He Looked at the Numbers; They Added Up to ‘It’s Over’

Everywhere he looked, everywhere he turned, Bill Mulligan knew it was time to go.

He knew it when he watched TV. “I find myself looking at a basketball game when other teams are playing,” he said Wednesday, “and it’s getting to the point where I want both coaches to lose. I figure that’s kinda sick.”

He knew it when he read the newspaper. “With few exceptions, I don’t have the trust in the media I used to have,” he said. “Maybe it’s because we’re losing, but I keep looking to see who’s going to get ripped today.”

He knew it when he played on the road. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in hotels in places like Las Cruces and Logan, Utah,” he said.

He knew it when he played at home. “We win our tournament in December--we beat Bradley, who had beaten Loyola Marymount, who everybody thought was a really good team at the time,” he said. “A week later, we play Utah and I look in the stands and I see about 1,200 people. . . . I found that so difficult to fathom. Twelve-hundred people. Our players are thinking, ‘What have we done wrong, what did we do that was so bad within one week?’ ”

Most of all, Mulligan knew it when he looked at the numbers.

Record in 1988-89: 12-17.

Record in 1989-90: 5-23.

Record in 1990-91: 8-17.

Record in past 59 games: 14-45.

“You just reach a point where you say, ‘It’s over,’ ” Mulligan said. “When you’re 60 years old and you have to rely on 19-, 20-year-old kids deciding how your season’s going to turn out . . . I won’t miss that.”

Sadly, as you listened to Mulligan in this state, you knew it was time too. And if you ever marveled at the nervous-breakdown intensity of his best teams, laughed at the bite of his caustic one-liners or shook your head at his blatant, brazen stabs at showmanship, you didn’t want to remember him this way--bitter, beaten, transfixed by the negative as he ran a fine-tooth comb through 11 years of basketball ups and downs at UC Irvine.

You wanted to remember the Bill Mulligan who wore red at Fresno State, just to taunt the Red Wave manic-obsessives in Selland Arena, and his priceless exchange with one of them:

Fresno Fan: We’re going to kick your butt, Mulligan.

Mulligan: You guys may kick our butt, but we get to leave this one-horse town tomorrow.

You didn’t want to remember the Bill Mulligan who said Wednesday, “People tell me, ‘Come Oct. 15, you’re really going to miss it,’ and I say, ‘No way.’ I really won’t. I won’t miss it at all.”

You wanted to remember the Bill Mulligan who couldn’t figure out the supremely gifted, supremely flighty point guard, Jason Works, who could run, pass, shoot, handle the ball--everything but run the offense Mulligan wanted. “I listen to what Coach Mulligan tells me to do,” Works explained, “and I do what Jesus tells me do.” Retorted Mulligan: “Did Jesus ever tell him to give the. . . ball to Magee?”

You didn’t want to remember the Bill Mulligan who said the only thing he would second-guess in his 35-year coaching career was his decision to leave Saddleback College for Irvine in 1980. “I could’ve won 30 games a year there for the last 11 years and sold the place out every night,” he said.

You wanted to remember the Bill Mulligan whose first Irvine team debuted with a school-record 125 points against VMI, led by the best player Mulligan says he ever coached, two-time All-America center Kevin Magee, who followed his coach up the freeway from Saddleback.

Mulligan wanted to remember, too.

“I remember wondering what kind of crowd we were going to get,” Mulligan said. “I’d been to Crawford Hall before and I’d seen 300 people in the stands. But that night, we had people breaking down the door. Everybody wanted to see Kevin.”

In a way, it was all downhill from that night. The Magee years were the best years for Mulligan at Irvine. The Anteaters went 17-10 and 23-7 and lasted two rounds in the 1982 NIT. Mulligan was the toast of south Orange County--and when they stopped toasting Mulligan, Mulligan would toast Magee or Randy Whieldon or Ben McDonald or the planned on-campus arena that was going to break Irvine basketball big-time. Toasts Mulligan never tired of.

They broke ground for the new arena, but they couldn’t do the same for Irvine basketball. Today, the Bren Center sits, pretty in its pastel pinks and blues, more than half-empty for most Anteater home games. The fans don’t come because the great recruits don’t come. “The amazing thing is, we recruited better when we had Crawford Hall than we do with the Bren Center,” Mulligan said. “Figure that one out.”

One problem was the aftermath of Mulligan’s last big flush of success, when the Tod Murphy-Johnny Rogers-Scott Brooks Anteaters of 1986 beat UNLV twice and upset UCLA in the NIT.

Mulligan recaptured the imagination of the community--4,000 Irvine fans made the drive to Pauley Pavilion--but then couldn’t hold it.

“I think the biggest mistake we made was when the program didn’t take off after ‘86,” Mulligan said. “We went downstream instead of upstream and we didn’t seem to build on that enough.”

Build? Mulligan couldn’t keep the players he had, much less entice new ones. Tom Tolbert headed for Cerritos College and then Arizona. Boris King bailed for Nevada-Reno. Eric Leckner signed a letter of intent but didn’t have the grades, so he reached the NCAA tournament as a Wyoming Cowboy instead.

Brooks and Wayne Engelstad kept the program afloat as long as they could. Engelstad’s last game for Mulligan was the final of the 1988 Big West Tournament--as close as Mulligan would come to the NCAAs. The taunt was as cruel as they come: Irvine upset UNLV in the semifinals, but couldn’t hold a halftime lead against a third-place Utah State team in the final.

Three losing seasons later, Mulligan is almost 61 and his career is over and out. Since that crushing near-miss against Utah State, Irvine is a cumulative 25-57--a winning percentage of .305.

Three years of that was enough to suck all the joy Mulligan once derived from this game. His feuds with coaching rivals outnumbered his friendships. The fountain of quotes that made him the go-to guy for every writer on the Big West beat dried up. Losing encroached on it all, spoiling it all.

A glimpse of the old Bill Mulligan shined through the gloom when he spoke about life after coaching.

“What I’d really like to do is be a color commentator,” he said. “I don’t know if anybody would want me, but I’d like to sit up there like Vitale, who was a damn poor coach too, and evaluate how everybody else is playing.”

Mulligan grinned and his audience laughed. That’s how it used to be for Mulligan at UC Irvine.

With any amount of luck, with time, he’ll remember.