Stevens Still Making Friends
Two years ago, on or about the fifth day of the Christmas season, Len Stevens was headed to back to Switzerland for the basketball season.
The stateside reunion with his family had been a brief reminder of how much he was missing. The Washington State University coach of mid-1980s vintage was in his second season with the Neuchatel basketball club in the French-speaking parcel of the Swiss landscape.
After four years as head coach at Washington State, six seasons at Nevada and two years in the kitchen of Len’s Pizza Place in Reno - 8,000 square feet and five satellites, the in place for sports - he was ripe for change.
“Some of the employees started getting on my nerves,” Stevens said of his venture into private business. “They didn’t always come to work. I couldn’t make ‘em run laps. I couldn’t take away their per diem money on the road.”
The game he went back to in Switzerland was invigorating. The money was good, tax free, the perks excellent, the opportunity to see Europe too promising to believe.
The pace (Swiss teams play about once a week) and the context of the game (it’s not all that important) added another couple of readable chapters in an interesting life.
Stevens found that no matter how far you roam you’re never outside the range of a Cougar.
There, lighting up the Swiss League, was Donald Collins - Crazy Don as he was called at WSU, behind his back. Donald Collins in 1979 and ‘80 scored 30 or more points a WSU-record eight times. He was leaving WSU just as Stevens was coming in.
The years did little to diminish the Collins touch.
“You never know how much to believe but they say he could drink 10 beers and go out and score 35,” Stevens said. “Collins was playing well into his late 30s. From the time he left the NBA he made a lot of money over there. They told me he had been player of the year in France.”
Donald Collins’ run of basketball paychecks ended this year.
“I heard nobody offered him a contract,” Stevens said. “I guess he finally wore out.”
Stevens at 56 is showing only a little wear and tear. The hair is grayer. He’s a grandfather.
But in his second season as an assistant at UC Irvine under an old friend and rival, Pat Douglass, he talks like a man happy to be back in the country, back into college coaching, forever proud of a family that has given him support and cheer and grandchildren, too.
“Grandpa,” Stevens smiles. “That’s still a hard word for me to get out of my mouth. I tell those kids to call me uncle.”
Stevens thinks of himself as still growing, still looking forward to the next win, the next home visit, the next tee-off time, the next time he walks in the front door of his Laguna Hills home after a week on the road.
Len Stevens wasn’t the greatest coach in WSU basketball history - he had a stronger record after he left - but he may be the greatest guy to coach a WSU basketball team.
It’s not in him to nurse a grudge. If it were he wouldn’t talk to me. The media here, myself included, weren’t exactly in his corner when the going got rough in 1987, his last season at Wazzu.
In retrospect, his best Pac-10 mark - 8-10 in ‘86 - would have looked pretty good the last couple of years.
As in all times of change rumors were flying then, when Stevens and the Cougars parted company. He heard the one that his assistant, Kelvin Sampson, stabbed him in the back.
“Sometimes this business is not fun,” Stevens said. “The feelings I had when I left Pullman were pretty cold. Kelvin and I didn’t stay in contact for a year or two. We talk four or five times a year now. Life’s too short to carry those things around.
“Kelvin helped when I looked into a couple of jobs. He made calls for me. We’ve been on summer trips together with Converse. When he was with me he worked his butt off recruiting. As an assistant he was extremely loyal.
“In my mind, whatever happened - if anything - is over.”
Stevens’ career is long on memories.
Switzerland, for starters, is hardly a bastion of basketball. Neuchatel, a city of 50,000 perched on the shores of a scenic lake, had one gym.
One. Indoor soccer was big, Badminton was bigger. The floor was Tartan. Basketball players - hungry and humble - shared the facility.
Most of the local talent worked other jobs, too.
“A lot of the French players got a train ticket and 300 to 1,000 francs a month during the season,” Stevens said. “Some might get the train ticket and nothing else. Americans were pretty well taken care of.”
For good reason.
“All the pressure was on your American players,” Stevens said. “If your two Americans outscored their two Americans - and you kept your three Swiss guys from getting you into trouble - you had a good chance to win.”
Not every U.S. player is suited to Swiss-style hoop.
“You looked for guys who had a plan to get to the next level - maybe to Italy or France, where the bigger money is, or maybe the CBA or even the NBA,” Stevens said. “If you had bums, they’d self-destruct.”
Stevens avoided the self-destructive type.
“In my second year we made the Final Four of the Swiss Cup,” he said, “which was a pretty big deal for them. Thirty-two teams started the season. I looked at the standings the other day. I think they’re next-to-last this year.”
In the end “It was a great two years but it just wasn’t home. You got home five days for Christmas and that was about it. My daughter was in her senior year at UOP. My wife stayed home. I was over there by myself. It made the year real long.”
Leaving the Swiss was sort of accidental.
Stevens came back with a year left on his contract to interview for the Sacramento State job.
“I was supposed to go back and then Pat got this job (at Irvine, which played Idaho Saturday),” he said. “When the Sac State thing didn’t pan out Pat called me. I ended up staying.”
Looking back, his son Rick was an eighth-grader when Stevens left Pullman. Rick Stevens grew up to be a 6-1 guard and a “Typical coach’s son. He could shoot the hell out of it,” Stevens said.
He played at Cal State Stanislaus. Now 27, Rick Stevens coaches the junior varsity at Reed High in Reno, where he fired up the 3-point shot.
If he had the WSU experience to do over, Stevens would change some things.
“Without naming names, the one thing I learned at WSU is, you better make sure the most talented player is one of your hardest workers,” he said. “If your best players aren’t working hard for you, it’ll come back to haunt you. In recruiting after that, if we were looking at a kid who had talent but wasn’t a worker, we didn’t touch him.”
He learned that you couldn’t rely solely on man-to-man defense in the Pac-10 without the horses, that Otis Jennings, Keith Morrison and Joe Wallace weren’t going to win a championship, as he promised they would.
Stevens’ teams ran more in Reno, where his vision for the program was realized to a degree when the Wolf Pack for the first time posted winning records in five consecutive seasons before their move to the Big West. The graduation rate improved. Stevens had his own radio show. He loved Reno and the community seemed to love him back.
And then it was over. The A.D. announced that Stevens had taken the program as far as he could. Fired, (“Nobody wants to hire a coach who’s just been fired,” he says) he found nothing in basketball so he jumped into the pizza and bar business in a town that ranks with the world leaders in drinks on the house.
That he made money in that climate is pretty impressive.
Does he miss running the show as a head coach?
“At times,” Stevens said. “And a lot of times I don’t. You always want to call your own timeouts but it’s nice to go home and go to sleep, not stay up thinking about how to make it better.
“It’s changed. The older you get the more you recognize trends. In certain jobs all they do is rotate coaches every five or six years. You’re always struggling. I’ve been fortunate. I’ve coached in the Pac-10. I’ve had some success. If I end up here, I’ll be happy. Pat and I go back more than 20 years. What we have is better than a working relationship. It’s a friendship.”
Stevens updated us on the lives of some of his players and colleagues at WSU, a decade removed.
Kitrick Taylor, who starred in football and started for a while for Stevens on the WSU basketball team, coaches high school football in Pomona, Calif.
Otis Jennings is a high school basketball coach in his native Bakersfield, Calif.
Dwayne Scholten played pro ball in France for a dozen years.
Keith Morrison is living in the Los Angeles area.
Mike Wurm is a director with the Boys Club in Reno.
Puck Smith, a Stevens assistant in Pullman, is in his 13th season as head coach at Cal State Chico. I always get a kick out of Bobby Knight’s reputation as The General, even though the closest he ever got to a uniform was coaching basketball at West Point. Puck Smith, one of the few coaches of his generation who didn’t coast through the Vietnam era on an occupational deferment, served hazardous duty in long range recon in Vietnam.
Matt Williams of Naches, Wash., followed Stevens to Reno, where he graduated and stayed on to work at the university.
Joe Wallace, who works for Johnnie Cochran, the lawyer of O.J. Simpson defensive team fame, may be the unique Stevens-era Cougar.
“Joe made a lot of money playing in Europe,” Stevens said. “He’s another of those kids I wish we’d had the luxury of red-shirting. He had a lot on the ball when he came to us but he was only 17 at the time and never really had time to mature.
“But what a great guy. He was a clothes designer for a while. He made investments. He was working with Leigh Steinberg, and then went to Johnnie Cochran, who I think has branched into that business (representing pro athletes).
The best thing at WSU, he said, was the association with people. But then Stevens could say that about every one of his stops. He makes friends like Crazy Don made the perimeter jumper.
Frequently, with style.