Big man’s the same but the campus is different

ST. LOUIS -- The sweater is a different color, but the person inside it, working the sidelines, is the same.

Rick Majerus is back. Not Michael Jordan-esque back. No fireworks and brass bands yet. Just back.

He is in his first season as basketball coach at St. Louis University, a program traditionally more crop than cream. In a city whose highest-profile company uses large, muscular horses to brand its product, the Billikens’ basketball team is more Clydesdale than thoroughbred.

The Billikens have fielded a team since 1915 and have been in the NCAA tournament six times. The best they have done is four second-round losses. Their most recent trip was 2000, when they lost in the first round.

To Utah.

Coached by Majerus.

Yet, St. Louis is in his comfort zone, and his team looks remarkably similar to his early Utah teams as he built a program that went to 10 NCAA tournaments in his 12 full seasons there and lost in the 1998 championship game.

The Billikens are already getting better, as demonstrated Wednesday night.

They had lost to George Washington on Jan. 10, an embarrassing 49-20 setback that established a scoring low in Division I basketball since the advent of the shot clock in 1985-86.

“They didn’t hold us to 20,” Majerus says. “We held us to 20.”

This time, the Billikens won, 63-38.

That made them 5-5 in the 14-team Atlantic 10 Conference, 14-10 overall. Actually, 11-5 and 20-10 are still possible, and anything close to that might mark Majerus’ best coaching job anywhere.

Majerus was last seen officially in Los Angeles on Dec. 21, 2004, walking out a side door at USC’s Heritage Hall. Six days before that, he had taken the Trojans coaching job. But he changed his mind and keynoted the farewell news conference with the memorable: “I don’t want to have a Rick Majerus memorial game.”

It remains a strange twist for Southern California basketball fans.

He had been an enlightened choice -- consistently leading teams to 20-win seasons and top-10 rankings at Utah. For years, he had talked about getting to California, ideally to the Pacific 10 Conference. “Recruiting kids to places like UCLA and USC,” he says, “is like inviting an alcoholic to a New Year’s Eve party.”

USC did fine. It quickly hired Tim Floyd, opened the Galen Center and is now growing a program that was, for years, merely an afterthought to football.

So why did Majerus walk away from USC?

Turns out, this was mostly about a woman.

Her name is Alyce, she weighs less than 100 pounds and has beaten cancer twice.

Now 81, Alyce Majerus had begun her second battle with cancer about 14 months before that day her son walked out of Heritage Hall. When he did, everything pointed to his health being the issue, when, more accurately, it was the health of his mother.

“You only have one biological father and one biological mother,” Majerus says.

His father, Raymond, died of a heart attack in 1987. In his time, he was a high-ranking union official. Raymond and Alyce Majerus moved the family, Rick and two sisters, to Milwaukee when Rick was 7.

Alyce Majerus still lives there and sleeps in one or another of her late husband’s sweaters.

“A long time after my dad died,” Majerus says, “the mailman left a note for my mom, inviting her to a fish fry. I thought she was going out, get a gun and hunt the guy down.”

Worries about his health drove him then and drive him now. He remains heavy, his knees are bad, but he still works out every day.

Majerus will coach his next game Sunday, at Massachusetts. It will be his 594th game as a college head coach, and it will also be his 60th birthday.

Today, he carries an ever-increasing knowledge that he left USC for the right reasons.

“I’m the furthest thing in the world from a mama’s boy,” he says. “But this time was different.”

He says that when his mother, in her early 60s, got breast cancer, he left coaching for a couple of weeks to care for her.

“I thought I was such a hero,” he says.

The USC job scared his mother. She had small-cell cancer, a strain her doctors were saying offered about a 4% chance of lengthy survival. To endure what she thought was inevitable, with her only son two time zones away, was frightening for Alyce Majerus.

“It freaked her out,” Majerus says.

After he stepped down at Utah 20 games into the 2003-04 season, and after his short employment tenure with USC, Majerus worked as a commentator for ESPN. For one of his first games, he showed up with 12 pages of notes on the teams, and a young producer told him, “You don’t have to win the game, just report it.”

Then, last spring, after three years away from the sidelines, Majerus got the call from St. Louis. After due consideration, he concluded it was time to come back. More so, St. Louis had what was similar to a perfect real estate deal. Location. Location. Location.

“I’m five, six hours away by car,” he says. “At Christmas this year, it snowed and my flight got canceled. So I just got in the car and drove through the snow. She likes to know I can do that.”

He said that just being there counts most.

“Going to Mass with her on Easter Sunday, that’s like her Super Bowl,” he says.

Or just going to the grocery store, where she can be in her domain and make it his.

“She collects coupons,” Majerus says. “I can give her anything she wants, but she collects coupons. We’re at the grocery store and she has her coupons and we are standing in the coupon line and I don’t want to. So I suggest we just go in the other line and pay cash.

“And she says to me, ‘Aren’t you the big shot.’ So we stay in the coupon line.”

Alyce Majerus gets to the store on her own. She still drives, although not on freeways. She is also, her son reports, one of those who made the 4% category.

In St. Louis, Majerus lives in a suite in a hotel where he can find five restaurants and six movie theaters without going outside.

He is just starting to figure out how to make an impact in a city that dotes on the Cardinals, is fiercely loyal to the Rams, has good tradition with the hockey Blues and even has large pockets of fans rooting for Illinois and Missouri football and basketball.

His team has no natural rivals in the conference. Most of the teams are a time zone away in the East, and games against the likes of Charlotte, Fordham and Rhode Island stir little passion.

But a new 11,000-seat arena on campus will open next season. And Majerus is excited about his first crop of recruits.

Majerus remains refreshingly candid and unfettered by the bounds of political correctness. He gets much of that from his days as an assistant to the quirky and legendary Al McGuire, who won an NCAA title at Marquette in 1977 when Majerus was one of his assistants.

Majerus still says things such as, “Al used to tell me, never buy a boat, but always have a friend who owns one.”

Several weeks ago, Majerus went to a rally for Hillary Clinton and was approached by a local TV reporter, who asked his opinion on abortion and stem cell research. Majerus told him he was pro-choice and in favor of stem cell research.

The reporter called the archbishop of St. Louis, Father Raymond Burke, who fired back that somebody representing a Catholic school such as St. Louis should not hold those beliefs, and surely shouldn’t say them in public.

In Catholic-heavy St. Louis, a storm had blown in.

Majerus shrugged it off, claiming his rights to free speech. The archbishop asked the school to take disciplinary action. The school, run by Jesuits and not answerable to Burke, has taken none, to date.

So now, St. Louis has Majerus and Majerus has St. Louis.

He will prowl the sidelines, his black sweater replacing the old Utah white with red trim. He will coax out more wins than they’re used to here, start schooling the local press in McGuire-isms and say something every couple of months that will get him in trouble.

Fireworks and brass bands will be following soon. He’s back.

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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.