Cougs spark hope time after time
PULLMAN – Like Santa dipping into his sack for another toy, Jud Heathcote plumbed the depths of his after-dinner repertoire and came up with the story of the cop assigned to patrol Lovers’ Lane.
You may know it by heart. Cop shines his flashlight in the window of the first car he comes across and sees a guy in the backseat reading a book and a young lady in the front seat knitting a muffler. Thoroughly baffled, he taps on the glass and signals the man to roll down the window.
“How old are you?” the cop inquires.
“Twenty,” the man says.
“And how old is she?”
“Well, in 15 minutes,” the man reveals with only a hint of impatience, “she’ll be 18.”
To which Heathcote, segueing back to his personal narrative, applied the moral: “You see, it’s all about timing.”
Saturday was as good a time as any to consider that concept relative to basketball and Washington State, where all too often we see the results of the latest last-second crusher and assume timing is merely a conspiracy between the bad and the catastrophic.
It was more of a slow death Saturday night – the Cougars losing their fourth straight, 59-50 to Oregon State. That’s equal to the longest slide Wazzu’s endured under coach Dick Bennett – so if it really is all about timing, fellas, the time is now.
Wazzu also used the occasion to celebrate some of the good times of its basketball past. At dinner before the game, the Cougs feted the coaches 1, 3 and 4 on their all-time victory parade – Jack Friel, George Raveling and Marv Harshman – along with Harshman’s right-hand man for seven years, Heathcote, whose imprint went far beyond the typical assistant.
The working title was “The Four-Fathers of Cougar Basketball,” a nice turn of phrase, though the fore-est father, J. Fred Bohler (No. 2 on the list), had to settle for having the dinner in the gym bearing his name.
For Wazzu to get in touch with its bygone Coug is always a good thing, done in special-occasion moderation. The athletic challenges here are forever unique, and revisiting the foundation for any success you’d assume would be instructive – though after enduring a particularly miserable exhibition by his team, coach Dick Bennett was at the end of his learning rope.
“There have been too many object lessons in my three years here,” he sighed. “I’m sick of object lessons.”
(Timing advisory: Every time Bennett Ball seems to hit rock bottom – as gauged by the coach – some minor miracle ensues, though that’s problematic at the moment with point guard Derrick Low sidelined by a broken foot.)
But for the rank-and-file Coug, at moments such as these it helps to count the blessings of good timing, specifically the flyer athletic director Jim Sterk took three years ago to lure Bennett out of retirement to undertake the most painful exhumation in college basketball.
There have been similar critical junctures in Cougars hoops history, many of them involving the honored Four Fathers, and none of them produced anything close to instant gratification.
And part of the fun of Saturday’s festivities was imagining what might have happened in different circumstances.
What if Harshman hadn’t been chased off to Washington on a wave of uncharacteristic administrative ingratitude? What if Heathcote hadn’t already jumped to a head coaching job at Montana? What if athletic director Ray Nagel, who offered the job to Eddie Sutton – and not to Heathcote – and was turned down, hadn’t panicked and given the job to the unfortunate Bob Greenwood, who lasted but a year? What if Greenwood’s assistant, Dale Brown had accepted the job before Nagel tracked down Raveling?
And what if neither Harshman nor Raveling had been rewarded with the patience – in Harshman’s case, seven years’ worth – to build the program the school wanted?
In the dark-side scenarios, there wouldn’t be much feting of the Four Fathers of Cougar Basketball, but the Foreclosure of Cougar Basketball, as we remember from the tenures of Greenwood, Paul Graham, Kevin Eastman, et al.
Even Raveling what-ifs his own departure, prompted as it was by the retirement of president Glenn Terrell and athletic director Sam Jankovich’s ambition to move.
“This was the place I fell in love with and enjoyed the most,” said Raveling, echoing earlier remarks by Harshman and Heathcote. “I’m not sure, if I had to do it all over again, that I wouldn’t have stayed.”
But he understands the challenge of fit here, and of timing.
“Looking back, I don’t think Washington State is a job for everybody,” Raveling said. “It was the best opportunity for me because they were willing to be patient, but you’ve got to get a guy who wants to come here and is in it for the long haul and understands what it takes to win here. He has to be more than a good coach and a good recruiter – you have to connect with people.”
That’s happening again. Still modest, Friel Court crowds totaled more than 10,000 this week, the first time that’s happened on a January weekend in seemingly forever.
“They’re getting people back in the stands now,” Raveling allowed. “But honestly, I was thinking during the first half what you could do to get even more excitement in here. There’s a girl over there in the front row and one timeout she’s up dancing and all that. And I thought to myself, ‘How can I get her involved to get the crowd excited?’ … It’s got to be an experience. It can’t just be a game nowadays. It appears they’ve got the students back. Now they have to get the adults back.”
Of course, they have to get some victories, too. Maybe the best part of the dinner was that first Harshman and then Raveling related anecdotes about a rival coach administering a butt-kicking and then offering the advice that, “There’s nothing wrong with what you’re doing – you just need to get some better players.”
Harshman’s sympathetic counsel was Cal coach Pete Newell. Raveling’s – and this was the joke – was Harshman.
Sitting courtside later, Raveling offered that, “I think Dick Bennett has done a great job – he’s probably coached these guys as well as they can be coached.
“Now, if he had better players …”
No joke this time. In story telling and basketball, it really is all in the timing.