Role Call

Michael Holton was never Michael Jordan--he just had to guard him in practice.

Holton wasn’t the star of the 1980 UCLA Final Four team--he was only the high school scoring machine Larry Brown turned into a point guard and told to lead the way.

Holton didn’t get Jim Harrick fired in 1996--but only seven months after Harrick added him to the staff, he was the only assistant coach the UCLA administration publicly named as a central witness in the inquiry.

Holton isn’t the brand name on this Bruin basketball coaching staff--he just is the assistant who ended up at the hospital last spring with the family of the program’s most important player, point guard Baron Davis.

“While Baron was in surgery, Michael stayed for, like, two hours,” said Davis’ older sister, Lisa Davis, of Baron’s reconstructive knee surgery. “He stayed out there with my grandmother and myself, just talking to us. I thought that was really, really great. So did my grandmother.

“I think he’s a good father figure. And the guys need that, they need that badly.”

Maybe they need it now more than ever at UCLA, which, after consecutive strong recruiting seasons--with Holton as the recruiting coordinator and Jim Saia as the No. 2 assistant--has a roster consisting almost completely of blue-chip freshmen and sophomores.

And as UCLA attempts to move away from the controversies of the last two seasons, Holton is being pointed to as a calm, experienced and thoughtful mainstay.

“Mike’s really classy,” said Pepperdine Coach Lorenzo Romar, whose recommendation upon leaving the UCLA staff led to Holton’s hiring by Harrick.

“He didn’t make the NBA because he had Michael Jordan talent. He made it because he was talented but also a very smart basketball player. UCLA went to the championship game when he was a freshman--and he played the point when he was a two-guard. He always was a stable force with the ball.”

Stable force? Besides having NBA and Final Four playing experience, Holton, 37, also is the only married member of the Bruin coaching staff, the only one with children, and the only one who didn’t attend San Francisco’s Drake High in the late 1970s or early ‘80s.

“It’s really important for the staff to have that balance--him being a family man,” Lisa Davis said. “Just for these ballplayers to know that you need to go home to your wife and your kids and be a family person, have really good values. . . .

“I think they should give him a lot more responsibilities. Because he’s been through it, he understands it, he knows the good, the highs, the lows, all those things. Nobody really knows the ins and outs unless you’ve actually been there, seen it, done it.”

Holton has seen it, he has done it, he has been burned by it. He has made NBA money, made Larry Brown proud, and made a lot of trouble for himself.

And, most important in a sport and a program that has had more than its share of problems, made his way out of it.

Holton has never hidden his past, a brief problem with substance abuse that got him kicked out of the CBA near the end of his playing days.

From leaving UCLA with expectations of a long NBA career, to the battle for a roster spot, to the trips to the CBA, to his fall into frustration and flunking a random CBA drug test, Holton’s life after UCLA was typical of the journeyman’s odyssey in pro basketball, he says, and at times was terrifying.

“I chased this game,” Holton said. “I played for four teams in six years. I was a third-round draft pick [in 1983 by the Golden State Warriors] who didn’t make it. . . .

“I did the CBA and played a year and came back and made it [in the NBA] and started 59 games for the Phoenix Suns, thought I was on my way, thought I was going to have a 10- or 12-year career, be rich and famous and never work.” Pause. “And got cut again the next year.”

Then Holton starts rattling off his stops, like destinations on a late-night train ride: “Back to the CBA, traded in the CBA, picked up on the CBA all-star night after the game by Jerry Krause and the Bulls, signed to a 10-day [contract], a second 10-day. . . .

“It was Jordan’s second year [late in the season], he comes back from the broken foot. I was guarding him every day in practice, so you’re trying to turn 10 days into 20 days and you’re guarding a hungry Jordan.”

Holton also had stints in Portland, where he was part of a guard rotation with Clyde Drexler and Terry Porter, and finally with Charlotte, from 1988-1990. In training camp his second season there, Holton began experiencing numbness in his back, needed surgery, and was waived at the end of the 1989-90 season.

Then, with his back still hurting, it was back to the CBA, and desolation.

“A lot of his teammates were into lifestyles which they shouldn’t be in, and chumming with them, he kind of got caught up in that fast track,” said George Terzian, who was Holton’s coach at Pasadena High.

“That was all brought on by frustration, and being in the NBA at a time when everything was ‘hang loose.’ He got caught up in that lifestyle. Thank God he got out of it quickly.”

Holton, who underwent counseling for the problem at the time and made it back to the CBA for a final, clean season in 1991-92, says his struggles with his career weakened him.

“Whenever you make mistakes, it’s humiliating. But I’ve always believed that there’s life after mistakes,” Holton said. “I learned there’s appropriate and there’s inappropriate ways to deal with feelings and experiences.

“Me, I chose some inappropriate ways. And what I’ve learned is to accept that things aren’t always going to go right, that all your dreams aren’t always going to come true.”

It surely wasn’t his dream to be a salesman, but, after retiring from basketball, that’s the job Holton got, selling clothes for L.A.’s Cross Colours.

Then, Holton was drawn back to basketball. If he couldn’t play anymore, he wondered if he could coach. He had always been a thinker and a leader as a player, wouldn’t coaching be natural?

So he took classes at UCLA, finished up work on his degree, and was advised by Romar to seek out Terzian, who by then was coaching at Pasadena City College.

Terzian gave him his first assistant coaching job before the 1993-94 season.

“I knew I wouldn’t keep him,” said the now-retired Terzian, who saw Holton move on after one season. “He was terrific. He was such a great recruiter--he has such great charisma.”

After one-year stints at Portland and Oregon State--he landed high-quality players for both schools--suddenly, when Romar left to take over the Pepperdine program, Harrick had a big opening and everybody was telling him to hire Holton.

For the man involved, the return to UCLA stirred memories of a teenager who’d thought he was going to tear up college basketball almost 20 years earlier.

“I’m 18 years old, a CIF co-player of the year, high school All-American and Larry Brown’s telling me to run the team, play defense and pass the ball,” Holton said of his freshman season. “I looked at him and kind of said, ‘And on the offensive end?’

“He said the reason we’re having a conversation about my role is because he believed in me. And that he needed me to do these things to help our team. That relationship helped me out a lot--to respect coaching. And a lot of the character that I’ve developed in life has been a result of coaching.

“I think I’ve always hoped to have that type of impact on others.”

Typically, his coaching start in Westwood was not without its testing times. He was, after all, hired in the tense aftermath of the Bruins’ first-round NCAA defeat by Princeton.

In November came the nuclear explosion: Harrick was fired for filing a false expense report on a recruiting meal, lying about it, and, according to UCLA investigators, asking Holton to lie about it too.

Holton, according to UCLA’s report on the matter, at first misled administrators to cover for Harrick, then the next day told them the truth and about Harrick’s request that he lie.

“It was awkward for everybody in the UCLA family,” Holton said. “Loyalty takes you to strange places. But it was important for me to step back and look at what my principles are. . . . You never know when a situation’s going to come up that’s going to require you to stand up at the plate.”

Immediately after that, with Steve Lavin moving up to the interim head coaching spot amid the tumult, Holton’s first assignment was to land Davis, the nation’s top prep point guard. It was a whirlwind.

Romar, watching from only miles away, empathized with the new assistant.

“I thought, ‘Man, what a tough thing to walk into,’ ” Romar said. “He didn’t ask for all that. But everybody came out OK, and now that’s a thing of the past. . . . Their future looks good, and I guarantee you, he learned a lot from that whole incident. He survived it.”

Lavin and his assistants were given permanent jobs, and Davis signed. Later, more big-name recruits signed on, including wingman JaRon Rush, who was Holton’s primary assignment for the 1997-98 recruiting period.

But the chaos continued.

A year later, center Jelani McCoy flunked repeated drug tests, which eventually led to his forced resignation from the team.

“I felt in coaching my last 10 years, you not only had all these normal problems, academics and all that, but you were battling abuse,” Terzian said. “Everything you’re doing to build a kid up is being torn down over the weekends.

“Michael, because he’s experienced some of this, saw what a dead end it was and [how] it can keep you from reaching your full potential. He’s able to pass it on.”

Said Lavin, “Michael Holton has been an integral part of our coaching staff and team’s success.”

For now, it’s hard for Holton and Lavin and the other assistants to temper their enthusiasm for the coming season. If Davis is fit and the freshmen--led by Rush and big men Dan Gadzuric and Jerome Moiso--can produce immediately, UCLA is set up for a good season.

For the first time in this staff’s tenure, the roster is made up of players recruited by Lavin, Holton and Saia, and the credit or blame will be completely theirs.

“I don’t know if it gets any better than this for a coach,” said Holton, who added that the ultra-hands-on Lavin has told his assistants they all could have more responsibilities this season. “It’s a young, talented roster that you’ve recruited, and you’re putting them together as a unit.

“Chemistry is not predictable. The team could come together the first week, be committed and bond. Or it could take longer.”

Holton paused a moment and gave a mini-shrug.

“There’s a myriad of things that can happen,” he said. “As we’ve seen.”