Few and Far Between

SPOKANE, Wash. -- The way some people tell it, Gonzaga Coach Mark Few turned down the Washington Huskies’ job offer, then turned around and turned them in for recruiting violations.

There’s a little more to the story, but it makes for a pretty lively rivalry as the teams meet tonight on Gonzaga’s campus.

This is the case of a 4,700-student Jesuit school from the West Coast Conference outdoing the state’s two Pacific 10 universities. Last season, the Zags beat Washington by 20 points and Washington State by 23 in consecutive December games.

Little wonder that after Gonzaga’s rise to No. 6 in the nation ended with a thud in a first-round NCAA tournament loss, Washington Athletic Director Barbara Hedges tried to hire Few to replace Bob Bender.

Few turned Washington down -- along with the money and glamour of the Pac-10 -- to stay at Gonzaga, where the beloved Zags play in a 4,000-seat gym.

“It really causes you to be introspective,” Few said. “You have to look deep into your soul, what you want out of life. That’s not that fun. I’d rather cruise along in superficial waters, fishing, playing with my kids and coaching my team.

“To me, it came down to more personal things, like ‘OK, you’ve got to go look Cory [Violette] and Blake [Stepp] in the eye and tell them you’re leaving.’ ”

Instead, he stayed, and the job of trying to revive a Washington program that has finished in the bottom half of the conference 10 of the last 15 years fell to Lorenzo Romar, the onetime Husky guard and former UCLA assistant who most recently coached at Pepperdine and Saint Louis.

It hasn’t been a pretty start. Romar’s team is 0-2 after losses to Montana State and Nevada Las Vegas. (No. 20 Gonzaga is 2-2, but the losses were to No. 19 Indiana and No. 15 Kentucky.)

Romar hadn’t even coached his first practice before trouble hit.

Assistant coach Cameron Dollar, the former Bruin point guard, was caught breaking NCAA rules in a rash of overzealous recruiting, mostly consisting of improper contacts and phone calls with Washington high school players who had not yet completed their junior years. Some say Dollar was fortunate he wasn’t fired. Instead, he served a one-month suspension, was docked more than $13,000 in salary and cannot recruit off-campus until July 1.

“I made poor decisions and showed poor judgment,” a contrite Dollar said at the October news conference announcing Washington’s self-imposed penalties. “Bottom line, I blew it.”

He missed the first month of practice before returning from his suspension.

“It definitely was a setback for us,” Romar said. “Initially, I think he was embarrassed, disappointed in himself. He’s a fighter. He’s always been a fighter.”

Gonzaga’s role in the saga is that the school was listed along with Washington State and Eastern Washington in published reports as the ones that turned in Washington to the NCAA.

Not exactly, Few says.

“It gets misconstrued a little bit,” he said. “You don’t turn anybody in. If [NCAA investigators] come to your campus, you answer some questions. I didn’t really have any answers to lead them to anything. I think most of the damage was found by them going to Washington to ask questions, look at phone records, and by asking specific recruits questions. People painted it as all the schools in the eastern part of the state [reporting Washington to the NCAA].”

Romar speaks delicately about the matter, saying he has known Few a long time and little more than that.

Few acknowledges the situation probably has caused some strain the coaches will feel when they shake hands tonight.

“I’m sure it has,” Few said. “We just have to work through it. I certainly don’t look at him in a different light.

“Lorenzo will do a great job for them. He’s a great recruiter and a hard worker.”

It will take hard work to get the Washington program back to where it was in the final years under Coach Marv Harshman, whose 1984 and ’85 teams led by Detlef Schrempf tied for the Pac-10 title and reached the NCAA tournament. (Years earlier, Washington reached the Final Four in 1953, and in a Hollywood fantasy, won the NCAA title in the 1997 film “The Sixth Man.”)

Most people agree that the Huskies seemed on the brink of something big under Bender in 1998, when only a last-second basket by Connecticut’s Richard Hamilton off an offensive rebound kept 11th-seeded Washington from reaching the NCAA tournament’s Elite Eight.

Washington never seemed to recover, reaching the tournament again the next season with a team led by Todd MacCulloch, only to be upset in the first round by Miami of Ohio.

Three losing seasons later, Bender was gone.

Doug Wrenn, a junior gunner who had four 30-point games for the Huskies last season after transferring back to his home state from Connecticut, says Hamilton still taunts him about what that shot did to the Husky program.

“He says, ‘My shot caused your demise. You could have been going to the Elite Eight,’ ” said Wrenn, still in high school at the time. “But we’re going to be back. We’re going to get back to where we were.”

The early omens for this season aren’t good, not with Romar benching Wrenn for nearly the final four minutes of a three-point loss to Montana State for what he called “family business,” apparently a reference to Wrenn not displaying the leadership Romar wanted.

Romar is focused on rebuilding through recruiting, and that means doing a better job with players from the state who have been going elsewhere, a talent drain that dates at least to the days of Jason Terry and Michael Dickerson signing with Arizona.

Oregon’s Luke Ridnour also is from Washington, and Dan Dickau -- Gonzaga’s star last season -- started his career as a Husky before transferring. Yet another talented former Husky guard, Erroll Knight, will play for Gonzaga next season after sitting out under NCAA transfer rules this season.

Romar believes the flow of good players to other programs already has been slowed -- and unlike Richard Hamilton, he likes to find the positive side of that loss to Connecticut.

“The context I use that shot in is, ‘Don’t tell me we can’t get to the Final Four. If Rip Hamilton doesn’t tip that shot in, we’d have been in the final eight,’ ” Romar said.

Few is hardly one to say any program can’t get to the Sweet Sixteen, Elite Eight or even beyond. After all, look at Gonzaga.

He did, which is why he is in Spokane instead of Seattle.

“[Washington] is a heck of a school and program, resource-wise, and so is the city, recruiting-wise,” said Few, whose credentials include an 81-20 record and the most victories in his first three seasons by a Division I coach.

“But where we are right now, I thought it would take three or four years [at Washington] to get to where we are here.”

If he eventually leaves, it might be because of something like his frustration with the effect of playing in the West Coast Conference on Gonzaga’s RPI rating. (His rant last season about the detrimental effect of the WCC tournament on NCAA seeding drew a response: After a format change, the league’s top two teams now waltz into the semifinals on byes, needing only two victories for an automatic NCAA bid.)

Or maybe it will be the lure of more money, though that didn’t get him last year when Washington might have doubled his salary.

“We’re all competitive. We all want to compete for the national championship,” Few said. “And I’m not sure we can’t do that here with the type of guys we have and the guys we have coming in here. I’m just not convinced there’s better situations, or many better situations out there, than this.

“You never know until the situation comes up. You try to be honest with recruits. You never say never. To me, it comes down to having an opportunity to win a national championship. And I believe we can compete for one up here.”