Going to end of earth to get on map

Tony Bennett is down to earth when he describes the basketball program at Washington State University.

“We have eaten dirt,” says the first-year coach.

Not this season. This has been the winter of resurrection for the Cougars. They are doormats turned dangerous.

They didn’t win the Pacific 10 title, but they had a shot last week. For a share of the prize, they needed to beat UCLA here Thursday night, do the same against USC on Saturday, and have Washington beat UCLA on Saturday in Seattle.

It almost happened. The only failure was the Cougars’ 53-45 loss to the Bruins, meaning that a basketball program mostly moribund for 106 years got to within nine points of hoop heaven.

This is not a place of great expectations in athletics. Yes, it once had Ryan Leaf, plus Rose Bowl games and minor sports stars. But mostly, Washington State is a major university in a city reachable only by several airplane stops and a dog sled.

Pullman has a population of 27,000, 20,000 of them students. It shares an airport with Moscow, Idaho, and has a climate closer to Chicago’s than California’s. Blue-chip basketball players do not flock here.

Still, two weeks ago, the Cougars were ranked ninth in the country. They had never been that high in a national poll. They are currently ranked 11th, have a 24-6 record and are a sure NCAA tournament team. The guy driving the bus is Bennett, who on Monday was named Pac-10 coach of the year.

He is one of the better stories in college basketball. He is 37 and looks 27. He is a former player at Wisconsin Green Bay, where he set the NCAA career record for three-point shooting percentage that still stands, .497. He played three seasons in the NBA as a backup point guard in Charlotte (1992-95) and was the main assistant at Washington State when the head man stepped down after last season.

The head man stepping down was Dick Bennett, Tony’s father.

Dick Bennett was talked out of retirement in 2003 to come to Pullman. Despite three losing seasons here, he built a foundation. Cougars fans saw progress in Bennett’s seasons of 13-16, 12-16 and 11-17.

“He took the bullet for this program,” Tony says.

Cougars fans knew Dick Bennett had coached Wisconsin Green Bay and the University of Wisconsin to NCAA berths, and Wisconsin to the Final Four in 2000. Even better, they saw results. He beat UCLA at Pauley Pavilion his first season, the first time the Cougars had ever beaten the Bruins in Los Angeles.

They also knew, despite protests to the contrary and Athletic Director Jim Sterk’s public statements that there had been “no prenuptial agreement,” that Dick Bennett had a wish. Were Tony to come along and show his own coaching skills, might he not get an extra look when Dick stepped down?

“This has been a little misunderstood from the start,” Tony says. “When he took the job here, he encouraged me to stay where I was, as an assistant at Wisconsin. He said that [Coach] Bo Ryan had a good thing going there.”

But the family pull was too strong. Tony had been a star player for his father at Green Bay and an assistant to him at Wisconsin.

“I just decided that there weren’t going to be any better chances to spend time with my dad at this stage of his life, him nearing 60, with us doing something we both love,” he says.

That turned out to be a sound decision for all concerned. Tony Bennett’s team will enter the Pacific Life Pac-10 tournament at Staples Center seeded No. 2, playing Thursday’s 8:30 finale against the winner of Wednesday night’s Washington-Arizona State game.

Dick Bennett won’t be there. He will watch on TV at home in Pullman. “I cannot believe how nervous I get,” he says. “It is much worse, watching [Tony] coach, than it was coaching myself.”

Dick Bennett, now 62, sat 25 rows above the court at home games this season, putting distance between him, the bench and the officials.

Tony smiles at his father’s intensity.

“One game this year, he stayed home,” Tony says. “He had some sort of run-in with a fan and was unhappy with himself. So he put himself on a one-game suspension.”

Dick Bennett also stayed home Saturday for Washington State’s regular-season finale against USC.

“I just can’t be there today,” he said, just hours before the game. “I don’t have a good feeling. It’s kind of foreboding.” This time, father didn’t know best. In a double-overtime thriller, Washington State beat USC, 88-86.

The Bennetts’ coaching philosophies are similar, but Tony is not Dick’s clone. Both stress defense, but Tony has taken it another step by going strictly man to man with weak-side help. The first half of Thursday’s UCLA-Washington State game, with Ben Howland’s attacking defense against Bennett’s double-and-help schemes, was textbook basketball.

Dick Bennett’s intensity was well-known.

“One thing I learned from him,” Tony says, “is when he lost it a bit with a player, he would come back the next day and, in front of all the other players, say he was wrong and he was sorry. He always had enough humility to say he screwed up.”

Tony Bennett’s poise and maturity have been impressive.

“As a father, you love to see that,” Dick says. “He never points fingers, never blames.”

It has been a season of moments for father and son.

“The Gonzaga game, that was when we kind of knew,” Dick says of the Cougars’ 77-67 victory over the Bulldogs on Dec. 5 at Pullman.

“We had started off 7-0, but then we played a bad game and lost to Utah, and we weren’t sure this wasn’t just going to be the same old, same old. But then we beat Gonzaga [then ranked 18th] and it was a major breakthrough. I remember Tony walking off and catching my eye. We connected. It was a special moment.”

The Bennett-to-Bennett transition at Washington State is nearly complete. In September, Dick and his wife, Ann, will move back to Wisconsin, the state where he worked for 35 of his 38 coaching years.

Next season, Tony Bennett will go it alone in Pullman, with wife Laurel and two children. That’s assuming another program doesn’t steal him. He is, after all, among the favorites to be named national coach of the year.

He says Pullman “is like Mayberry, in all sorts of good ways,” and cites the small-town charm and “great parks and great weather in summer and fall.”

But he also has never said that he is certain he will be in Pullman next season.

Washington State couldn’t have been clearer on its feeling for the Bennetts.

Before Thursday night’s game, Dick and Ann Bennett were called to center court and they were given honorary alumni status.

It was a love-in. The red-shirted fans reacted with a standing ovation. The Cougars players, most of whom had played for Dick, stood and joined in the applause. The ceremony went on for more than five minutes.

After Dick Bennett had gone down the line of players, shaking each hand, he headed to his 25th-row seat. He was intercepted by his son, who put his arm around his father’s shoulder.

“I just told him,” Tony says, “that he built this.”

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.