Here’s Inside Story On Jud

The Sonics were coming to town and rookie guard Eric Snow asked his old college coach from Michigan State if he needed tickets.

“Thanks,” said Jud Heathcote, recently retired to a new home on the South Hill, “but I’m already taken care of.”

And he was. On game night, he and his wife watched from the second-to-last row in the Spokane Arena.

“It’s too bad,” Beverly Heathcote told her husband, “TV can’t show where you used to sit and where you sit now.”

At age 68, Jud Heathcote had seen enough games from the front row. Add ‘em up - from West Valley to Wazzu to Montana to MSU, that’s 1,300 games, easy.

And, yes, he’d also had it up to his ears with the lamentable trappings of those games, but those flaws and defects didn’t chase him out of basketball.

He left when it was time, on his terms.

The joke last winter, when Heathcote was wrapping up a 45-year coaching career, was that retirement would give him “time to finish my book.”

Someone: “I didn’t know you were writing a book.”

Heathcote: “I’m not. I’m reading one.”

Ba-dum-bum.

Now the real punch line: He finished the book. And it’s his own, with Lansing State Journal columnist Jack Ebling the assistant coach in charge of spelling and punctuation. “Jud, A Magical Journey” has just been released by Sagamore Publishing and here’s an early review from the author:

“There’s nothing in the book unless you’re a Spartan fan or you know me or you’re to some extent a basketball fan,” he said. “Then it’s worth reading if you can borrow it instead of buying it.”

So what did he think we were expecting? The Jump Shots of Madison County?

“Well, it’s not an expose,” Heathcote said. “And it wasn’t going to be a rip job. So we passed over what would have been juicier parts.”

Which is to say, who’s buying whom? But if college basketball’s cheaters remain mostly nameless, it wouldn’t be Jud’s story if it wasn’t blunt, with helpings of humor to take the edge off the candor and occasional outrage.

Published in Big Ten country, the book is predictably thick with tales of Magic Johnson and the championship season of 1979 and other Spartanabilia - and maybe a little light for local tastes on the West Valley-WSU-Montana years.

But then, perhaps we’ve realized by now that Magic had a bit more to do with Heathcote’s NCAA ring than the hard knocks of City League coaching or turning on the masses in Missoula.

“What you do learn in high school coaching is making the most of what you have,” he said. “We did that at Washington State and Montana and even at Michigan State. If you think we had players as good as Indiana’s or Michigan’s most years, hey, we didn’t.”

This was often chalked up to Heathcote’s supposed shortcomings as a recruiter, a rap he does his best to debunk. There can’t be all that much truth to it. The man did land Magic Johnson.

“But we didn’t get many of the top players out of Detroit,” he admitted, “because there you always work through a middleman who has his hand out. And if the top players in Detroit go elsewhere, you’re stamped with not getting the job done.”

“The kid got bought” is the first cop-out in recruiting, Heathcote points that out. But you know what you know. In recruiting Vern Fleming, Heathcote broke bread with legendary New York street sleaze Rob Johnson to learn what he didn’t want to. Another player transferred to MSU bearing the news that he’d inked a letter-of-intent with his original school 17 days after the signing period. And Heathcote still recalls a particularly disgusting home visit.

“Tell you what,” he told his assistants. “If either of you have any more contact with this kid, you’re fired.”

It was in trying to protect his reputation that Heathcote wound up coaching two years longer than he planned. When player Parish Hickman said he’d been paid by a booster, Heathcote stayed to see the allegations disproved. After a clumsy administrator’s memo recommending Heathcote be fired was made public, the coach sought and got the school’s support for another go-round.

“My idea was always to retire at 65 - if not with the greatest record in the world, then with the satisfaction I’d done things right and with dignity,” Heathcote said. “I couldn’t retire with dignity under either of those circumstances.”

Now, if you remember Jud bouncing a ball into his face in the heat of a game, then you can tease him about dignity. Go ahead. The man knows how to laugh at himself and his unsparing style.

“Jud, you’re a better defensive coach than I am,” former Gonzaga coach Hank Anderson once told him. “You’re no smarter than I am. But you’re a son of a bitch. And I’m not.”

Wrote Heathcote, “That was a compliment.”

He’s also, Anderson could have added, one for a book.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 photos (1 color)

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: HEATHCOTE’S CAREER School Years Record Michigan State 1977-95 340-220 Montana 1972-76 77-56 Washington State (Frosh) 1965-71 99-9 West Valley High School 1951-64 74-72* *-City League record only

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review