Floyd Has Special Bond With Team Manager

Tim Floyd arranged for Rob Brooks to receive a college scholarship, meet an NBA general manager and attend a Laker game.

Just a few appreciative gestures from the USC coach to his head team manager?

Hardly. All these acts of kindness occurred several years ago, when Floyd coached in the NBA and Brooks was a high school student in Orange County.

Floyd had been inspired by a television story he saw about Brooks playing basketball at Los Alamitos High with a prosthesis attached to his partially formed right leg.

“He wrote me a letter saying he liked the way I hustled and the way that I took charges and played the game,” Brooks recalled. “He said if he could help me out at any point, he would love to and just give him a call.”

So Brooks called, and Floyd arranged for the teenager to meet Floyd’s Chicago Bulls a few months later at their Marina del Rey hotel. Brooks attended a film session, had lunch with Floyd and rode the team bus to Staples Center for the Bulls’ game against the Lakers. He sat next to then-Chicago General Manager Jerry Krause.

Floyd later convinced Louisiana State Coach John Brady to offer Brooks a scholarship as a team manager, but Brooks decided to stay closer to home and attend USC on a scholarship under its “Swim With Mike” program for physically disabled athletes.

Brooks served as a team manager under Trojan coaches Henry Bibby and Jim Saia but never lost touch with Floyd, calling him every few months. When Brooks learned halfway through his sophomore year that Floyd would take over the USC program, it was as if he had won the lottery.

At Floyd’s introductory news conference, Brooks said, “we just kind of looked at each other like, ‘Is this really happening?’ It was real bizarre. To think that that happened, it just gives me the chills sometimes. Out of all the colleges he could have gone to ... and he came to SC, it was just unbelievable.”

Floyd has been an ideal mentor for Brooks, a junior sociology major who has known since childhood that he wanted to coach basketball at the college or pro level.

“The office and the gym and whenever I can hear the coaches on road trips, that’s my classroom,” said Brooks, whose father, Steve, was a longtime coach at Los Alamitos. “What [Floyd] teaches me and what he shows me and the people I meet and have met already just because of him ... that’s everything to me. He’s been like a second father to me.”