USC’s Henry Bibby Pushes On as He Tries to Build Trojans in His Own Image

At a high school basketball tournament last month, USC basketball Coach Henry Bibby ran into four of his players and beamed.

“Look at those smiles,” he said shaking hands with sophomore Jarvis Turner and freshman Greg Lakey, who were beaming right back at their coach. “I love those smiles.”

It’s not unusual to see Bibby dote on his players. He sometimes splashes lavish praise. And just as common, Bibby will criticize his players in the press. He will suspend them for being two minutes late for a bus. “Life is about rules,” he said. “I want them to learn that there is a consequence to everything they do.”

His players understand.

“He’s like a second father to me,” said senior Behzad Souferian, a former walk-on who rarely plays. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re the highest scorer or ride the bench, he wants to see us all do well. He tries to teach us about life.”

Henry Bibby, a man whose former wife had accused of abandoning his family, and whose own son, Mike Bibby, one of the premier guards in the country at Arizona, called his father’s scholarship offer “a joke,” appears to be revered by other people’s sons, if not his own.

When USC and Arizona played last season, it was like a Greek tragedy being played out in the media. While his ex-wife held impromptu press conferences to blast him, Henry Bibby said little in his defense. “There are a million divorces a year in this country,” Bibby said recently. “Mine was just blown out of proportion and turned into some media event.”

Because neither Mike nor Henry has said much about the relationship since then, not much is publicly known about where they now stand.

But Bibby has gone into the homes of talented players all over the country trying--like every other college coach--to convince them and their parents that he is knowledgeable, nurturing and the right man to be a surrogate father when those players head to college.

And Bibby seems to be getting that message across. His first two recruiting classes have been praised by recruiting experts; next season’s incoming class is considered among the nation’s top 20.

“I asked him a lot of questions about his personal life, and he was very candid,” said Evelyn Augustine, the mother of USC freshman point guard Kevin Augustine, who was a top West Coast recruit from Santa Ana Mater Dei High School last year.

“He was not offended and did not pull any punches. I believed him when he said he would try and give Kevin all his knowledge and experience,” she said.

Another reason for the recruiting success is Bibby and his staff beat the bushes, maybe too hard at times.

One East Coast prospect USC pursued who recently committed to Notre Dame was turned off by the relentless sales pitch.

“You know, I almost miss the craziness of recruiting,” 6-foot-10 Troy Murphy from Morristown, N.J., told the South Bend Tribune. “Well maybe I don’t miss the stuff from USC. One of their coaches would send me hundreds and hundreds of letters every day. He even sent one to my dog--’You can be a big dog at USC.’ What a wacko.”

“Not everybody is going to like us,” Bibby said. “We’re trying to get USC’s name out there, trying to let people know what we’re doing. At this point I would rather lose a player for being too aggressive than to lose one because he didn’t think we wanted him.”

Three-Time Winner

It was almost 26 years ago that Bibby was trotting around a celebrating Sports Arena with three fingers flashed high over his head.

Bibby was a Bruin then, part of the John Wooden legend and UCLA mystique and had just scored 18 points in the victory over Florida State in the 1972 NCAA tournament final, the third championship of his UCLA career.

Since taking that victory lap, Bibby’s fortunes have swayed from prosperity to privation, fame to obscurity, exile to adulation.

Through it all, Bibby has immersed himself in basketball.

“People who have been part of something as rewarding and successful as UCLA and the NBA were for us are always in search of duplicating it,” said Bill Walton, a teammate of Bibby’s at UCLA. “You can spend a lot of time chasing that dream of repeating your success.”

After nine seasons in the NBA, where he played with the 1973 champion New York Knicks, he went to the Continental Basketball Assn. He went from making $90,000 a year and flying first class, to making $400 a week as a player-coach, roaming the backwater towns of the CBA in a minivan.

In 1983, Bibby became an assistant to then-Arizona State coach Bob Weinhauer. After three seasons, both were implicated in a recruiting scandal and fired. A pariah as far as the NCAA was concerned, Bibby headed back to the CBA.

He coached the Tulsa Fast Breakers, the Savannah Spirits and the Baltimore Lightning. He coached abroad, in Venezuela and Puerto Rico. As a CBA coach, Bibby developed a reputation as a winner after his 1989 Tulsa squad won the championship, but was also known to go through scores of players.

“He was always cutting players left and right,” said former NBA all-star Otis Birdsong, who played for Bibby at Tulsa. “There were guys who were playing in the CBA just so they didn’t have to get a job,” Birdsong said. “If you were one of them, Bibby had no use for you. He wanted the guys who wanted to make it to the NBA.”

It was his CBA experience that Bibby says molded his coaching philosophy and prepared him for the task he’s facing at USC.

Bibby knows the obstacles facing him if he is to turn USC into a national power: the school has always been far more interested in football than basketball; the basketball team is without an on-campus arena and has only a small following. Los Angeles, as rich in talent as any city in the country the last several years, appears to consider Trojan basketball a joke.

“Nobody wants to play in front of empty seats,” said an assistant coach from a local high school powerhouse. “Why go to [USC] when you can play in front of all those crazy fans at Kansas or Duke.”

After a surprising finish last season, when the Trojans were 17-11 and made their first NCAA tournament appearance since 1992, USC is 7-17 and tumbling toward one of its worst seasons in the last 10 years.

“From what I’ve seen, he doesn’t have the material,” said Wooden, “I’ve watched them play at UCLA and on television. USC plays hard, but right now, the Trojans do not have the kind of talent to challenge the better teams in the Pac-10.”

That’s what people said about USC before last season. Nobody picked that team to finish higher than seventh place, but Bibby led the Trojans to a second-place tie in the conference.

Bibby built the team around four seniors, especially around a reputed malcontent named Rodrick Rhodes, who had transferred from Kentucky. Bibby turned him into a three-position player, and Rhodes was the surprise first-round draft choice of the NBA’s Houston Rockets.

“There’s no doubt that I would have been picked much lower if it wasn’t for Henry,” Rhodes said recently. “There aren’t too many 6-7 point guards in the NBA, but I got to show that I could play the position while at USC.”

A Touch of Reality

For every one of the kids Bibby has helped get into the NBA, he’s had to smash a few dreams too. “I’ve had to tell kids that their future is not in basketball,” Bibby said. “Man, I was in the CBA. I saw all those guys trying to get to the NBA, who were never going make it. All these kids think they are going to be the next Michael Jordan and the reality is most are not. . . . This is a great opportunity to earn a degree. I owe them that.”

All coaches say how much they care about academics. But in his two years, Bibby has had an impact at USC’s Student Athlete Academic Services.

“Henry Bibby from the first day he arrived on campus was particularly serious about the academic progress his athletes made,” said former SAAS director Fred Stroock. “He has followed through with his rules about attending class and tutoring sessions. The student athletes who don’t are sometimes suspended from entire games.”

Last weekend, Elias Ayuso, one of the team’s best outside shooters, was suspended for academic reasons.

“I never saw [former USC football coach] John Robinson once downstairs in SAAS,” said one tutor, who worked in SAAS for five years. “But I saw Henry down there yelling at one of his players who skipped a class. . . . Henry does something about helping his players earn their degree.”

It’s that kind of tough love that his players respond to. They don’t always like it but they appreciate that he sees them as more than basketball players.

Senior guard Ken Sims praised Bibby for being an honest man, even after Bibby dismissed him from the team last week for complaining about his lack of playing time: “If Henry Bibby ever needs me, which I don’t think he ever will, but if he does, I’ll be there for him. I love Henry Bibby.”