Lavin’s Getting Fired, but All Got Burned

And so this week, it finally will end, the blundering, the backstabbing, the besmirching of college basketball’s ancient temple.

This week, UCLA will wearily strip away Steve Lavin’s job, the way he once stripped away his soaked postgame shirts.

Yet all involved should feel the chill.

Lavin will be fired. But the Bruin administration, flunking this course from start to finish, should be embarrassed.

Lavin will lose. But those throwback Bruin alumni look lost.

Lavin will leave town. But the wild and hasty judgment by those in the media -- myself included -- should hit the road too.

Steve Lavin deserves to go. In his seven years at UCLA, the players stopped learning, the recruits stopped coming, the fans stopped cheering, and the tradition of consistency stopped, period.

But UCLA basketball deserves better than an end like this.

The university will be firing a coach who has already quit, for the sake of a team already in ruins, to appease fans who no longer care.

All this amid an atmosphere so poisoned, even John Wooden has felt compelled to reiterate his allegiance.

“For years, I have left my seat at Pauley Pavilion five minutes before the end of the game because I’m an older man and I want to get home early,” he said Tuesday. “But this year, for the first time, somebody wrote that I left because I couldn’t stand to watch anymore. That is wrong. I would never do that.”

Of course not. But the Lavin era has been so moored in thick gel and phony smiles, no truth is sacred.

The Bruin program is no longer hallowed, it’s a howl, and while Lavin’s face looks red, everyone but Wooden himself should blush.

*

This is who he is. A coach unwilling to compromise for the sake of an image. A coach unwilling to change for the sake of a job. An interim coach who should be hired as the Bruins’ permanent one. Now.

That’s what I wrote about Steve Lavin on Feb. 8, 1997.

Three days later, based on Lavin’s 13-7 record, UCLA named him the permanent coach.

What was I thinking?

What were they thinking?

The first, biggest and most lasting mistake of the Steve Lavin era was, simply, the creation of that era.

UCLA was needy and vulnerable. Lavin was available and cool. In the wake of Jim Harrick’s firing, it was a marriage of convenience.

Think about it. Would UCLA have gone outside the program to hire a 32-year-old coach with 20 games on his resume? Would any major university?

Lavin was never ready for the job.

Yet he had an ego that would never allow him to admit it.

He never hired a veteran assistant coach, and his bosses never forced one upon him, and thus his teams played best during those frantic March times when they simply coached themselves.

It seemed Lavin was reluctant to hire anyone who might prove smart enough to eventually replace him. Or maybe he felt he needed protection on his bench because he was so busy dodging shots from the stands.

His inexperience was compounded by those in the UCLA community who refused to give him a chance, relentlessly undermining a program they professed to support.

The cries to fire him began midway through his second season, even with that initial Elite Eight appearance still warm.

After one home loss to Stanford in Lavin’s third season, I remember a professor coming up behind me at the press table and saying, “That guy’s gotta go!”

Later in the season, while UCLA celebrated after defeating Syracuse, the same academic was at my shoulder, saying, “That guy’s still gotta go.”

It was as if Lavin, having accepted a job that only a fool would have turned down, was nonetheless being punished for it.

Instead of ridiculing the athletic department, they ridiculed the coach, for his hair, for his sweat, for his substitutions. Soon, local high school coaches and parents became part of the chorus, hurting his recruiting as much as tales of his coaching leniency.

Most of all, though, he was ridiculed for not being John Wooden by fans who still haven’t learned that there will never be another John Wooden.

Nor will there ever be another run of seven consecutive championships, or a decade of national dominance, by the Bruins or anybody else.

UCLA basketball fans need to learn what USC football fans seemed to have figured out two years ago, when new Coach Pete Carroll was struggling.

Success is no longer a birthright. Patience is as important as pride. Give a new guy a chance.

Midway through Lavin’s run, when the boosters were finally running out of breath, then Bruin Athletic Director Pete Dalis pumped them full of more vitriol by talking to Rick Pitino about replacing Lavin.

News of the talks further undercut Lavin in a community that had already mostly abandoned him.

The media didn’t abandon him. We loved him. And hated him. Sometimes in the same paragraph.

During his time here, I have written 64 stories about him. Approximately 32 of those stories called for his firing, and 32 begged people to leave the poor guy alone.

The only consistency in the coverage was a failure to understand the bigger picture that is UCLA basketball. If only I had kept my laptop shut in the first place.

So soon, there will be a dismissal, then a search, one that will, I hope, uncover the three things necessary to avoid reliving the Lavin years:

A veteran coach, a long contract, and a little perspective.

*

CHAMPIONSHIP WEEK

PACIFIC 10 AT STAPLES CENTER

Thursday, Fox Sports Net

* Arizona vs. UCLA...1:20 p.m.

* Arizona State vs. Oregon...3:30

* Stanford vs. USC...6:40

* California vs. Oregon State...9:10

BIG WEST AT ANAHEIM CONVENTION CENTER

WOMEN: Today, semifinals Friday, final Saturday

MEN: Thursday, semifinals Friday, final Saturday

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at [email protected].