BIG MAN ON CONTINENT

St. Mary’s Coach Dave Bollwinkel isn’t certain his 7-foot-3, 345-pound center, Brad Millard, is college basketball’s biggest player.

“All I know is that there’s nobody as big as Brad who is as good,” Bollwinkel said.

Take one look at Millard and the “big” is never in doubt. Shake his hand, and he seems to have half of his left over. When he stands next to 7-foot teammate Chris Walls in practice, he makes even Walls look small.

“He was big when he was born--12 pounds 13 ounces,” said Millard’s mother, Diane. “He just kept growing and was always bigger than other kids his age.”

His basketball shoes are size 23 EEEE, prompting Bollwinkel to joke, “When Brad gets a new pair, I take the box home and use it as an extra bedroom.”

But being so big can also bring problems. And that doesn’t just mean trying to find a comfortable seat on an airplane or bumping into shower heads in hotel bathrooms.

Millard has broken his left foot twice and played only five games the last two seasons.

But if he can overcome those injury problems and have a good senior season, his bankroll might be as huge as he is. Every game he plays without an injury moves him closer to being an NBA first-round draft choice.

Pete Newell, the former coach at California and a guru for basketball big men, nicknamed him “Big Continent” when Millard attended one of Newell’s summer camps.

“You’re bigger than ‘Big Country,’ so you have to be a continent,” Newell told him, referring to Bryant “Big Country” Reeves, the Vancouver Grizzlies’ center.

The next season, as a sophomore in 1997, Millard was selected the most valuable player in the West Coast Conference tournament. He averaged 16.3 points and 8.7 rebounds in the tournament and had a career-high 22 points in the Gaels’ championship victory over San Francisco.

In the NCAA tournament, Millard had 16 points, six rebounds, two blocks and two steals against a Wake Forest team led by Tim Duncan, a senior who became the NBA’s top draft choice after that season.

After that game, Randy Pfund, the former Laker coach who was scouting for the Miami Heat, walked up to Bollwinkel and said, “You can tell your big man that his life has changed forever.”

But it didn’t change for the better the next two years.

In warmups before the third game of the 1997-98 season, Millard broke the fifth metatarsal in his left foot. He had surgery to put a screw in the bone, and another operation six months later to graft bone from his hip to the fracture.

Then, in practice before the 1998-99 season, Millard broke the navicular bone in the same foot and had to have more surgery. He sat out 2 1/2 months, but came back to play the final regular-season game and two in the WCC tournament.

“The first time it happened, I thought, ‘OK, I just have to get on with it,’ ” Millard said. “But when I was injured again, I started wondering how many times this is going to keep happening to me with my luck. Am I just going to have to forget basketball and get a 9-to-5 job?”

Injuries aren’t always simply a case of bad luck when it comes to such big players.

“The bottom line is that when a guy as big as Brad jumps up, he comes down with a lot of pressure on his feet,” St. Mary’s trainer Chris Jacobson said. “And those muscles are only so strong.”

Bollwinkel and Jacobson have been working to reduce the odds of another injury.

“We talk a lot about whether he needs to be in certain drills or not, and we tried to do a lot of his conditioning in the fall on the exercise bike and in the pool,” Jacobson said. “It’s a lot better for him to be running in the water than on the hard gym floor.”

Bollwinkel says Millard does about 60% of what the other players do in practice. But his teammates understand the need for the special treatment, the coach said.

Millard, however, is restless about it. “I’d like to be doing more than I am,” he said. “I think Coach is being a little overprotective right now. But I can understand why he’s that way after what has happened to me.”

The approach seems to be working.

In his first game this season, Millard had 18 points, eight rebounds and nine blocks against Colorado in 28 minutes. Heading into a game Saturday night against UC Irvine in the Bren Center, Millard is averaging 16 points, 9.5 rebounds, 5.0 blocks and 22 minutes per game.

“I was really nervous and a little scared in that first game back,” Millard said. “I was really pretty cautious to start off with. I still don’t jump into a crowd of people, and I don’t go for as many loose balls. I don’t think the fear is going to ever totally leave me, but I don’t think about it as much now.”

Millard said his confidence grows with each game.

“It was difficult sitting out almost two seasons, but the coaching staff and my parents have been very supportive,” Millard said.

So has Newell. “He came to my apartment to see me after my first surgery,” Millard said. “He stayed for quite a while that day just to talk, and we’ve developed a friendship. It’s nice to feel he’s on my side.”

Bollwinkel has been playing Millard for about four minutes, then resting him for four. Bollwinkel wants him to be in top shape by the time the Gaels begin the conference season, Jan. 14 at Pepperdine.

“I know that having a decent season would help me a lot in going to the NBA,” Millard said. “My goal is for the team to have a good year, but I do care about what’s going to happen with me.”

Bollwinkel, a former Washington Bullet scout, believes Millard has the potential to be picked in the middle of the first round--maybe higher.

“His strengths are obvious,” Bollwinkel said. “But a lot of people don’t realize he has really soft hands and a good shooting touch. He’s not just a dunker. He can step out and hit a 15-foot jumper. He hit one like that against Colorado, and they were shocked. But the big thing is just how much space he takes up in the middle on defense.”

Cal State Fullerton’s 6-foot guard Kenroy Jarrett said: “It’s unbelievably hard to shoot over the guy. When I saw him warming up, I was in awe of how big he is. Then, in the game, when he put his hands up, it was like there were two brooms in front of the basket.”

Marty Blake, the NBA’s scouting director, said it’s much too early to form an opinion on how high Millard might be drafted.

“The whole trick for Millard will be how well he holds up this season,” Blake said. “He has talent, but he also has that history of physical problems. But we like him.”

Dave Babcock, a Milwaukee Buck scout, watched Millard in a game Tuesday against Cal State Fullerton and was impressed.

“The NBA is always willing to take a gamble on size, and he’s much improved over when I saw him a couple of years ago,” Babcock said. “His body fat must be way down from what it was then, and he’s running the floor better. I haven’t seen any apparent fatigue, and his legs look strong. He’s obviously worked hard to get back to where he is now.”

It’s even further when you compare it to Millard’s days at Seattle Blanchet High.

“We used to say he lumbered down the floor, more than he ran,” said Jerry Carr, Millard’s high school coach. “We’d slow down the offense until Brad got down the floor. He was around 6-11 and 350 pounds then, and he had a lot of baby fat.”

Millard, who has an older brother and two younger sisters, was 6-4 as a freshman in high school, but grew to 7-1 by the time he graduated. His father, Gary, is 6-3 and his mother 5-9. His brother is 6-6. One sister is 6 feet, the other 5-10.

Millard said he had problems with his feet several times in high school, but mostly small stress fractures.

Still, Millard averaged 16.4 points, 10 rebounds and 6.3 blocks as a senior for a team that was 18-9 and finished eighth in the state tournament. But he wasn’t highly recruited, despite his 3.67 grade-point average.

“Several schools said they were interested, but not any of the big schools, no Pac-10s” Millard said. “It got down to St. Mary’s, Portland, Boise State, Montana State and Navy. St. Mary’s was my last visit, and I fell in love with the school. I liked the whole atmosphere here. It’s not like being at a big university where you have 200 or 300 people in a classroom.”

There were reports that Millard might transfer after his successful 1996-97 season, when Ernie Kent, the coach who had recruited Millard to St. Mary’s, left to become head coach at Oregon, but Millard decided to stay with the Gaels.

St. Mary’s is nestled in the hills east of Oakland, and the small Catholic school of 2,200 undergraduates has the look of a retreat. It turned out to be a comfortable setting for a shy young man uneasy about the heads that always seemed to swivel when he walked into a room.

“When he was growing up, he pretty much avoided crowds,” Diane Millard said. “He was a little sensitive about his height.”

Even as a freshman at St. Mary’s, Millard said he was uncomfortable walking through a mall. But now he will sometimes ask his friends to walk a few steps behind, so they can watch people’s reaction when he goes by.

“People can be involved in a serious conversation and they’ll just stop,” Millard said, smiling. “I’m sort of having fun with it now.”

Millard’s parents are pleased.

“He’s the same gentle giant he always has been,” Gary Millard said. “But his confidence in himself has really grown.”