Eastman Just Needs More Loyal Cougs

If you’ve been putting off tackling the Book of Job - waiting for the movie, no doubt - perhaps you’d be interested in the stage version.

Otherwise known as Cougar basketball.

Yet the travail buffs who gathered at the Spokane Arena for just such a purpose Thursday night probably didn’t go away with their fill. Except for the troubling notion that - in time - this may qualify as the high point of 1998, Washington State’s 94-81 loss to fifth-ranked Arizona perhaps did a little something to dissipate the doom that’s enveloped the program, where a scholarship anymore covers room, board, books, tuition, fees and a getaway car.

Of course, you could chalk it up to Arizona’s lack of interest. Lute Olson did.

“This is a beautiful arena,” said Olson, himself trying not to nod off at the post-game debriefing, “but it’s a dead place if it’s only probably a third filled.

“Beautiful. Just needs to get more people in here.”

Hmm. Guess Wazzu should have made tickets part of the NCAA volleyball package.

The mere theater of this game - if not the quality of play - probably merited a bigger audience than 5,339, but that’s marketing under the bridge now.

But you’re not likely to draw big unless there’s a sense that the home team has a reasonable chance. There was never that this night - even though the Cougars stubbornly and courageously dogged the defending national champions until deciding to foul repeatedly and make it look like a blowout at the end.

Everyone loves The Little Engine That Could. But few hop aboard The Little Engine That Probably Won’t. Still, we will enjoy seeing Carlos Daniel swoop through triple-teams for dunks the next couple of months and the sheer grit of the rest - newcomers Kab Kazadi and Kojo Mensah-Bonsu, in particular - makes for the most basic of lessons, that “compete” is not a dirty word. “We weren’t just lucky to be in the game,” insisted Daniel. “We were playing hard for the whole 40 minutes.”

No doubt. Better Cougar teams have looked far worse against the Wildcats. Not much in the way of consolation, but after 25 straight losses in this series …

“It eats away at you,” said Daniel. “You want to win so bad, you want to do everything in your power to go out there and get a win. Arizona and UCLA, they drive me crazy. Those are the biggest games to me because we never beat them.” A senior, he is looking at - or avoiding - the probability that he never will.

The disturbing downward spiral of Cougar basketball - when being .500 against the likes of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez and Portland State is cause for confetti - will be thoroughly hashed the rest of the winter. The pluses, minuses and endless extenuations of the Kevin Eastman era will be toted up, oh, daily by all interested parties.

This interested party respects the Eastman way, but would like to see him recruit - and retain - just one player superior to the ones he inherited four years ago.

For the Cougs, as we all know by now, have more defectors than Cuba.

This year alone there has been Beau Archibald, Ron Selleaze and now Rodrigo de la Fuente - all fine players, all with special circumstances whether they be tragic, cheesy or fiscal, in that order. Makes you wonder. How is it that Arizona could win the NCAA championship and have none of its superstars flee to the pros, while the listing Cougs see their leading scorer lured away - or lucred away - at New Year’s?

Bad luck. Bad karma. Bad news. Each apostasy is magnified by the ones before. Before any of them happened, de la Fuente’s loss might seem to have the least impact. Now it’s huge.

“We’re probably still a little bit on that let’s-band-together level,” Eastman said - and that was indeed the feeling left by the way Wazzu clawed after the Wildcats. “It’s one thing if a jerk is eliminated. It’s another if it’s a good kid and they know he had to do it. From that standpoint, they were real encouraging to him and maybe you can bounce back from that loss a little better than one where the player had stuck it to you. “We’re OK with it emotionally,” he said. “On the floor, we lose a good player. Not great. He’s good.”

At the moment, the emotional part may be more important. This team wasn’t going to play beyond March 7 with de la Fuente, never mind without him. The Cougars were going to be underdogs more nights than not anyway.

Now they’re going to be one every night, or nearly.

“I’d much rather have Ron Selleaze, Rodrigo and Beau Archibald,” Eastman admitted. “But the single biggest thing our coaching staff has to do is keep it extremely positive regardless of circumstance. This group needs that.

“I think I can handle that (being an underdog). I’ve never been in a program where it’s been the top echelon school in the league, so every place I’ve been we’ve been used to that.”

It just doesn’t seem like something you’d want to get used to.

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