Win Or Come Close, Ucla’s Harrick Living His Dream

The letter arrives in Jim Harrick’s office every year - an invitation for his UCLA Bruins to come and play in Shootout Spokane.

You know, just in case the Bruins feel Yale is ducking them, or Drexel won’t deign to play home-and-home.

“We send ‘em out to all 300 (Division I) schools,” explained Gonzaga University basketball coach Dan Fitzgerald, “but Harrick’s is the only one that comes back with, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me’ written across the top and ‘Good luck, Fitz’ across the bottom.”

Jim Harrick has a feel and a fondness for the Gonzagas and the other ground-zero programs in college basketball - and not just because he won 15 of 19 from the Zags when he coached at Pepperdine.

But he’s not going back, even for a visit.

And no matter what you may have heard, the prospect has never had any appeal. Jim Harrick waited too long and wished too hard for the job of He’s No John Wooden to let character-assassination radio and assorted other hyenas chase him back to anonymity.

“I’m a stayer, I’m a survivor,” said Harrick on the eve of his first appearance - and UCLA’s first in 15 years - in the Final Four. “I’m not like those other guys.”

Those other guys are the five men who tried to tread in Wooden’s footprints. Four quit, the other was fired.

“The way it was for those other guys was a couple of years and then gone - get another guy in here. And I truly felt that’s the kind of mentality there was when I was hired. The last couple of years have really been so much easier than the first couple of years.”

Could he have said that had Tyus Edney not gone the length of the floor in the last 4.8 seconds against Missouri two weeks ago to save the Bruins from another early round el foldo in the NCAA Tournament?

Probably. Jim Harrick doesn’t have thick skin so much as he has armor.

But you can bet the Bruins bandwagon - now frontrunning at full speed - would have made a quick detour down the nearest Malibu mudslide and into the Pacific Ocean.

“There is no coach in the country who has had to operate under the pressures that Jim Harrick has had to,” insisted George Raveling, who coached across town from Harrick at USC before joining CBS’ dogand-pony show this season.

It is the ritual hanging of Jim Harrick in the media national and local that makes him something of a sentimental favorite among his peers - as sentimental as they can get, anyway - to win today and Monday night.

He is not the prettiest billboard for the profession, but he is a worthy one. This is the guy who taught driver’s ed in Inglewood, coached the JV team in high school, worked summers on the assembly line at Mattel, turning out water guns.

His dad ran a fleabag hotel and a pool hall in West Virginia and with no job prospects, Jim Harrick piled his wife into a 1960 Chevy Bel Air (“stick shift, no air, no radio”) in search of the promised line.

Perhaps this plebeian pedigree has been part of his problem in earning the love of UCLA’s occasional faithful.

They had their hearts set on a bigger name. Brown, again. Denny Crum. The late Jim Valvano.

All turned it down, and it wasn’t the Wooden mystique that chased them away, but the money. UCLA has long expected champagne results on a Champale investment - and, naturally, Harrick spawned even more critics when he suggested three years ago that his earning power should rival that of a Rick Pitino or a Dean Smith if the expectations were to be comparable.

Now if Pitino had said it …

“I think it might have been worse, though, if he had been a big name - the expectations are high enough as it is,” said Raveling. “If he had been a bigger name coach, the only thing that would have happened is that they wouldn’t have put the tag on him that he couldn’t coach.”

Frankly, it does seem that Harrick has grown into his job - that he is more capable of handling his senior stars and hotshot freshmen than, say, he handled the Don MacLeans and Tracy Murrays of a few years back. He has recruited better - credit for which has been deflected to assistant Lorenzo Romar. It was at Harrick’s insistence that the former Washington star was given a multi-year contract at nearly $100,000 - a deal that prompted Romar to turn down the head-coaching job at Oregon State.

Perhaps Harrick has finally carved out his niche at UCLA, after all.

“I feel no vindication,” he said. “I said when I took the job that it will be our era, no matter how it comes out. But it is nice to bring your team to this game.”

But even if the Bruins take another banner back to Pauley Pavilion, it’s not as if it hasn’t been done before.

“It’s not going to be over until he wins the title,” said Bruins freshman Toby Bailey, “and even if he does, it’s still not going to be over.”

Doesn’t matter. Jim Harrick is exactly where he wants to be.

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