Lavin’s Climb at UCLA Might Seem Like a Sprint to Many, but to Interim Coach, It Has Been the Longest Run of His Life

This is a race, and Steve Lavin likes to race. Lives to race. Hasn’t his whole life been a race?

Hasn’t this whole, rushing, manic 32 years been about scrambling toward something faster than anybody else could have imagined (32 years old and the heir to Wooden’s throne?) but seemed achingly slow to the guy doing it?

So slow he had to keep finding longer, harder races, bigger challenges?

“I used to run marathons--Indianapolis, Chicago marathons,” Lavin says, pulling out a 1990 Chicago Marathon finish-line picture from a stack of mementos behind his desk. “The whole thing was, ‘Can you run under eight-minute miles for 26 miles?’ I know I can, I did it.

“It’s about knowing you’re capable of doing things that are very difficult. My whole life I’ve done things people didn’t expect me to do.

“No one ever thought I’d ever be the top assistant at UCLA, and then to be the head coach--exceeding anyone’s wildest dreams. But I’ve always had dreams and goals about where I wanted to go.”

The bills piled up, along with the years on the sideline after ending his playing career at Chapman College. First, he talked his way onto the staff at Purdue with Gene Keady as a graduate assistant in his early 20s, participated in countless clinics and volunteer assignments for Keady, Bob Knight and other luminaries, then moved over to Westwood as a part-time coach by the time he was 27.

Until he was lifted to a full-time spot last season at UCLA, Lavin never made more than a $16,000 salary, but he had already developed a reputation as a sunnier, more hyper, extra-motivated hoops version of Anthony Robbins.

“He has a sort of confidence in the way everything will turn out,” says his father, Cappy Lavin, a San Francisco prep and collegiate basketball legend who was a backcourt mate of K.C. Jones under Pete Newell at the University of San Francisco. “If you know him, you have a lot of confidence in him too. It was like a real long medical student-starving scholar situation, and he ran those bills up and everything--which finally now he can start paying all off.

“I didn’t really worry, because he always seems happier than most people. He’s always been somebody who follows his own lights, and enjoys it. And the best thing I see now is that Steve hasn’t lost his sense of humor, he’s been able to laugh at things, even with everything that has happened. That’ll get him through this.”

Before Jim Harrick was fired in November and Lavin took over the job (and an extra $100,000 this season), at least through the rest of this season (plus a guaranteed contract through next season at least to be the No. 1 assistant, whoever the head coach is), Lavin, at different times, ran close to a $70,000 tab in student-loan and car-loan debt--but without doubts.

He still has few doubts, even if everybody else was asking: Who is Steve Lavin and what is he doing running the UCLA program?

“In some ways, when I became a head coach here, all of a sudden it was kind of an accelerated career,” says Lavin, who adds that he paid off his debts with his first head coaching check. “People were like, ‘Wow, warp speed, he’s the head coach at UCLA.’

“But, really, if you’ve been watching, it has been a pretty slow and methodical eight-nine years, graduate assistant, volunteer, really working your way up part time, restricted earnings, full time, then top assistant, then head coach.

“So there has been a step to step, it’s just that when you’re this young at UCLA, it’s so unusual. . . .”

Lavin decided to become a marathon runner when he had just gotten out of college and into coaching. He needed another competitive test, and, while coaching at Purdue, set out to run the long race. In training, he ran 80 miles a week, he says.

Eighty miles a week. Now, he coaches the tempestuous Bruins, on an interim basis, until the end of the season or longer, until he can prove he deserves the job or shorter, depending on so many factors the mind reels.

Marathons. Coaching UCLA basketball. Which is the endurance test and which is the metaphor?

“I haven’t told them I run marathons,” says Lavin, who injured his knee a few years ago, ending his long-distance running career. “But what I’ve talked about to the players is that life is a marathon, it’s not a sprint. And the season’s a marathon.

“Obviously, in my own career, I have to understand it’s not a sprint. Steve Lavin the coach is not going to be determined in three months. Now, it may be by the perception of people thinking in terms of money or big-time coaches or even being an NBA guy or all that, if you’re affected by those external things.”

External things, such as: What will you be doing next season? Will you ever get another chance at a major school if this doesn’t work out? What happens if the kids tune you out and simply don’t listen?

Harrick himself said during an ESPN interview that he didn’t think Lavin would be back as coach next season--and Lavin has not had a conversation with Harrick since, though Lavin says maybe it’ll happen when everything calms down, whenever that is.

“I think we all understand the difficult situation Steve’s in,” Keady says, “and I know Steve knows it too. I knew he was going to have his hands full. But I have every confidence in the world he’s going to be OK, that the players will listen to him.”

Keady points to Lavin’s first season at Purdue, when he was right out of college and in charge of shepherding a rambunctious freshman group through study hall.

“Steve had a tough time with those guys in study hall, anybody would have, and he kept at them,” Keady says. “It was a good learning process for him. It was a good test.”

It was his association with Keady that brought Lavin to the Pan American Games when Keady coached the U.S. team in 1991, and that got Harrick’s attention when Lavin ran the pre-practice drills and exercises, which brought Lavin to UCLA later that year, which carried through to the 1995 national title season, then to the full-time staff and eventually No. 1 assistant’s job when Mark Gottfried and Lorenzo Romar took head coaching jobs, which led to the current surprise.

Two summers ago, Lavin, by then widely known on the coaching circuit as a defensive specialist, pondered an approach by Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski to join the Blue Devil staff, but decided to stay with Harrick.

Before moving to the No. 1 spot this season, Lavin had told people his dream job was to coach at USF, where Lavin actually was a finalist two years ago before pulling out and watching Phil Mathews get the job.

Then, suddenly, he was the top man at UCLA, and hearing boos during the dreadful loss to Kansas, losing two of his first three, getting whomped on the road by Illinois, gasping through the worst loss in school history, by 48 points at Stanford on Jan. 9.

Still, despite the rough spots, the team has survived, and, with the help of some Lavin tinkering (abandoning the traditional UCLA high-post offense for a pass-oriented motion system, wandering from his beloved man-to-man defense more often than not to a scrambling matchup zone) bolted to a 6-1 first-place spot in Pacific 10 play--including a four-game winning streak immediately after the Stanford stunner, then a tight loss at then No. 6 Louisville.

But nobody believes the rest of season will be all sweetness and light.

What if you’re a nice, hard-working guy, respected by countless big-name coaches, who has been dropped into a nearly unsolvable mess?

“The people who know me know that I thrive on the challenge and I thrive on adversity and I thrive on difficult situations,” says Lavin, the youngest of six children. “Like my brother said to me, ‘You’ve always been the underdog. You love underdog situations.’

“He goes, ‘You’re the only coach probably in the history of UCLA that’s an underdog. That’s good. At Chapman College you’re an underdog. You’re an underdog when you’re volunteer assistant, you’re an underdog when you’re restricted earnings guy, you’ve been an underdog all the time.’

“Six foot, slow and thick-legged, that made me an underdog in basketball. Now, I’m an underdog as a coach. To me, that’s a positive.”

*

This is a race, UCLA Athletic Director Peter T. Dalis concedes. Because of the unpredictable circumstances, Lavin had two weeks to prepare the team for the start of the season after Harrick was ousted, and has 28 games plus the postseason to convince Dalis he should stay as the top man at UCLA.

Dalis says he has made a few calls to start the search process, but says he is watching Lavin intently at this particularly precarious point in Bruin history.

“I’d say the expectation I have is to try to stay the course, do the best we can, given the circumstances we’re facing,” Dalis says.

“Winning the conference, given the hurdles that everyone has faced since really November, that’s a difficult thing to do. I’m hoping that Steve can forge a commitment from these young people to reach goals we all have.”

So far, Lavin has made a point to stress the UCLA players’ on-the-court demeanor--less complaining, fewer made-for-TV taunts--and mental discipline, including benching J.R. Henderson three times and Jelani McCoy and Kris Johnson twice apiece for minor team infractions that players have said would not have resulted in punishment under Harrick.

“The difficult thing for me would be to coach without discipline,” Lavin says. “The hard thing would be to say, ‘Well, it’s a big game, we need to win, so maybe we’ll find another form of discipline than not starting our three best players.’ To me, that would be very difficult to do.

“Because it would kind of blow or waste my whole apprenticeship, everything I learned. Because I may only have one chance to do it, I’m going to do everything I believe in.”

Get control of your emotions, Lavin has preached to a team that pouted and bellowed its way through last season, and good basketball will follow.

“He appears to be a good teacher, but I think it’s premature to make any conclusions because the season is just under way,” Dalis says of Lavin. “You can’t know a person’s strengths and weaknesses until the whole season unfolds.

“But I’m pleased so far. Particularly in terms of kind of capturing the basketball players’ attention in terms of discipline. I think all those things are things he has handled very well.”

There is more, of course. Through the good and bad of this season, Dalis has a job to fill, resumes to flip through, calls to make, big names to consider.

Every loss, every bad Bruin moment, Lavin will hear it and feel it: When is Lorenzo Romar coming, or Pete Gillen or Tubby Smith, or whoever the hottest rumor of the millisecond is? The players will be watching.

“It’s an opportunity to show them kind of what I’m made of,” Lavin says. “I don’t need to impress them with my genius X and O’s and multiple matchup zones. What I need to show them is I have to walk the talk. Which means I have to stay in the moment.

“I can’t worry too much about my future, I can’t worry too much about the past. I’ve got to coach through the boos, coach through the media, letters to the editor, coach through XTRA radio. . . . If I let that affect my teaching and coaching, then I’m guilty of the very thing that our team could be guilty of.”

The relationship with Dalis, Lavin says, has been warm and supportive, even though both know the situation is less than perfect.

Lavin asked Dalis if Jim Milhorn, an associate athletic director and a member of Wooden’s early title teams, could travel on the team’s trips as an experienced hand, and conduit to the department, which Dalis readily approved. No member of the administration has traveled with the basketball team in several years.

“He’s been a friend, he’s a basketball man,” Lavin says of Milhorn. “He’s someone you can lean on for his experience and his wisdom. And I’ve always been a guy for whatever reason that’s been attracted to older people.

“My dad will tell you stories: I don’t remember, but I guess when I was in kindergarten, nursery school, I was always talking to the janitors and the guys who were cutting the hedges and I was in these long, long exchanges with them. I really did enjoy talking with kids my own age, but I always wanted to talk to the teacher or the guys doing the windows.

“My dad always thought that was a pretty healthy sign. So even now, my friends are Coach Keady and Coach Wooden, the guys who are older, for whatever reasons, whether I’m aspiring to that or you want to learn from it or natural curiosity or whatever. . . .”

“Steve is old school, I guess,” says Cappy Lavin, an English teacher at Sir Francis Drake High in San Francisco who also has taught at the University of California.

Will that translate to UCLA’s very ‘90s players?

“That’s the big question now, isn’t it?” Cappy Lavin says. “We’ll know in a while. These are tough circumstances. . . . I have no questions that Steve is ready for this. None at all. Coaching? Steve can do that, at any level.”

Said Arizona Coach Lute Olson, after UCLA beat the Wildcats at Pauley earlier this month: “He’s really done I think a miraculous job, if you ask me. With all the circumstances he’s had to overcome, it’s amazing. The players are trying to play unselfishly, you can see it. They’re not jacking up shots, they’re playing defense.”

Pete Hayward, Lavin’s coach at Drake (he also coached Lavin assistants Jim Saia and Steve Spencer at Drake), gave Lavin one hard bit of advice when Lavin took over at UCLA: Stay genuine, and see what happens.

“Kids have always bought into Steve because he is so sincere and dedicated and see he really knows what he’s doing and his enthusiasm is so infectious and he’s not a phony,” Hayward says.

“The thing here, these are not really kids he’s recruited--he’s inheriting a group of really older guys who may all be leaving and may have an agenda. He could do a really great job there, and still not be able to get through.”

Cappy Lavin, the man who gave coaching a brief run after his playing career, says he’s proudest that he never nudged Steve toward basketball, and at first thought his son would make a great journalist or commentator.

The night Steve told his father he wanted to make coaching his life, the two cried together and argued for hours.

“Early in college, when I knew he had his mind set on coaching, we had some really good long conversations,” Cappy Lavin says. “I was pleased that I went the other directions into writing and teaching, and I told him he had a lot of talent in those kinds of fields, particularly in journalism and broadcasting.”

Don’t do it, his father said, unless you are ready to commit yourself to a life of hardships, and unless you know you can do it in a way different or better than anybody else.

“I was saying, ‘Well, if you do go into coaching, realize that there are some limitations’--of course, not realizing the kind he’d be facing this year,” Cappy Lavin says. “But I wanted him to know I was lucky I had [Phil] Woolpert and Newell.

“Until he understood what I meant, he felt a little hurt. He thought I was disappointed in him.

“I wasn’t. I was just trying to stretch his potential, but maybe I shouldn’t have been worried, because he has a knack for that.”