began a decade of town-hopping as he tried to work his way into the coaching profession.

After winning a Continental Basketball Assn. title as a player-coach for the Lancaster (Pa.) Lightning, Bibby in 1982 landed an assistant’s job at Arizona State under Bob Weinhauer. There, the Pac-10 cited the school for recruiting violations and, three years later, Bibby was gone, a pariah in the coaching ranks.

For eight years beginning in 1985, he would coach CBA franchises in Baltimore, Oklahoma City, Tulsa and Savannah.

Summers, he toiled in the U.S. Basketball League and led basketball caravans through Puerto Rico and Venezuela.

Bibby was a spartan traveler--clothes, a bed, TV--leaving the articles behind each time a new opportunity knocked.

Virginia remembers Henry’s time at home became “less and less. We sort of lived getting accustomed to him not being around.”

Bibby once explained in a magazine interview that he was trying to earn a living for his family as best he knew how.

Virginia disagrees.

“Henry had chances to be part of their lives,” she says. “Henry made his choices in life, and Mike is not to be blamed in any of this. There is a lot more that happened we don’t talk about. . . . Trust me, Henry lived the life Henry wanted to live. Henry made the choices in life to suit Henry. Henry could have done anything Henry wanted to do.”

Bibby left behind a wife and four kids: Dane, Hank Jr., Mike and Charlsie.

One of them, Mike, was a basketball prodigy.

“I do know that he has a gift,” his mother says.

Jerry Conner, Mike’s high school coach, remembers Bibby rising as a young phenom in the Northeast Community Basketball Assn.

When Mike was in the sixth grade, his uncle, Garrard Carmichael, brought him to Conner’s summer basketball camp.

Mike, painfully shy, didn’t say much.

“The only talking he did was with the ball,” Conner says.

Bibby bested the Shadow Mountain varsity squad in a three-point shooting contest, and a legend was born.

Mike was more naturally gifted a player than his father, a blue-collar star. Mike had intuitive basketball skills and a shooting touch. He would be dubbed “Jason Kidd with a jump shot.”

Throughout the hype, Mike remained unassuming, almost to a fault.

To wit: When Conner wanted to promote Bibby from the freshman team to the varsity, Bibby said he had to ask his mother first.

Virginia told Conner: “Mike is ready for the challenge. You take him.”

Virginia says Mike was worried people would think he would become big-headed.

“He’s so afraid of how people would react to him, not knowing what he was like,” she says.

After mom OKd the promotion, Mike began one of the most storied careers in high school basketball, winning the first of three state player-of-the-year awards as a sophomore.

Conner was most impressed with Mike’s selfless style, how he was always most concerned about getting his teammates involved. Bibby was so unselfish as a sophomore, Conner pulled him aside and begged him to shoot.

“He almost had to be told,” Conner remembers. “The first night we told him that, he was six for eight from the three-point line. Afterward, he sheepishly said, ‘Was that enough?’ and I laughed and said, ‘Why don’t you try to shoot a bit more?’ ”

Conner could sell popcorn to Bibby’s highlight reel. There was the night his junior season Bibby scored 53 points against North High. “The most unassuming 50-point game you could imagine,” Conner says.

And the state quarterfinal game that same year against Carl Hayden High, which Conner still describes as the “most amazing bit of basketball I have ever seen.”

Bibby totaled 30 points, 11 assists, eight rebounds and eight steals--in the first half. He finished with 50 points.

Sealing his legend as a senior, Bibby led Shadow Mountain to the state title, averaged 34 points, eight rebounds and four steals.

It was around this time that Mike started to distance himself publicly from his father’s name.

“The first time he was able to say that was a relief for him,” Virginia says. “He no longer had to hide the fact what was going on. . . . I really didn’t know how he felt, because we never talked about what they were missing out on.”

Where was Henry during all this?

“‘He saw him play one game in high school,” Virginia says.

Conner says he and Henry spoke weekly by phone when Mike was a freshman, but that the conversations became less frequent.

Meanwhile, in Tucson, Olson was drafting on Bibby like an Indy Car driver. Olson has recruited great players in his day--Damon Stoudamire, Sean Elliott, Khalid Reeves, Steve Kerr--but none compared to Bibby.

Olson marveled at Bibby’s poise and leadership skills; how Bibby could be content scoring five points a game while distributing passes to all-star supporting casts in summer camps and then transition smoothly into a 30-point player for his high school team.

“You just couldn’t wait to get him in your program, frankly,” Olson says.

When Bibby committed early to Arizona to get the recruiters off his back, it was quite a coup.

“This kid is as good as any I’ve ever had anything to do with,” Olson says.

Bibby has not disappointed. The first freshman to start for Arizona since Elliott, Bibby made his debut with a 22-point game in an upset of North Carolina in the Hall of Fame Tip-Off Classic.

He currently ranks third in the Pac-10 in assists, 6.3 per game, and fourth in steals at 2.6, while averaging 12.7 points.

No one knows how Mike will react playing against his father. He is already famous for his basketball poker face.

“I’ve never seen him change his demeanor on the court,” Olson says.

Conner expects Mike will be nervous.

“He’ll be chewing his fingernails, like he always does,” Conner says. “But when the game starts, there’s just something about him. Between the lines, Mike is a performer. I’ve never seen anyone like him.”

Bibby’s poise will be tested. Would anyone in his situation not be tempted to flash a steely glare to the opposing bench after a made basket?

Bibby told the Arizona Daily Star the divorce is hurting his mother.

“I can see it sometimes gets her down,” Bibby said. “But she tries not to let us know. I’ve been around her so long, I know when something is bothering her. Yeah, I think about it [the divorce] a lot.”

Asked if she thought Mike loved his father, Virginia hedges.

“That’s a sticky question,” she says. “Right now, there’s so much going on. I’m sure there is some love, but he [Mike] doesn’t like him [Henry], I think that might be it. Or like what he represents now. Just what he is now, what he’s about now. He is his father, he knows he’s his father, but there’s a lot I can’t go into.”

Virginia and Henry have been separated 10 years. She sued Henry for divorce in 1994 but refuses to settle. The case is schedule to be heard next month in Phoenix.

Asked again about his son at his weekly Monday news conference, Henry said, “I’m not going to get into that.”

Bibby says tonight is another game, not a personal thing.

Just like every other game you coach against the son who didn’t want to play for you with his mother staring daggers at you from the stands.

“I guarantee you, despite what he says, deep down, I know what he wants to do,” Virginia says. “I guarantee you, deep down, he wants to beat Mike.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

How Bibby Ranks

How Mike Bibby ranks in assists and steals per game in the Pacific 10 Conference. The top five:

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PLAYER, SCHOOL AST Knight, Stanford 7.6 McCruder, California 7.2 Bibby, Arizona 6.3 Terry, Arizona 5.5 Cunningham, Oregon State 5.3 PLAYER, SCHOOL STL Terry, Arizona 3.0 Rhodes, USC 2.7 Dollar, UCLA 2.7 Bibby, Arizona 2.6 Knight, Stanford 2.6

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