Wiggins Carries Legacy Proudly

It is a curious relationship that Candice Wiggins has with her father. She says they have the same face -- you can see it around the cheeks, the eyes -- and the same small gestures.

But she knows this only through photographs and what people tell her.

Still a teenager, the 5-foot-11 guard will lead top-ranked Stanford against defending national champion Connecticut on Sunday in the Kansas City Regional semifinals of the 2005 NCAA women’s basketball tournament as one of the brightest newcomers in the game. Pacific 10 Conference player of the year. National freshman of the year. On the ballot for the Naismith and Wooden awards.

All of this, she credits to her dad, listing him as her primary inspiration in sports, the person who has most influenced her basketball.

“It’s a legacy,” she says.

Yet she has almost no recollection of the man, knows him as an athlete only through snippets of old television footage.

Alan Wiggins played for the San Diego Padres in the early 1980s, his career a shooting star. He set a team record for stolen bases while helping spark the Padres to the 1984 World Series.

“If not for Alan, we don’t win the championship,” Dick Williams, the manager of that team, once told The Times. “My God, could he play!”

Yet, like a shooting star, he disappeared quickly. The next season, Wiggins failed to show up at the ballpark, ended up in a drug rehabilitation center. Six years later, at 32, he was dead of complications from AIDS.

His youngest daughter, Candice, was only 3. More than a decade later, she says, “he just sort of lives on through me.”

This unusual legacy begins with a widow, Angela Wiggins, who dealt with grief by devoting herself to her three children. A few years after her husband’s death, she took them to a local recreation center to sign up for basketball. Actually, she intended to enroll only her two oldest, Cassandra and Alan Jr.

That irked Candice. It did not matter that, as a first-grader, she was too young. She begged. Finally, Angela relented and lied about Candice’s age to get her on a third-grade team.

“That whole season, she only scored one basket,” Angela recalls. “And they pretty much had to let her score that one.”

Candice smiles at the mention of it. “Yeah, one basket.”

The next year, though still the youngest player, she grew comfortable on court, discovered an inherent quickness that allowed her to steal the ball, dribble around bigger girls, score at will. It got to the point where rec center officials asked whether she might take it a little easier.

“I remember being, like, ‘Wow, this is crazy that everything has changed,’ ” she says. “I had control over the game. I loved it.”

Just like her father. Alan, who briefly passed through the Dodger organization as a young player, broke into the big leagues with the Padres in 1981. Two seasons later, he set a team record with 66 stolen bases. Then, in that pennant-winning season, he improved to 70 steals and scored 106 runs.

Angela recalls, “His intensity ... it was almost crazy the way he could make things happen.”

Watching old highlights of her father’s play, Candice sees an athlete who was “really electric. A lot of energy. Fast.”

Qualities that his kids inherited.

But Angela was not about to let them rely on genetics. As they began to show a talent for basketball, she sometimes got them out of bed at 5 a.m. to practice in the driveway.

“We had to make a certain amount of shots, then we’d get ready and go to school,” Alan Jr. says.

Angela took them on bike rides, leading them up hills.

If any of this sounds extreme, Candice is quick to correct: “It never got to the point where I thought she was pushing too hard. It was, like, ‘She’s not pushing hard enough.’ ”

And it turned out that the Wiggins children had inherited something else from their father. A burning desire to compete. Especially Alan Jr. and Candice, who consistently challenged each other, one on one or in games of H-O-R-S-E.

“One summer, we played chess every day,” Candice recalls. “It always ended up, right when Alan was about to checkmate me or I was about to checkmate him, the other one would throw the pieces everywhere.”

As the youngest, Candice learned to be a little tougher.

“She never liked losing because we’d always rub it in her face,” Alan Jr. says.

That desire made her a star in high school at La Jolla Country Day. Coach Terri Bamford said she was “a dream player,” the type who would score 30 points and walk off the court angry about two missed free throws. The type who demanded perfection of herself but had the mental toughness to remain upbeat. All of which translated into 28 points and 11 rebounds a game during a prep career in which she led her team to two state titles and two second-place finishes.

As a senior in 2004, she was California’s Ms. Basketball and a McDonald’s All-American. By then, Stanford Coach Tara VanDerveer knew all about her. Candice had visited the university for a basketball camp when she was a junior.

“She was with the campers all day, doing drills ... then she played with the counselors at night and dominated the counselors’ game,” VanDerveer says. “So that was the tip-off that this is a special kid.”

Maybe the only surprise was that, barely 18, she acclimated to the college game so quickly. Starting all but one game for the 31-2 Cardinal this season, Candice leads the team with an average of 17.3 points and is second in rebounds at 5.3. In one torrid stretch at midseason, she scored 31 points at Arizona State, 28 at Arizona and 23 against USC. She scored 29 in the Cardinal’s tournament-opening victory over Santa Clara.

VanDerveer calls her “a freshman in a senior’s body.” The coach adds: “And I yell at her like a senior. I told her, ‘You’re not a freshman. Sorry.’ ”

That might have caused resentment on a roster deep with upperclassmen, but teammates say she soothed any hard feelings with a cheery personality -- and results.

“We need Candice on the floor,” senior forward Sebnem Kimyacioglu says. “We all recognize that.”

Once again, her jump shot and dribble are only small parts of what has made her so successful, so quickly.

“There are players who are more skilled, but she’s just so aggressive,” says Coach Kathy Olivier of UCLA, which lost to Stanford twice this season. “You can tell, she comes on the floor and she has a commitment to play hard.”

But basketball is only part of the equation. Now that Candice has commanded the spotlight, she has a chance to fulfill another part of her legacy. Just like Cassandra, who played for and graduated from New York University, and Alan Jr., a sophomore forward at the University of San Francisco, she wants to set the record straight about her father.

Around the Padre clubhouse, Wiggins was known to be smart, if stubborn. Tony Gwynn was a staunch ally -- “To not like Alan Wiggins is to not know Alan Wiggins,” he once said -- but some of his teammates, like some in the media, never quite figured him out.

After arrests on suspicion of possession of marijuana and cocaine, Wiggins was cut loose by the Padres in 1985 and spent 2 1/2 seasons with the Baltimore Orioles. In August 1987, he was involved in a highly publicized scuffle with his manager. Less than a month later, the commissioner’s office suspended him, sources saying he had failed a drug test.

Out of the game, battling drugs and illness, Wiggins busied himself with financial arrangements, selling off real estate and checking on his life-insurance policy. He would leave enough in cash and pension payments to provide for his family. He also made time to spend with his kids.

“I remember things, like him picking me up from kindergarten, hanging out,” Alan Jr. says. “He loved all three of us. He would have done anything for us.”

Candice might have been too young for such memories, but all these years Angela has talked to her about her father. About his drug abuse and death. Also about the good things that never showed up in news accounts.

“I want people to know the kind of person he was,” Candice says, “that he was a good father.... I wish people could see.”

The best way to show them is through basketball. For all her accomplishments this season, all the awards she has received, the excitement of opening the tournament against Santa Clara, she seems most thrilled by something else that her talents have brought.

Letters. Not fan mail but short notes from people who knew her father. They see her on television, then write to tell her stories.

“Good stories,” she says.

It is a curious relationship the girl has with her father.

“I got a letter from somebody who said, ‘I want to tell you that I met your dad and I asked for an autograph and he was the nicest guy ever,’ ” she says. “That’s awesome to hear. That’s what I want.”