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1994-95

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UCLA Makes It 11

By PAUL ATTNER   The Sporting News

Before UCLA left Los Angeles for Seattle, the site of the Final Four, Jim Harrick took the players into Pauley Pavilion.

They had been there hundreds of times before, of course, and what he showed them was not new. But he wanted them to stare one more time at the 10 NCAA national championship banners that hang in the rafters.

Don't worry, be happy, he told them.

And they laughed. Maybe more than anything he did with his coaching schemes, Harrick's handling of this team and the ghosts that have haunted the program for 20 years resulted in an 11th banner.

Harrick did not run from the past, he courted it. His triumph might not be the most memorable in UCLA history, but it is close. Not many of John Wooden's could match this one.

Who would have thought Harrick could beat Arkansas without Tyus Edney? Edney, whose sprained right wrist limited him to the game's first three minutes, had been his team's most valuable player during the tournament. Without him, how could the Bruins handle the ball well enough to beat Arkansas?

Yet UCLA played with poise and got huge games from senior Ed O'Bannon and freshman Toby Bailey. And Cameron Dollar, who replaced Edney, was nearly flawless. This was no fluke, this 89-78 triumph over the defending national champions.

Wooden was there, in the stands Monday night in the Kingdome. But this one belonged to Harrick. He certainly had earned it.

"Getting to UCLA was a lot harder than coaching here," Harrick says. "My wife and I went to high school together (Stonewell Jackson in Charleston, W.Va.), and we got married after we got out of college (Morris Harvey, now called the University of Charleston), and that night we left West Virginia and drove to Los Angeles and knew nobody.

"Twenty-eight years later, you become coach at UCLA. That's one of the great thrills of my life. And the second thrill is doing everything during those years in the same city."

And now a third thrill, the best of them all. Harrick laughs. "People ask, 'Why didn't UCLA win in the past?' I tell them, 'It's not easy to do, to get here.'

"It's a combination of your players and the chemistry and the listening and the understanding and the talent and the injuries and the luck, all those things."

But he could dream. And he did, every year. He wanted to win a national championship.

"It is the dream of any coach and if they say it isn't, they aren't telling the truth," Harrick says. "This is a fulfillment of a lifelong dream. In your professional career, this is the pinnacle of what you do and this certainly is the pinnacle for me."

Harrick is a bulldog of a man. Not particularly smooth or glib, he is a survivor. A lifer. Basketball is his world, nothing else. He is not considered a brilliant tactician, nor a particularly sensational recruiter.

But he knows the intricacies of his profession. He has built a network of contacts, with coaching friends spread across the country.

"Funny how this coaching business is," Oklahoma coach Kelvin Sampson says. "Once you get a tag placed on you, it is hard to shake even if it isn't fair.

"Jim became known as something less than a good coach, and that isn't true at all. His peers know he can do the job. It just has taken a lot longer for everyone else to catch up to that fact."

His peers understood Harrick's plight.

In a poll conducted by a Seattle paper, fellow coaches voted him and Roy Williams of Kansas as the two men they'd most like to see win a national title.

But Harrick hasn't always helped his cause, either. He can be defensive and combative, and until this season, he didn't absorb the pressures associated with the UCLA job in the most graceful fashion.

But once his team developed into a legitimate contender, he seemed to relax and accept his burdens with more ease instead of fighting the demons.

The most telling sign of his maturity was his handling of the Wooden affair.

It is incredibly difficult to coach at a school that once enjoyed enormous success. I mean, if John Wooden could win 10, why can't someone else? Anyone who thinks these expectations don't exist is denying the realities of this strenuous profession.

Gene Bartow, who replaced Wooden, could stand only two years before bolting for Alabama-Birmingham. The coaches who followed, from Gary Cunningham to Larry Brown, who directed the Bruins to their last Final Four, from Larry Farmer to Walt Hazzard, never were completely comfortable.

Do you embrace Wooden or do you acknowledge him but still attempt to distance him from your program? Even Harrick struggled with that problem before arriving at an agreeable solution. He simply brought in the great coach, surrounded him with hugs and linked this team's efforts with the achievements of Wooden's marvelous squads.

The bold stroke of inviting Wooden to Seattle was the most intelligent move of all. After all, he is what UCLA is all about, and his presence did not detract from what Harrick accomplished. It only enhanced the celebration.

And it revealed a confidence level in Harrick that was missing in years past.

"Look, I love John Wooden," Harrick says. "Always have. I consider him a close friend in matters other than basketball."

When Wooden's wife, Nell, spent two months in intensive care before she passed away, Harrick and his wife were among the frequent hospital visitors.

"I could never turn my back on a good friend," he says. "I want him to be around more than he really is. I'm proud of the tradition and certainly not scared of the ghosts.

"I promised myself I would never let anything from the outside bother me. And I learned it from coach Wooden. You listen to too much criticism, it hurts your coaching. You walk through the lobby of our hotel and you think you're King Kong, and you're only really as good as your next game.

"Remember, what UCLA is today is because of John Wooden. I never forget that."

Wooden never told Harrick, but he was planning all along to come to the Final Four. He didn't talk to the team before or after the game.

"I didn't think it would be appropriate," he says. "I would rather stay in the background and not take anything away from the team."

Harrick's players, however, really aren't steeped in UCLA tradition. Most were only a year or two old, at best, when Wooden won his final title.

"I don't know most of the players who played back then," Bailey says. "I mean, we know Kareem and Walton and Walt Hazzard, because he coached here, guys like that. But not a lot of them."

And Marques Johnson, because his son, Kris, is a freshman on this team.

Harrick benefited from watching the soap opera that became UCLA basketball once Wooden retired. First as a local high school coach, then as a Bruins assistant for two years under Cunningham and finally as head coach at Pepperdine, he had a vantage point to learn the good parts - and the bad - of being at UCLA.

"It was kind of like the old New York Yankees," Harrick says. "They don't want them to be successful because they have been in the past. I saw that Gene Bartow went 52-8 and to a Final Four. And he is gone. And Gary Cunningham is 50-8 and no one ever said a negative word about him and he is gone.

"And Larry Brown went to a Final Four (in 1980) and was gone before the end of the season the following year. And why that is, sometimes I don't know what goes on inside a person because sometimes (the job) tears a person apart. And obviously these guys were very, very good coaches."

Harrick knew that when he replaced Hazzard in 1988 - the sixth change since Wooden retired after his title in 1975 - that "I would be dissected like you were a frog in a biology class."

It was all new to him, that kind of intense scrutiny and criticism.

"I've lived a vanilla life," he says: 13 years as a high school coach, six years as a college assistant, nine years of mostly favorable reviews at Pepperdine, where he won five conference championships.

Despite his current claims, he did not deal well with the sudden fame and exposure once he arrived at UCLA. His disappointing teams didn't help either.

Not even Wooden won as many games as Harrick in his first seven years at UCLA - remember, it took Wooden 15 seasons before he captured his first national title - but these Bruins were underachievers and soft, particularly on defense.

During games, Harrick spent more time screaming at the officiating than he did coaching, and the results were disappointing. A blowout by Indiana in the NCAA Tournament three years ago, followed by the horrible loss in the first round to Tulsa last season only increased the feeling that Harrick couldn't return the Bruins to glory.

Harrick had all 20-win seasons, sure, but the only thing that counts at UCLA is the tournament. Just as important, he had not regained the recruiting foothold in southern California that his predecessors had fumbled away.

It all seemed so simple; if UCLA had hired Denny Crum, a former Wooden assistant who had moved to Louisville, when the old man retired, none of this would have happened to the program.

"But I really like the job (Harrick) has done coaching this season," says Eddie Sutton, whose Oklahoma State team lost to the Bruins, 74-61, in Saturday's semifinals. "They have so many talented athletes, and they are given a good structure.

"I don't want anyone to think they can't adjust to different situations and handle them."

Harrick's coaching skills were evident against Oklahoma State. Wooden despised zones and never used them. Harrick employs them reluctantly. But the Bruins couldn't handle center Bryant Reeves around the basket, so Harrick switched to a zone and surrounded Reeves in the second half.

Reeves, who had scored 18 points in the first half, had only seven more. And UCLA, playing at a less-than-quick tempo, won going away.

"We were surprised a little by the zone," Oklahoma State forward Scott Pierce says. "We hadn't seen many zones lately, and our zone offense was a little flat."

Then, against Arkansas, the Bruins made up for Edney's absence by tightening up around the basket. Corliss Williamson, fighting double- and triple-teaming, was limited to 12 points on 3-of-16 shooting and Scotty Thurman made only 2-of-9 attempts for five points.

Without their pivotal players performing well, the Razorbacks couldn't answer O'Bannon's 30 points and 17 rebounds or Bailey's 26 points and nine rebounds.

Nor could they prevent UCLA's 19th consecutive triumph. The Bruins were seeded first entering this tournament; other than a last-second victory over Missouri on a basket by Edney, they handled the pressure of their seeding with dignity.

Arkansas had hoped to become a rare back-to-back winner of this championship. But the Razorbacks came out flat.

"Like we were in mud," coach Nolan Richardson says.

Their lack of enthusiasm was reflected in rebounding. UCLA had a 50-31 advantage, including 21-12 on the offensive end.

The Bruins simply outworked their deeper rivals. Arkansas wanted to wear down UCLA with its greater depth, but despite using only six players for the bulk of the game, UCLA was just as fresh as the Razorbacks at the end.

Arkansas' trapping defense didn't work, their 3-point shooting didn't bail them out, their always suspect half-court offense was ineffective.

Harrick told his team to attack the basket every time it broke Arkansas' press, and they did with great success, never taking the pressure off the Razorbacks.

"I was surprised they went to the hoop so effectively," Thurman says.

But even without Edney, who triggers so much of what the Bruins do on offense, Harrick never doubted; he has assembled a group of gifted athletes who perform best in the open court. And against Arkansas, they saw plenty of open court, particularly the high-flying Bailey and the steady O'Bannon.

It was, in all, an impressive, composed demonstration by the Bruins against a team that seemed, once more, to get lucky in this NCAA Tournament, considering Edney's status. Arkansas wanted wild; it got intelligence instead.

Marques Johnson, who played on the 1975 champions, says Harrick did things this season much like Wooden in the 1960s, when the dynasty started.

"This year he said forget it, go all out (on defense), play up tempo, the same as coach Wooden did," Johnson said. "Jim has matured as a coach. He learned to back off things when he needed to.

"And we won in 1975 with six guys (playing in the title game). We did it, it can be done again and it was."

Certainly, no previous UCLA squad under Harrick was ever praised for its defensive play. The Bruins' improvement is the result of a concentrated effort, beginning in the preseason, to build a stronger mental attitude among the players. It takes commitment to excel at the defensive end, and past Bruins didn't want to expend the energy necessary to be good defenders.

But this squad was different. It played hard even when it didn't have the ball. The result was that this is the first Harrick-coached team that felt it belonged among the nation's elite.

"When we were ranked No. 1 last year, we kind of lucked into it and we didn't feel we should be there," Ed O'Bannon says, "and I think it was reflected in how we played after that. We would win, and then lose, and win and lose.

"This year, we all had the confidence we were one of the best around, so when we were ranked first, it felt more comfortable."

Harrick's dealings with the players also helped. He is not a screamer during games, nor does he exercise unrelenting control over their movements. He has gifted athletes, and he has allowed them to act with freedom on their stage. It is a trait Nolan Richardson appreciates.

"Good teams make plays," Richardson says. "Don't ever forget that. It's not about a coach who takes total credit for everything. UCLA has players who can make plays, and so do we.

"We don't handicap them with some kind of 'system.' We try not to put them on a string: A go to B; B go to C; C go to D. And if it doesn't work, what do they have left? They have to come back to the coach and have him check his (coaching) book.

"UCLA got kids that can make plays no matter who coaches them. That is what I like about them."

Harrick studied Wooden, and the freedom he gives his players - within reason - is a Wooden trait.

"He's also a player's coach," Charles O'Bannon says. "He doesn't rag on you, yell at you that much. He pats you on the butt. He is your friend."

Yeah, and he makes his players laugh with his West Virginia country humor. "Not many people can make me laugh," says freshman center J.R. Henderson, who is expressionless on the court. "But he can.

"He has that way about him, to be able to lift us up and get us going by saying something that loosens us up."

It probably is impossible to determine how much Harrick benefited from the presence of Ed O'Bannon and Edney. Not just from a playing standpoint but also from a leadership standpoint.

Coaches talk endlessly about senior leadership, almost to a point where it becomes laughable. But Edney and O'Bannon were crucial to the character development of this team. They represented strength and maturity, and they gave the Bruins a will to win that Harrick's earlier squads lacked. It all started with the loss to Tulsa last March.

"Ed got up at halftime, and he definitely demonstrated how he wanted to achieve better things the next season," says his brother, Charles. "He showed us that he didn't want anything less than to achieve greatness his senior year."

Ed O'Bannon was embarrassed by the Bruins' performance against Tulsa. He vowed that it would not be repeated this time around. And never was his leadership more evident than against Arkansas, when he was overwhelming despite playing 40 minutes.

Without Edney, he had to come up big for his team to win, and he did.

Edney is less vocal but so consistent and so tough it is difficult for his teammates to slack off.

"You see him do what he does, and you wonder how he does it," says center George Zidek, who frustrated Williamson all night with his defense. "If he can do it at his size, why can't everyone else who is bigger play well, too?"

This certainly is a strange trio - Harrick, O'Bannon and Edney. If nothing else, they show that even a program like UCLA's needs a break.

Edney, who is 5-foot-10, 152 pounds, was a good high school guard, but his size discouraged schools from pursuing him vigorously. He certainly wasn't a prime target of the Bruins.

"We were all looking for bigger guards back then," Harrick says. The Bruins signed him reluctantly, then discovered he was special.

"He sees things on the court better than anyone else you have," Wooden told Harrick when Edney was a freshman.

O'Bannon was the country's best high school player his senior year, and coaches envisioned him doing just what he accomplished against Arkansas. But O'Bannon decided to go to Nevada-Las Vegas, changed his mind when UNLV was sanctioned by the NCAA and enrolled at UCLA, then suffered a serious knee injury.

O'Bannon fought through it, returning to play. His presence helped Harrick recruit brother Charles, one of the most sought-after prospects in the country two years ago. Charles was considered a break-through recruit for UCLA on the West Coast.

Now, the Bruins have put together three strong recruiting classes; there shouldn't be a significant drop-off in the program. During prime moments of the Arkansas game, Harrick was using three freshmen and a sophomore along with Ed O'Bannon. This will be a strong squad in 1995-96.

"We know all about coach Wooden and what he did," Charles O'Bannon says, "but in our mind, this is now coach Harrick's program, not coach Wooden's.

"That's important for everyone to remember."

When they raise that 11th banner, Harrick should be the guy pulling the cords.

Copyright © 1997 The Sporting News. All rights reserved.