NCAA BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT / WEST REGIONAL : Fish Knows How to Play the Game With Blue Chips

My old friend Steve Fisher suddenly started turning up everyplace but on a yacht in Barbados with Joan Collins and Robin Leach, indulging caviar wishes and champagne dreams. One morning I would flip open a magazine and there he’d be, curled up in Mickey Mouse’s lap at Disneyland. Another day there he’d be, pumping President Bush’s hand in the Rose Garden, swapping stories. Steve Fisher, America’s coach.

All I could recall were the Friday nights we spent together, rapping about high school basketball, sipping a beer inside Freeh’s Inn, under the Illinois Central railroad tracks 40 miles south of Chicago, waiting for the other suburban prep coaches to arrive and scribble their final scores on Freeh’s chalkboard, coaches to whom he was simply “Fish,” the regular guy from Rich East High who sometimes had to show some ID to get his beer.

Last time I saw Steve Fisher, in a hallway outside a Seattle Kingdome locker room, we immediately began rehashing those old late-1960s days, much to the displeasure of the mob that assembled around us, which was far more concerned with the fact that the ol’ Fishster had just become the first “temporary” head coach ever to take the NCAA’s national championship.

“Hey,” Fisher called over his shoulder, before returning to the business at hand, “remember when the biggest thing in life was getting to the state tournament?”

I couldn’t resist.

“Fish,” I said, “you never got to the state tournament.”

And, you know what? He never did. Never even got to the Sweet 16. Yet, who is Steve Fisher now? He is the man who has never been outcoached in an NCAA postseason game, the man who takes a tournament record of 7-0 into today’s West Regional game against Loyola Marymount, where Michigan will continue its efforts to become the first back-to-back national champions since John Wooden and UCLA won their last title in 1973.

Steve Fisher and John Wooden, in the same sentence? Even he can hardly believe it. All he wanted a year ago was to be considered for the coaching position at Illinois State, his alma mater. Now, here he was, on a balmy Friday evening in Long Beach, coaching the team that eliminates Illinois State from the tournament, telling listeners how butting heads in the Big Ten week after week “prepares you for stressful situations.”

He’s still got the sweet face, the high natural rouge on his cheeks that gives him a toy-soldier complexion. “I know he may look like Mr. Milquetoast,” said Bo Schembechler, the man who gave him the Michigan job, “but he’s tough.”

He had to be. As might be expected, no matter how popular the appointment of Steve Fisher as permanent coach clearly was in the community of Ann Arbor after the Wolverines won the championship, there is no game as important as the next game, and Fisher found himself the subject of occasional boos this season, from so-called fans who accused him of being unable to hold onto a lead.

Hey, Steve Fisher has never coached an NCAA tournament game in his life that he wasn’t leading when time ran out. Oh, well. He braced himself for it, saying: “I’ve sat in that stadium and listened to 105,000 people boo the football coach. If they’re dumb enough to sit there and criticize someone like Bo Schembechler, I know it’s going to happen to me.”

As the world turns, the basketball coach at Michigan now has seniority over the football coach. Schembechler is gone, having turned over the headset he nearly lynched himself with at the Rose Bowl to an assistant, Gary Moeller. Michigan is big on turning over teams to assistants.

The defection of Bill Frieder to Arizona State, complicated by a premature announcement, so disturbed Schembechler that he dismissed Frieder immediately, saying: “I want a Michigan man to coach Michigan.” It was one of the more hilarious lines ever uttered by this hilarious individual, seeing as how Frieder was a dues-paying alumnus of this fine institution, while Mr. Schembechler himself attended Miami of Ohio.

There were some who pressed Frieder to say that he resented Schembechler’s intervention, that he hated Fisher getting credit for winning with a team another man built. Frieder did nothing of the kind. Frieder, a guy whose specialty was recruiting, said he couldn’t be happier for Fisher, a guy who was more into coaching than into the glib glad-handing that enabled his predecessor to lure such physically gifted high school kids to the campus.

“Look at it this way,” Frieder said. “If you got divorced from your wife, would you want her to do a bad job raising your kids? Would you want her to fail as a mother and have your kids be failures, too? They’re still your kids, aren’t they?”

The kids that Frieder left behind say they have accepted their new coach’s methods. Terry Mills credits Fisher for restoring his self-confidence, after having been depressed over repeated scolding from Frieder. Loy Vaught calls Fisher a “nit-picker” who stresses defense more than the old coach did. Fisher also forced the players to start dressing better, saying Michigan’s image had become “a little slovenly,” and insisted upon more cheering from the bench.

Mickey Mouse stuff? High school stuff? Maybe. So far, in any case, it has worked for my old friend Fish, college basketball’s coach of the moment. If he wins this thing again, the least I can do is buy him a beer.