Talent Wasn’t as Thin as the Skin

The latest news from Westwood: Goodby, Walt. Hello, Larry?

When the heat was coming down on Walt Hazzard six weeks ago, when his UCLA Bruins were struggling to play .500 ball, Walt pretty much drew up into his own personal fortress and described his immediate goals thusly:

“Just survivin’ this gig.”

Not any longer. Wednesday, the fabled Bruin basketball mystique having been trampled flat as cow flop, the school fired Hazzard.

It was the end of an era--although since John Wooden, UCLA hoop eras tend to last about as long as semesters--and probably the dawning of a new age of reality in Westwood.

The Hazzard Era lasted four seasons. It just seemed a lot longer to some of the school’s supporters. Now it’s time for what? Larry Brown Era II?

One thing is fairly certain. The next coach will be a big guy, a proven Division I winner, a Final Four-type coach. Maybe even a guy who is a proven Division I winner and Final Four-type coach at UCLA, which could limit the field to Wooden and Brown.

Not long after Brown left UCLA in 1981, when the school wouldn’t repaint his office or ease his financial insecurity, he told someone that quitting the Bruin job was the biggest mistake of his life.

Would he come back to Westwood now?

“In a minute,” Brown reportedly said not long ago.

Would the Bruins have him back? In a minute.

They would do this because the smugness that has settled over UCLA basketball for about a decade now is giving way to panic. For years, the athletic program’s overseers figured the Bruins could ride the momentum of the Wooden years, could win on the cheap. Need a new coach? Let’s go out and discover one. Anybody could coach this talent. No need to put together a juicy financial package to lure in a proven home run hitter, or to keep one (Brown). Let’s give a shot to an unknown, or a UCLA assistant or a former Bruin star player. No experience necessary. We discovered Wooden, didn’t we?

A lot of the credit or blame for that attitude can go to the late Sam Gilbert, the notoriously influential godfather-booster of Bruin hoops. Larry Farmer and Hazzard were hired with Gilbert’s blessing.

Farmer and Hazzard, presiding over the last seven seasons, came to the job with a total of zero games of Division I coaching experience. Neither guy revived the old Bruin glory. Should we be surprised?

Hazzard, in the beginning, looked as if he might have a shot. But maybe that was a Hollywood haze influencing our expectations. Had Hazzard emerged from minor league college coaching to lead the Bruins back to national dominance, it would have been a marvelous story. A modern day version of “Hoosiers.”

Hazzard was the school’s original glamour kid, the spark that touched off the Wooden-years bonfire, the player who established a tempo, style and intensity for Bruin basketball. To bring that same feel to coaching his beloved school would have made for an incredible cycle.

In some ways, Hazzard was a breath of fresh air hitting campus. He revered Wooden and swore allegiance to the Wooden style of ball, yet he was an independent-type guy. Walt wore his old Bruin cap and letterman’s jacket to school, and was always candid and colorful. Still is, in fact.

He seldom dealt in cliches, and nobody ever called Hazzard a phony or a dummy. He had all the bluntness and brightness you could want in a coach. And he wasn’t afraid to work hard.

But all of that didn’t make him a great coach.

He would have had a better shot at becoming one if he hadn’t burdened himself with his microscope complex. When Hazzard went on a mini-rampage in a game at Corvallis, Ore., in February, giving refs the choke sign, the tantrum made all the local newspaper leads.

“Other coaches do that (stuff),” Hazzard bristled a few days later. “ Other coaches curse the officials and call ‘em all kinds of names. But I’m in the fishbowl and under the microscope.”

When UCLA won the NIT in 1985, Hazzard opened his postgame press conference not with words of praise or joy, but with a stinging we-showed-you rebuke to Bruin doubters, especially some L.A. sportswriters.

“Walt wore his resentment on his sleeve,” one close follower of the program says. “It’s a wonder he could lift his arm.”

Coaching UCLA, with its demanding alumni, fickle fans and almost suffocating tradition, requires thick skin. Hazzard tended to wear his like tissue paper.

There is evidence the UCLA brass was not enamored of Hazzard’s truculent style. A couple of seasons ago, Hazzard was quietly advised to tone down his sideline behavior, his raging and pacing and barking at opposing players.

So you would often see Hazzard anchored to the bench, glowering.

College teams tend to reflect their coach’s personality, and a case can be made that the Bruins tended to play with more anger than pure passion. Sometimes that anger was even directed at Bruin teammates, or the Bruin coach.

Hazzard saw himself as victim of a talent shortage. The UCLA dynasty-type players just weren’t available, he would say. The school’s entrance requirements had become too high, for one thing.

In the old days, UCLA had its pick of national high school talent. In recent years, the Bruins (and other West Coast schools) couldn’t even land the great local kids. Hazzard would say that the Abdul-Jabbars and Wickses and Waltons and Wilkeses just weren’t available anywhere.

But you should see the ones that got away. Would the Bruins like to have expatriate Southern Californians like Scott Williams (North Carolina), Brian Williams (Maryland), Stephen Thompson (Syracuse), Chris Mills (signed by Kentucky) or LeRon Ellis (Kentucky), to name but a few?

Besides, impatient Bruin fans pointed out, teams like Arizona are winning with relative rejects. Why can’t UCLA?

“Stop whining and making excuses, Walt,” Dick Vitale, ESPN analyst and Hazzard-baiter, barked in a recent halftime editorial, calling the Bruins chronic underachievers.

Can a Larry Brown-type coach successfully recruit the great local kids for UCLA? Can a Larry Brown type give the program an attitude adjustment?

Or are we in for another episode of Mission Impossible.

We’ll soon find out.