Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 5, 1995 TAG: 9504080011
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: SEATTLE LENGTH: Medium
It would be inaccurate to say Jim Harrick awoke here Tuesday morning like he was riding that 200-pound basketball tethered to the top of the Space Needle.
That's only because he was pretty much sleepless in Seattle Monday night after coaching UCLA to its 11th NCAA championship, and first in two decades.
How huge is it? Well, for at least a day, the nation is paying attention to something in Los Angeles besides the O.J. Simpson trial.
In a season in which 49 teams appeared in the two polls, a year in which six different teams were ranked No. 1, Harrick's Bruins became only the third top-ranked club in 17 years to win the NCAA title.
The UCLA program hasn't exactly been in hibernation. Harrick's first six years produced NCAA berths and two Pacific 10 Conference titles. He was highly regarded for his success at Pepperdine before moving to UCLA.
John Wooden, he wasn't. Ten NCAA titles he didn't have.
``The thing about being at UCLA,'' Harrick said a few days ago, ``is that they dissect you like a frog in biology class.''
Then, at the Kingdome, in only the biggest game of his three decades as a coach, Harrick has to play without his injured star point guard. How confident was he?
``We let Tyus [Edney] play with and dribble a basketball in the locker room before the game,'' Harrick said after the Bruins' 89-78 victory over defending champion Arkansas. ``He had no power on the ball on the dribble [with his bad right wrist].
``I thought I'd start him to see if the adrenaline would take over. Then he went down left-handed and turned it over. I said that's enough of that.
``We'll just go down the best way we can.''
What Harrick did was what he always has since growing up in Charleston, W.Va., in the same years Jerry West was putting Cabin Creek on the basketball map.
He succeeded. He profited, like he used to do summers visiting his uncle on The Hill in Pittsburgh in the '40s.
``I spent the first 15 summers of my life, three, four weeks to a month up there,'' Harrick recalled. ``My mother was born there, and my uncle used to sell the paper downtown. I'd go help him.
``The paper cost four cents. They'd give us a nickel and he'd make $4 or $5 a day. Then we'd go back to the station and they'd flip quarters and my uncle would lose all of his money. That was a great lesson to me.''
Long before Harrick, 56, became the first Morris Harvey College graduate to win the NCAA championship, he left West Virginia for Los Angeles. It was 1960. Wooden hadn't yet even taken UCLA to a Final Four.
``I graduated and later that summer my wife and I married,'' Harrick said. ``We left that night, came to Los Angeles and knew nobody.
``I had gotten a job teaching junior high. I was driving a 1960 Belair Chevy stick shift with no radio or heater - or no air conditioning either. Well, I had a heater, no air conditioning. My parents bought it for me that May, for graduation.''
He was a high school coach for a decade, starting in junior varsity ball. He went to Utah State, then UCLA as an assistant to Gary Cunningham, where he saw what following Wooden was really like. Cunningham's two UCLA teams were 50-8 - not good enough.
As a high school coach and teacher, he paid to watch Wooden's teams play. He became friends with the master. He attended UCLA practices.
``One day, years ago, I asked Coach Wooden, `Why don't you work on being down one with 10 seconds to go, special situations?''' Harrick said. ``He said, `Jim, I never expected to be in that situation.'''
Perhaps Harrick doesn't have Wooden's pedigree as an All-America player at Purdue. Perhaps he doesn't have his 10 titles. He does seem, however, to have that kind of confidence in his ability.
And after he became the 36th coach in history to win an NCAA Division I title, he followed coaching savvy with humility.
Harrick had a list of a million thanks, including ``the city of Los Angeles.
``Really, it's my home,'' Harrick said, ``and we've been through a lot the last four or five years with disasters. There's been a lot of depression. We've had the O.J. trial, and that's really not an uplifting thing. It's nice the city can get excited about something of this nature.''
Only then, Harrick spoke of himself.
``This is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream,'' he said.
by CNB