NET WARRIORS

With John Wooden, a Seppo and an entourage behind us, how could our team lose?

Wooden, the UCLA basketball coaching legend, was not with us in person. One of three UCLA graduates on our team trekked to his home in Encino to get autographed copies of his book, “Wooden: A Lifetime of Reflections on and off the Court.”

We weren’t seeking to climb Wooden’s Pyramid of Success to an NCAA basketball title. Most of never could dunk.

But we were out to make history of our own--on a different court.

Our destination was the United States Tennis Assn.’s adult league championships. The USTA also stages the U.S. Open, but no big endorsement deals ride on this competition--it’s for bragging rights among the nation’s club and park players.

Still, some of us had been trying for a decade to get there, and this season it took seven months of local and regional competition to become one of the 17 teams from across the nation to gather in Tucson, Ariz., for a grueling weekend of play.

Our team from Toluca Lake Tennis Club, in the shadows of Burbank Studios, earned the right to represent Southern California by besting the Orange County champion.

Now that we’d made it, we intended to be ready. Word was that Southern California teams too often fell short because of overconfidence, a tendency to assume that players from, say, Duluth, Minn., couldn’t match up. So our guys entered a slew of warmup tournaments, lost a few pounds where needed and then did what it took to get Seppo Viljanen to come along.

Seppo is the club’s Finnish masseur and normally he’d be spending his weekend working out the kinks on some starlet from Melrose Place. As clients, we weren’t nearly as interesting as that, but we offered him a deal: We’d buy 10 massage gift certificates if he’d join us. So there he was lugging his portable table to the baggage counter at LAX for the flight to Arizona.

It was all about being ready. For as Wooden wrote, recalling his advice to any player seeking to crack the big time: “Young man, tell yourself, ‘I will be prepared and then perhaps my chance will come because if it does come and I’m not ready, another chance may not come my way very soon.”

THURSDAY

New York looms. Not on our flight path--we’re still bound for Tucson--but on the pairings sheet.

In the first phase of competition, we’re grouped with three other teams for round-robin play to determine one semifinalist.

First we play the Northern champion--North Dakota perhaps?--then Mid-Atlantic and then, on Saturday afternoon, “Eastern.” We assume that’s New York because a Gotham squad won the whole thing last year--a team from Central Park, no less--and because the L.A. vs. N.Y. match-up is a natural, like Sodom vs. Gomorrah.

As the plane descends, I pull out Wooden’s book for guidance. A compilation of short entries (“A Leader’s Difficult Task,” etc.), it seems a perfect spiritual Ouija board, one I can open randomly to see what wisdom is revealed. I open to Page 152, a rumination on . . . Bill Walton’s whiskers. Wooden had to instruct his red-headed All-American to get a shave or say goodbye to Westwood.

That episode does not speak to my team. Sure, sitting next to me is our own Bruin All-American, Norm Perry. But his NCAA wars were fought in tennis, four decades ago. These days, he doesn’t exactly keep the barber going overtime. Indeed, we wonder whether, at 60, he’ll be the oldest player at Tucson. We also wonder if we’ll be the oldest team, with only one player under 38.

Our top singles player is Dr. Win Chang, a Yale graduate and an anesthesiologist. At No. 2 singles is Jason Sallin, a tall left-hander who works as a studio animator. At No. 1 doubles are Rob Coss and Richard Beharry, former community college players at Pierce and Glendale, respectively, who worked as club pros before giving in to real jobs. Then an odd-couple pairing of flashy Rene Lamart, undoubtedly the only heavyweight boxing trainer in the field, and quiet Keith Huyssoon, a financial comptroller. Finally, in the last doubles spot, computer training executive Ron Nall and Jim Mueller, a former harness driver who describes himself as “the old, lame gray-headed guy with the big, fat belly.”

Mueller mashed his ankle on a sprinkler while retrieving a ball hit over a fence. But opponents should not be fooled by his limp or physique. He was an All-City Section basketball guard at North Hollywood High and played a year at UCLA in the Wooden era. Three decades later, he still can scoot.

I’m the captain. In reality, I’m like those pro wrestling managers who do all the talking and nothing else. After three knee surgeries, I’ve benched myself. Team members have noticed that the first year I’m not playing is the first we’ve made nationals. Hmmmm.

As we arrive for a practice session at Randolph Park, I size up the competition: New York has a speedy 5-foot-5 singles player. The Mid-Atlantic guys (from Richmond, Va.) like to “slice and dice.” The Northern team--it’s Minneapolis!--is young, and run by a woman pro.

Later, at a captains’ meeting, officials announce that a masseuse will be on site. I ask, “Can we bring our own?”

After the laughter, someone says, “That must be Southern Cal.”

Play starts in the morning.

FRIDAY

Here’s what we’ve heard overnight around the bar, pool table and spa at our hotel:

* South Carolina is very confident, having won 22 consecutive matches. But one of its players has become infatuated with a local stripper and spent $200 watching her.

* Denver’s captain can recite the outcome of every nationals competition in recent years.

* A Texas player is having mother-in-law problems after she found him in the spa with one of the women’s teams.

There are 17 women’s teams also competing for the title at the USTA’s most active rating level, 4.5. Players a notch lower, 4.0, battled here a week before. There’s a higher division, 5.0, but it’s dominated by full-time teaching pros and played at the USTA’s Flushing, N.Y., tennis center.

The good news for us is that Mueller’s ankle is holding up. In fact, he and his partner, Nall, quickly take a service-break edge against Minneapolis’ last doubles team. With five matches in each team contest--two singles, three doubles--it takes three wins to seal a victory.

Just as we’re feeling good about Mueller, there’s a cry of pain from the next court. Lamart, the boxing trainer, has gone down in agony. A groin pull.

Lamart is the team character. He showed up for one match without rackets. But he’s also our most-talented player, capable of 100-mph backhands, and a genuine tough guy. The Pierce College coach once cited his comeback victory in a 1978 doubles match as the crucial moment in that school’s nine-year league winning streak. Twenty years later, he gets up off the mat in his gray boxing shorts, wraps his thigh, and says, “Let’s play.” He can hardly move, but he’s not about to default. The rival team looks flustered.

By the time Lamart and Huyssoon complete a courageous victory, the overall match is tied, 2-2. It all comes down to Chang, who survives a first-set tiebreaker to clinch our opening-round victory over Minneapolis.

Back at the hotel, I flip open Wooden’s book to Page 172: “The Hard Part is Still Ahead.”

SATURDAY

No way Lamart can play. Perry, our 60-year-old former Bruin, will have to fill in. I put him at No. 2 singles, where he should be matched against a player from Richmond, Va., who was cursing himself in a loss the previous day.

The other captain has flip-flopped his singles players, though, worried about our powerful left-hander, Sallin, who’s not even playing singles today. The result? Our best player, Chang, gets their weaker player. And Perry has to play their best, a much younger man. Both contests will be mismatches.

This match will come down to the doubles, which take three agonizing hours.

Mueller’s ankle again holds up, but he starts cramping. Like Lamart the previous day, Mueller takes an injury timeout, then keeps playing. He and Nall go the limit, to a third-set tiebreaker, and pull out a victory.

Our No. 1 doubles team of Coss and Beharry, undefeated all season, has three match points to virtually cinch a spot in the semifinals for our team. But their opponents retrieve an overhead smash and later benefit from a ruling--an umpire calls a foot fault against them just as Coss hits a stinging cross-court return. The Richmond team gets a second serve. That one, they win.

We congratulate Richmond for a nail-biting 3-2 victory.

We have a quick meeting to ponder our afternoon challenge. We can still make the semifinals if we beat New York--and Richmond loses.

The battle of the coasts is a war, three hours of agony that ends with our hopes riding on the doubles team of Huyssoon and . . . Lamart.

He’s forced back in because Mueller now can’t play--he’s still cramping. Though Seppo tapes him like a mummy, Lamart can only walk around the court.

It’s no surprise when New York takes the opening set. But as the teams change sides, Lamart says, “Don’t worry.” Then he lets his strokes, and experience, do the job.

It’s nearly dark when the final stroke hits the net. We’ve beaten New York, 3-2.

Someone asks, “So are we in?”

SUNDAY

We’re watching, not playing.

Richmond is in the finals, having beaten Cleveland to get there. It’s frustrating to think we had match points to beat them, without one of our top players. But we also know that we could not have survived another day. So we root for them in the championship match against the Mountain champion, Denver, which wins the title.

I open Wooden’s book on the flight home. It takes three “random” tries to find Page 53, “Preparation Is the Prize,” where Wooden recalls advice from Spanish philosopher and novelist Cervantes:

“The journey is better than the inn.”

This year, that will have to do.