He Talks as Good a Game as Anyone

In Los Angeles, the surest indication of the onset of college basketball season is the sound of Steve Lavin’s voice.

From mid-October on, it gets tough to turn on the radio without hearing it. Sometimes it’s as if he has his own frequency.

Right now his voice is in the earpiece of my phone. That’s my own doing, brought about by the curiosity of what the past two seasons--about as tumultuous, exhilarating and trying as they get in his sport--have done to him.

Seeking answers from Lavin can be a test of stamina. He takes questions and runs with them. Long, marathon races. He gave me more than 3,200 words to type, which translates into 13 pages when printed out. Then he faxed over 23 more pages of information.

It’s worth processing. Through all of the words, a portrait of Lavin begins to emerge.

The son of a teacher, the former coaching apprentice, the man whose main desire is to pass along knowledge himself, had to go back to school. Fate (and a bogus expense report by Jim Harrick), conspired to toss Lavin onto the Mount Olympus of his profession at age 32. And that’s when the learning started.

It was quite a path. Salvaging a run to the NCAA tournament’s Elite Eight from a season that began five days after Harrick was fired in 1996. Suffering through two of the worst losses in school history. Coping with the school-imposed suspensions of Jelani McCoy and Kris Johnson last year, their returns and McCoy’s subsequent “retirement”, and somehow making it to the Sweet 16.

“A lot of the same things you try to teach your players in terms of the lessons you learn through the course of a season and the course of a career, a lot of the same lessons that players go through during their career, as valuable as it’s been to them, it’s become valuable for me,” Lavin says.

“It’s definitely taught me a lesson. How to handle the obstacles, the different kinds of hurdles we’ve had to overcome. It would have been very easy for players to use some of the obstacles or hurdles that have come our way as an excuse to fail.

“When we stepped between the lines, we were still able to put together two successful seasons back to back. During a difficult time, we were able to kind of persevere and put in place a very strong foundation that gives us reason to believe we have a strong future.”

The Bruin coaching staff can roll out one of the nation’s top recruiting classes this year, with Matt Barnes, Dan Gadzuric, Jerome Moiso, JaRon Rush and Ray Young. That’s a nice supplement to last year’s class, which included Baron Davis, Rico Hines, Billy Knight, Todd Ramasar, Travis Reed and Earl Watson.

The trouble is, that’s 11 freshmen and sophomores, plus sophomore transfer Ryan Bailey. But Bailey’s older brother Toby and J.R. Henderson aren’t around to provide senior leadership the way they did last year. Now it has to come from Lavin.

During his first season, when he still had the interim label, he had too many things at hand to think big picture.

He thought about the big picture only twice, on his first day when he faced the huge media throng at his introductory news conference, and on the last day when his eyes welled with tears after the NCAA regional loss to Minnesota.

In between, he simply went to work, doing everything by instinct after all of those years spent preparing to be a head coach. When the season ended in San Antonio, after Minnesota beat the Bruins to advance to the Final Four, it all caught up to him. There were tears as he sat on the interview podium. His team had come through so much.

He had earned respect, plus a new contract from the school. The hard part was supposed to be over.

But if Lavin’s own future was uncertain in year one, at least he knew what to expect from his roster. The ongoing saga of Johnson and McCoy in 1997-98 meant Lavin’s team kept changing. It took too much simply to cope with their situations.

After giving himself a B-minus grade for coaching and a B-plus for management in his first year, Lavin thought he had another B-plus year as a crisis manager last season, but only a C-minus as a coach.

“That’s where I felt last year’s team got shortchanged,” Lavin says. “The freshmen got short-changed because of the distraction and the scrutiny for the difficult stuff that we were going through.”

This year Lavin plans to meet with his players individually every two weeks, instead of once a month. He wants this year to be about growth.

He held a two-day session of speakers last month, bringing in former NFL star Ronnie Lott, Olympic decathlete Rafer Johnson, Laker legend Jerry West, former Bruins Mitchell Butler and Darrick Martin and motivational speaker Gene Griessman.

Lavin listened closely too. He’s always looking to take something away from people. He even drew inspiration from the work ethic of Cameron Dollar, a player at UCLA while Lavin was an assistant who now is a head coach himself at Southern California College.

Lavin wanted his players to have a vision of the course before them. And he wanted some reference material to bring up when they hit those inevitable walls during the season.

Now he has some of his own experiences at UCLA to use as well.

“I’m at the point where I’m able to learn, and I can impart the information to my players,” Lavin says. “That’s the interesting thing.”

Lavin and his staff went down to San Diego to catch Game 4 of the World Series last month. As head coach of UCLA, Lavin has some idea of the pressure on New York Yankee Manager Joe Torre.

“I get the sense, just watching him, that one thing you can tell is he’s really kind of at peace with himself,” Lavin says. “He’s really hit that rhythm of life.”

It’s the third year for Lavin at UCLA. Maybe now the Bruins can hit that steady and continuous flow, kind of like Steve Lavin when he’s talking.