Still Feeling the Tremors

Fused by a mixture of sweat, salesmanship and controversial circumstances, for better or worse, the embattled basketball program and the ambitious 33-year-old coach are basically one entity these days:

UCLAVIN.

Nobody planned it this way, and even Steve Lavin, who obviously loves the limelight, could not have foreseen the twists that have made him UCLA’s most identifiable face after only a year on the job.

He would not be where he is if Jim Harrick had not been fired two weeks before the start of the 1996-97 season, would not have gotten the job permanently if the team had not responded during that chaotic campaign, would not be making an average of $475,000 a year if the school had not believed he could handle the high-profile pressures of the position, and would not be a budding media superstar if he had not promoted himself so aggressively.

Who got the biggest cheers when the team was introduced at Pauley Pavilion in the exhibition opener last week? The coach. That probably has not happened there in a while.

Lavin clearly is a survivor, and his energy and personality helped the Bruin nation live through the damage of Harrick’s firing.

Lavin, contractually bound to Westwood for the next five seasons--he has an escape clause in case he wants to go to the NBA--is the man on whom the Bruins have staked their basketball future, more than UCLA ever did in eight seasons with Harrick, even after Harrick had brought home the 1994-95 national title.

But even now, with Harrick gone to Rhode Island and Lavin’s picture and words dominating the Bruin media guide, the earthquakes haven’t stopped. Most recently, starters Jelani McCoy and Kris Johnson were suspended indefinitely for unspecified violations of athletic department policy.

Lavin, for his part, has hardly been knocked off stride by preseason developments, from the loss of recruit Schea Cotton because of eligibility problems to the Johnson-McCoy suspensions.

“It’d probably be different if I hadn’t inherited the job under kind of a crisis,” Lavin said recently. “So, I’ve really never known anything else. Kind of gone moment to moment, day to day, week to week, game to game. . . .

“I think if there would have been some honeymoon period . . . but there’s never been a honeymoon. From Day 1, there’s been crisis and damage control.

“Last year at this time, it was more the shock and the trauma of it all. This year, we know what’s in front of us. We know it’s a big mountain in front of us, and we’re going to go after it.”

But that tight focus doesn’t address a bigger issue: Will things ever be stable again at UCLA?

Or did the shock of the Harrick firing, however justified, send this program into a long period of disarray?

“From time to time, what happens in athletic departments mirrors what happens when you’re driving a car,” said George Raveling, former USC coach and current CBS commentator, when asked about the continuing Bruin problems.

“Occasionally, you hit a little bump in the road. And you might get flat tires as a result of it. But you get things straightened out, get back on the road, and keep going. That’s what happened at UCLA. They hit a bump in the road, and things will smooth out. There’s just too much tradition there.

“If Steve recruits well and wins a Pac-10 championship and gets to another Sweet 16 and a Final Four, everybody will forget all this stuff.”

Arizona Coach Lute Olson, fresh off winning the national title, said it is a 1990s reality that players are going to get into trouble occasionally--and angrily pointed to the problems that took his friend Bill Frieder out of the Arizona State job a few months ago.

And Olson shook his head disgustedly when asked if it was fair to view UCLA as in turmoil.

“Somebody who would make that statement is not aware of the effort that the UCLA staff and administration puts into making sure that things are done the right way,” Olson said.

“Kids have to understand they are responsible for what they do. It can’t always be somebody else’s responsibility or somebody else’s fault. You’re 18 years old, you know what’s right and what’s wrong. When do you start taking responsibility for your own actions?

“We saw in our state it cost Bill Frieder his job. . . . If that’s how it is now, it makes me wonder how it’s going to be in another 10 years.”

Said Raveling: “We’re going through a lot of societal changes in our country--kids are different, values are different, parents are different. All of our norms and standards are being questioned today and we have a spillover of societal problems into intercollegiate athletics. And we’re not used to it. So we overreact to it.”

Raveling, whom Lavin has pointed to as an important advisor, said that Lavin has proved himself capable of dealing with adversity.

“This whole thing has told us a hell of a lot about Steve Lavin the person,” Raveling said. “A lot of guys would be on the couch three days a week with a shrink after dealing with what he’s had to.

“But some people operate best when there’s turmoil. I used to say that about Dick Harter when he was at Oregon and I was at Washington State. If there was peace and tranquillity, Harter got nervous.

“I don’t know Lav well enough to know if that’s how he is yet. The point I want to make is that there are people who are.”

*

With the same iron will that helped the Bruins through so many uneven moments last season, Cameron Dollar does not accept any suggestion that the UCLA program is out of control.

Dollar, who was instrumental in the bumpy transition from Harrick to Lavin as the senior point guard-leader-drill sergeant, offers no excuses for his former team--only a passionate volley of support.

“I don’t have to defend it,” said Dollar, who is an assistant on Coach Pat Douglass’ new staff at UC Irvine, “because UCLA is always able to defend itself.

“What’s going to happen now is what has always happened with this program: It’ll be competitive, it’ll continue to produce quality athletes and people, and it always will.

“UCLA is bigger than one person, one team. . . . It’s kind of its own separate entity. And it’s been like that for years and years and years.”

The only serious problem, Dollar says, would be if Johnson and McCoy, and really, the entire UCLA program, couldn’t bounce back from these crises stronger and better than before.

Nobody is tarnished unless you give up, Dollar said. That’s the lesson of the last four years.

“This isn’t one of those calling-card moments where the light clicked on--they just made a mistake,” Dollar said. ‘Now, it’s over. It’s been exposed and move on. I think throughout your life, you have to make decisions, and people make mistakes.

“Just because of the visibility of the program, mistakes are magnified. I think we all make our share of mistakes. Only if they don’t come back from it, if they stayed down and let everybody take shots at them and didn’t come back harder and get back into the game . . . I’d be thoroughly disappointed then. And I know they won’t do that.”

Like most of his teammates, senior guard Toby Bailey has been true to the Dollar way of thinking through the difficulties: the harder the journey, the more rewarding the result.

But Bailey says he knows how closely the UCLA basketball program is watched, and how many tough questions are being posed about its direction.

Bailey concedes that the fallout from last year’s Harrick firing may still be affecting the program.

“I’m sure it’s going to take some time before Coach Lavin cleans up everything that might have been wrong with our program,” Bailey said. “It’s going to take maybe another year for everything to happen.

“It’s still a transition. There’s just some misfortunate events that have happened to us. And since everybody has their eyes on us, things that people might get away with at other schools, we don’t get away with.”

Said senior forward J.R. Henderson: “They really don’t know how things work down here. One coaching change, seems like it’s the end of the world, big old thing. But it happens around the country all the time.

“I just see [the suspensions] as a separate incident, something that happened with them. Every program has their problems. So I don’t think of it as we’ve always got things going wrong. It’s just something that happened. And we’ll get past it.”