Kiffin joins long line of successors to L.A. coaching icons

So another coaching icon has skipped town. It happens.

Southern California has had its share of coaching legends and has seen them move into retirement, onto other teams or just get worn out or fired. Every time it happens the question comes up: Will anyone ever be able to replace Walter Alston’s steady hand, John Wooden’s championship halo, Pat Riley’s winning style or Barry Melrose’s mullet?

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FOR THE RECORD:
Coaching legacies: A graphic accompanying an article in Friday’s Sports section on how individuals performed after succeeding coaching legends in Southern California listed former basketball coach John Wooden’s career record at UCLA as 316-68. Wooden’s record at UCLA was 620-147. —

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(Answer: Yeah -- Tom Lasorda. No -- Gene Bartow. Kind of -- Mike Dunleavy. Are you kidding? -- Larry Robinson.)

Actually, the local winning percentage with successors is pretty good, though there’s no pattern. Company guys have worked, but so have outsiders. Brash guys have succeeded, but so have quiet guys. Alston, who was quiet, was replaced by Lasorda, who had played for Alston and was loud. Lasorda flourished and was replaced by Bill Russell, who had played for Lasorda and was quiet. He lasted 2 1/2 seasons.

Whether Lane Kiffin will be able to carve out his own niche after Pete Carroll at USC remains to be seen, but if anyone knows what he can expect it’s John Robinson. Like Kiffin, Robinson coached under a gray-haired USC icon, John McKay, who had multiple national championships and Heisman Trophy winners. Like Kiffin, Robinson served as the Trojans’ offensive coordinator and left to take a job with the Oakland Raiders, though, in Robinson’s day, that wasn’t considered a desperate cry for help. Like Kiffin, Robinson took over a USC team coming off a mediocre (8-4) season in 1975.

In 1976, eager to make his mark, Robinson went right out and led his team to a 46-25 loss to Missouri.

“The story in The Times the next day said something like ‘How can one man ruin a great program in one game?’ ” Robinson, 74, said. “I read that and I thought, ‘OK, it’s yours now, baby.’ ”

Robinson went on to ruin the Trojans to 11 straight wins, including a victory over Michigan in the Rose Bowl, his team outscoring opponents, 361-93, in those 11 games. In his first, seven-year stint at USC -- there was a second from 1993 to 1997 -- he won his own national championship and produced his own Heisman Trophy winners.

“Losing that first game brought the focus on me,” he said. “It wasn’t John McKay’s team anymore. It was mine. And that team had talent [Ricky Bell, Vince Evans] and I believed in the system we ran. I didn’t have to come in and do anything radical. We quietly made a few changes as I’m sure Lane will do. I just think it’s important to downplay the changes.”

Not if you’re Lasorda. It’s easy to forget, given his own Hall of Fame managing career, that at one time Lasorda was a relative unknown taking over for a future Hall of Famer in Alston.

“When I first got the job, a guy from the paper comes up to me and says ‘You’re replacing a great manager, you’re replacing a man who won a lot of games, that’s a lot of pressure.’ I said ‘I’m not worried about replacing him, I’m worried about the guy that’s going to have to replace me,’ ” Lasorda said. “If you’re thinking about the guy you’re replacing, that makes you inferior. You got to have the attitude that you think yourself superior. You got to let everyone know that you don’t care about who you’re replacing, it’s about what you are going to do.”

Of course, helping Lasorda, who led the Dodgers to the 1977 National League pennant his first season, was the fact that he won right away. Of course, so did Mike Dunleavy with the Lakers and Ray Malavasi with the Rams. Dunleavy got to the NBA Finals his first season; Malavasi, who had replaced Chuck Knox, took the L.A. Rams to their only Super Bowl in his second. But Malavasi was let go after his fourth season, remembered as much for what he didn’t say -- once falling asleep and snoring through a live radio interview -- as what he did. He died in 1987, his last coaching job with an Australian American rules football team called the Kookaburas.

Dunleavy left after his second season with the Lakers, one that started with Magic Johnson’s HIV announcement and ended with a first-round playoff series loss to Portland.

Probably what bodes best for Kiffin is that he’s signing on to coach football at USC and not basketball at UCLA. When it comes to replacing coaching legends, John Wooden stands as an 80,000-pound, carbo-loading gorilla, albeit one that never uses curse words. Wooden retired immediately after his 10th NCAA title and has cast a shadow over the UCLA program ever since. Most infamously was the fate of his immediate successor, Gene Bartow, who led UCLA to the Final Four his first season and was congratulated with death threats, having lost in the semifinals to eventual champion Indiana.

Bartow coached one more season in Westwood, getting the Bruins to the Sweet 16 and then left, convinced that his or anyone else’s best would never be good enough.

Bartow, who went on to great success at Alabama Birmingham and would eventually be inducted into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame, still felt that way nearly 20 years later. Asked about UCLA replacing Steve Lavin with Ben Howland in 2003, Bartow said: “Don’t ever doubt. [Ben’s] not following Steve Lavin. He’s following Coach Wooden.”

Gary Cunningham, who played and coached under Wooden, followed Bartow and did two seasons of his own, going 50-8 for a .862 winning percentage that is actually higher than Wooden’s. When he left after his second season, it led to speculation that he couldn’t handle the heft of Wooden’s shadow either.

“That’s a myth, I retired because I was more interested in administration,” said Cunningham, who recently retired as athletic director at UC Santa Barbara.

“I knew what the program was about and I was not intimidated by it. I think if there is pressure, it comes from the mind-set of the individual who follows Coach Wooden. A coach should never take a job that he doesn’t feel he can sustain something or add to a school’s tradition.”

So there it is. All Lane Kiffin has to do to be successful is be real loud. Or quiet. Win right away. Or lose. Just make sure you don’t end up coaching hoops at UCLA and, most of all, says Robinson, relax.

“I think USC fans are so loyal to the program and they’ll be patient,” he said. “This is a lifestyle for them. They’ll say, ‘Hey, we’re with you whoever you are.’ They’re loyal and they’re going to be willing to go along with you.

“But if you throw two incomplete passes, you’re in trouble.”

It happens.

sports@latimes.com