PRESSURES ON FISHER ARE HIS OWN

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, April 5, 1993                   TAG: 9304050046
SECTION: SPORTS                    PAGE: B1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Jack Bogaczyk
DATELINE: NEW ORLEANS                                LENGTH: Medium
PRESSURES ON FISHER ARE HIS OWN
Steve Fisher says he doesn't call what he does a job. Maybe that's because it's an adventure.
Fisher went from assistant coaching anonymity at Michigan to being an NCAA basketball champion boss in six games in 1989. The next year, some Wolverines were howling that Fisher couldn't recruit.
So, he signed the Fab Five, which Fisher has guided to back-to-back NCAA championship game appearances in their two seasons together. Those are expectations that Fisher is lugging around in his briefcase.
"This is a different kind of pressure now from what I experienced in 1989," Fisher said Sunday. "Then, I had a fear of having to leave a place I didn't want to leave. Now, I know I can be at Michigan for a while.
"Now, it's living up to expectations. You try only to live up to your own and not that of others, but this team has had a bull's-eye on its back bigger than any this season because of what others have said about us. That's toughened us a little bit. We've taken a lot of best shots from people."
At the Superdome tonight against North Carolina, Fisher will coach his third NCAA title game in five years. He's 17-2 in the NCAA Tournament, a statistic no one can touch. He's done it in a job - sorry to call it that, Steve - he never thought he'd have.
Before the Wolverines started the '89 tournament, Fisher's boss, Bill Frieder, announced he was leaving Ann Arbor to become the head coach at Arizona State. Fisher already had told himself he would be moving out of Crisler Arena, too, because it was time for him to become a head coach.
Then-Michigan athletic director Bo Schembechler told Frieder that if he were leaving, he could do it immediately. Fisher was appointed interim head coach, and three weeks later he sternly had led Michigan to its first NCAA basketball title.
"Frieder, I thought he was a lifer there," Fisher said. "I didn't think he'd ever leave. I had been a college assistant coach for 10 years, so in the fall of that 1988-89 season, I was prepared to leave.
"The irony was that the jobs at Illinois State, my alma mater, and Western Michigan opened up, and I think I probably would have gotten one of those had what happened not happened."
A year later, Michigan supporters were calling Fisher a great x-and-o guy who couldn't recruit. There's more irony. Eric Montross, the 7-foot Hoosier who blocks Michigan's road to the title for North Carolina, was a big problem for Fisher then, too.
Montross' father, mother and grandfather were Michigan alums. Montross chose Carolina.
"I thought we had a good chance at Montross," Fisher said. "People said he's yours to lose and, when we did, it was me - I lost him. Heck, we did get his sister."
No one was laughing then though.
"What concerned me when we didn't get Montross is that I knew it would cause other players to think, `I don't want to go there and be the Lone Ranger,' " Fisher said. "I didn't want the seed planted that Fisher can't get it done.
"We went on red alert. Sometimes you have recruiting years. Other times you have red alerts. We knew we needed an exceptionally good class last year."
If Montross, at Carolina, was part of the so-called "greatest recruiting class in history," Fisher provided Michigan with the same a year later. Chris Webber, Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Jimmy King and Ray Jackson are the Fab Five who lost the NCAA championship game a year ago to Duke.
So, of course, now all Fisher hears is how he doesn't have to be a tactician or a recruiter because he has talent. Do you think his 48th birthday last week was a happy one?
"This is the smartest group of players I've ever been associated with," Fisher said. "Certainly, they're the most talented, too, and they've displayed that.
"We have fun, but we have discipline. There's a framework there, but the freedom within that framework to play, for the players to use their talents.
"Coaching is getting the most out of a player's ability, putting a team together, and getting the most out of that team."
Fisher said he has changed from "extremely rigid" to even incorporating ideas from players on occasion."
Webber said one thing hasn't changed.
"Coach is the boss, and he makes that clear," said the Wolverines' star.
"Coach does a lot more cursing in practice than he does up here," Rose said Sunday during a news conference with red-faced Fisher and his Fab Five.
Two decades ago, when Fisher was a high school math teacher and coach in suburban Chicago, the family got together at Christmas. Fisher's sister took out a Ouija board.
"She said the Ouija board said I was going to win the national championship as a college head coach," Fisher said. "We laughed about that. Then she said the board said I would do it at Northwestern. We laughed a lot harder."
Twenty years later, he smiled at the recollection. Why not? Fisher has a Fab Five and three Final Fours.
The numbers don't lie. Even without a Montross, Steve Fisher stands awfully tall in his profession.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB