Silent Treatment

After playing a year under Jim Harrick, after advancing to the NCAA’s Elite Eight on a run that could primarily be attributed to the new Rhode Island coach, Preston Murphy says he is honored to be playing basketball for the former UCLA coach.

“He knows this game and he’s done a lot of things,” Murphy, a senior point guard, said during the Great Eight tournament in Chicago last month.

“Coach Harrick has been through a lot and because of that, he’s a man we can listen to.”

Lamar Odom, who has had his own share of ignominy in his brief and peripatetic basketball life, says that he has never paid much attention to what people out West might think of his coach because all Odom knows is that Jim Harrick “understands the game and he cares about what’s best for me and that doesn’t happen all that much in this business.”

As Harrick brings the Rams to Malibu on Tuesday to play in the Sparkletts Invitational, his first game back here, there will certainly be some rehashing of the way Harrick left Southern California.

Of how Harrick was fired from UCLA in an ugly confrontation with Athletic Director Peter Dalis, in part, over a recruiting dinner that involved having more UCLA players than the NCAA allowed, and of Harrick’s clumsy attempts at covering up that violation.

Just a year after winning an NCAA title with UCLA and just a couple of weeks before the 1996-97 season was about to start, Dalis fired Harrick because Harrick lied and asked others to lie about who was at that dinner. Harrick will always feel that Dalis just didn’t like him, didn’t like Harrick’s rough edges and blunt manner. Dalis will say that he couldn’t brook the lies and the NCAA did hand down some punishment.

After a year away from the game, Harrick was hired by Rhode Island to succeed Al Skinner, who had gone to Boston College. Rhode Island officials say that they thoroughly investigated Harrick’s background and came to believe the man--believed that he made a mistake, owned up to it and that a long and distinguished career did not deserve to be ruined.

And so Harrick should be returning to Southern California somewhat triumphantly. If the Rams hadn’t squandered a 10-point lead in about a minute to Stanford in the Midwest Regional final last season, Harrick would have guided the Rams to the Final Four with a roster that had changed little from the previous season, when the team lost in the first round. As it is, the Rams have one of the best young players in the country in Odom and Harrick’s trip to the Elite Eight has the entire state talking college basketball nonstop since last March.

“We’ve become, like, the thing,” Murphy says. “That’s mostly due to what coach did for us last year.”

But Harrick will never be able to return to this area without the baggage of UCLA. There is a hardness to Harrick when the subject of UCLA comes up. While Harrick will not speak badly of UCLA or the way his exit was handled--”That’s in the past and I’ve moved on, I really have,” Harrick says--his son, Jim Jr., who played point guard for his father at Pepperdine, and who is a Rhode Island assistant coach for his father, will not remain silent.

“There is only one guy who can put his name next to Coach’s [John Wooden]. That’s Jim Harrick. He won a national championship. That’s a phenomenal feat. And to smear his name like UCLA did, that’s wrong. I can’t forget what they did,” Jim Jr. said.

“My dad won’t talk about it now. It’s pride for him. He’s got a great program, great kids, is appreciated. That just makes me hate Peter Pan [Dalis]. It makes you think. Here’s a guy who’s going after a guy, I compare it to this, the same context as Kenneth Starr. Going after a man who was very successful at his job because he didn’t like him. I hope [Dalis] can look himself in mirror and say, ‘I’ve never made a mistake.’ ”

So, yes, it seems that the Harrick family has not accepted how its time at UCLA ended.

There was a time when Jim Sr. saw college basketball as something full of innocence and freedom.

When Odom called college basketball a business, Harrick said that made him a little sad. Harrick gets a faraway look in his eye when he thinks back 37 years to when he was fresh out of Morris Harvey and ready to start being a basketball coach.

“I didn’t get into this business for money,” Harrick says. “I got into it for fun. I really did. I don’t think that, if I was a kid just starting out now, that I’d think of this in the same way. I don’t think I’d get into this profession.”

As Harrick talks, it starts to become more clear. While he will not speak unkindly himself of UCLA, in fact will not speak of UCLA at all, there is also a progression in his description of himself. From a kid in love with the game to a man nearing retirement age who wishes his son hadn’t gotten into the same profession.

When Harrick starts his story, he talks about how he and his wife Sally “got in the car for our honeymoon and drove to California. We were two young kids enjoying life, maybe not smart, but we were kind of adventurous.”

There were a couple of years in Northern California, “Smith River,” Harrick says, “where it rained 120 inches a year.”

Soon, though, Harrick moved south. He was the young high school coach at Morningside in Inglewood and in love with the gym, with the sound of the basketball hitting an uneven floor, of nights spent huddled over a playbook, thinking up new angles for a pass or different footwork on defense.

“Wonderful times I had at Morningside, times I’ll never forget,” Harrick says. “We’d go to the Chinese Theater and see Kirk Douglas putting his hand in the cement, in 1962 I think. My wife was working, we had two young kids, just enjoying life.”

After that there were four “fantastic” years as an assistant at Utah State and then two “wonderful” years as an assistant coach at UCLA.

“At UCLA the first time, that was a turning point in my career,” Harrick says. “I had always followed the John Wooden system. It’s just the best system and that gave me an opportunity to be even closer to that system.”

In 1979 Harrick was hired as head coach at Pepperdine, where, Harrick says now, “I could have been happy forever.”

Harrick will get a catch in his throat when he talks about his time at Pepperdine. Of how he still has friends in every department, of how there was no one at Pepperdine who wasn’t in his corner, who didn’t support him in everything he did.

And now Harrick is bringing his Rams to Malibu. “I’ve spent some of my happiest times at Pepperdine,” Harrick says.

When Pepperdine Coach Lorenzo Romar called Harrick to invite him to this new tournament, Harrick said he was on the phone immediately to juggle his team’s schedule, to move games around so that he could come back.

Harrick will speak of his joy in playing in front of his only grandchildren, who still live in the area.

But then the conversation will come to a halt. Because in the chronicling of Jim Harrick’s coaching life, the next step after Pepperdine was UCLA again.

And if Harrick would love to talk about winning a national title for the Bruins, Harrick can’t help but be reminded, as Jim Jr., will say, “that my dad was only fourth choice for that job in the first place.”

Harrick Sr. also knows that if he’s to talk about being the head coach at UCLA, he would also have to talk about leaving ugly, of being fired and firing back, of lies and betrayals and about being a 60-year-old man who deep inside knows that his reputation, if not as a coach, at least as an honest professional, took a hit and might not be repaired.

“I really discouraged my sons from getting into coaching,” Harrick says in deflecting the conversation from UCLA. “The oldest ones listened. Jim Jr., he didn’t.

“I wanted my children to be entrepreneurs, to answer to no one.”

Answer to no one. How telling is that?

“When I was at UCLA, I could hit a nine-iron and hit 400 guys who made six-figure salaries. There aren’t 400 guys in the whole world who make six figures by coaching. Business is the one place in the whole world where you can control your own destiny and get rewarded solely for the type of job you do. That’s what I wanted for my sons.”

Yet all Jim Jr. saw was “the passion for basketball behind the intensity of my dad.”

“What he gave me was a love for the game,” Jim Jr. said. “I remember watching him sweep the floors at Morningside High when I was a kid. He loved the game that much, to do that. The experience at Pepperdine for him was unique, extraordinary. For both of us.

“That’s what I learned from my dad. I’ll never be able to brush under the rug what happened to him at UCLA. But I admire the way he’s going on, and I’ll learn from that too.”