The Gospel According to Mathews : Ventura Coach Leads With Religious Zeal as Victories Mount

Ventura College basketball Coach Philip Mathews was angry with his players at halftime of a recent home game against Cuesta. The top-ranked junior college team in California with only one loss in 27 games, the Pirates seemingly had forgotten everything Mathews had taught them about basketball. On top of that, they had developed two left feet and were suffering acute vertigo at both ends of the court.

And they were ahead by 12 points.

“How did Cuesta get 11 offensive rebounds!?” Mathews thundered at full throttle, sounding like a cross between Bob Knight and Mike Ditka.

Lowering their eyes to avoid the coach’s searing gaze, a dozen players fidgeted on folding chairs placed randomly inside a large cinder-block room with a high ceiling, no windows and dim lighting.

Pacing back and forth in this Kafka-esque setting, with the jacket of his gray double-breasted suit flapping in the turbulence, Mathews barked marching orders to his players: “You will,” he orated in a fire-and-brimstone baritone, “systematically destroy (Cuesta) in the second half.”

Presto. The Pirates turned into the Dream Team and bludgeoned Cuesta, 98-54. Especially destructive was a tenacious full-court press that didn’t let up even when the shell-shocked Cougars were hopelessly behind--a tactic that raised hackles on Cuesta Coach Rusty Blair.

“I don’t think he should be pressing us when they’re ahead by 40 points,” Blair fumed after the game.

Blair’s comments were relayed to Mathews, who shrugged them off, saying without remorse: “That’s the way we play.”

If sports is a metaphor for war, then Mathews, 42, is the basketball equivalent of a Marine colonel: hard, tough, profane, uncompromising, committed to all-out, total warfare. Like Knight and Ditka, he has a histrionic side and a short fuse, often blurring the line between disciplinarian and despot. However, according to players and associates, Mathews almost magically transforms when the game is over, becoming a mild-mannered gentleman who barely raises his voice except to laugh.

“Phil is the nicest and sweetest man I’ve ever worked with,” said Becky Hull, the team’s academic counselor who named one of her infant twins after Mathews.

Although his players would hardly describe their coach as sweet , Mathews has earned their respect and admiration. “He’s like a father figure to me,” said 6-foot-3 guard Stephane Brown. “He makes sure I do the right thing. I learned more basketball from him in one year than I ever knew before.”

And what about his in-your-face tirades? “You have to listen to what he’s saying, not how he’s saying it,” said the Phoenix Suns’ Cedric Ceballos, a 6-6 1/2 forward who played on Mathews’ 1986-87 team.

Calvin Curry, the team’s best shooter with a 22-point average, understands the subtext of his coach’s halftime harangues. “I’m from Compton,” Curry said, “and when people get aggressive with you, it means they really care.”

Players say Mathews really cares because winning isn’t as important to him as making sure his players do well in school. Team rule: If a player misses a class or a study session, he doesn’t play the next game. According to Hull, only one player has broken the rule--and he sat out the game.

Along with a 31-4 record and a state championship in 1986-87, and more than 200 victories in seven-plus seasons as Ventura coach, Mathews has compiled the admirable record of graduating 96% of his players--45 of 47. Last semester, the team had a 2.78 grade-point average, with four players making the honor roll with GPAs of 3.0 or better.

Mathews gets as worked up over a missed class as a missed layup--he has been seen on campus tongue-lashing players who have transgressed in the classroom. Even worse, “Phil has threatened to call their momma,” said Hull, who oversees the players’ mandatory 90-minute-a-day study tables.

Although Mathews has been on an extended honeymoon with Ventura College fans and administrators, his court-side explosions drew complaints from fans at the start of his first season (1985-86).

“Phil was different from what we were used to--that’s a good way to put it,” Ventura College Athletic Director Jerry Dunlap said.

But Mathews immediately established himself as a winner and “people stopped complaining,” Hull said.

Before Mathews, the Ventura basketball program had been in the doldrums for three decades, with attendance averaging only 300 during the 1984-85 season. Buoyed by an active booster club this season, average attendance is 1,300--highest in the state for a junior college--and Saturday night games often draw 3,000, Dunlap said.

When Dunlap sought a coach to replace Ken Barone, who resigned after the 1985 season, he asked six Division I coaches for recommendations. Jerry Tarkanian, then at Nevada Las Vegas, suggested Mathews.

“Phil did a great job as an assistant at (Cal State) Fullerton,” Tarkanian said. “(My staff) and I thought the world of him. He’s a hard worker and a knowledgeable guy.”

Dunlap liked Mathews because “he had youth, knowledge, a good idea of what needed to be done here--and he wanted the job.”

Taking control of a team that had lost 22 games the previous season, Mathews led the Pirates to a 17-10 record and the Western State Conference title. Sweeping across the Ventura community like a tsunami, he drummed up fan support by visiting service clubs. Immediately, he began attracting quality players from all over the country--players who did not have the grades to get into four-year schools. Mathews promised them a winning team, a supportive community, and a sheepskin: 48 transferable units that would make them eligible to play in Division I.

“I’d say to these kids, ‘You’re a big-time player out of high school but you’re here because you’re not big-time in the classroom--we’re going to turn that around,’ ” said Mathews, who has sent 12 players to Division I schools and several more to smaller colleges. He says his current team has five Division I prospects: Curry, Brown, 6-5 forward Brandon Jessie, 6-8 forward Alfred Kennedy and 5-10 guard Joey Ramirez.

Mathews credits his father and late aunt with stressing hard work and education to him and his five brothers, all of whom graduated from college. His father also knows a thing or two about discipline. James Mathews spent 22 years in the Air Force as a chief warrant officer. Early on, his second-oldest son always followed orders.

“He was never unruly or rebellious,” James Mathews said. “I required my boys to do certain things. No ifs, ands or buts about it. I’d make a military-style list: mop floors, mow lawn. Phil would always do his chores right now. And he always had something to do to make extra money. Once he even had two paper routes at the same time.”

Growing up in Riverside, Mathews played at Riverside City College for two years and then at UC Irvine, where he was a part-time starter at point guard for two years.

“He was a coach’s player,” said Tim Tift, who coached UC Irvine when Mathews played there in the early 1970s. “Phil knew the offense as well as anybody and he thought beyond what most players do at that level. He was the kind of player who got the most out of his abilities.”

Tift encouraged Mathews to become a coach, although Mathews had other ideas. “Like any other kid, I thought I’d be a pro--until I found out I wasn’t that good,” Mathews said. “The next-best thing was coaching.”

Mathews got his master’s degree in teaching at UC Irvine and remained as an assistant to Tift for five years. In 1977, he became the coach at Santa Ana Valley High and posted a 55-22 record in three seasons before joining George McQuarn’s staff at Cal State Fullerton. He stayed at Fullerton for four years.

Like Tarkanian and John Wooden, whose portrait adorns his small office, Mathews plays a fast-break, up-tempo offense and a pressure man-to-man defense. “We like to start everything out of our defense,” said Mathews, whose team ranks first in the conference in defense this season.

Unlike most junior colleges in the Los Angeles area, Ventura usually gets its players outside its geographical sphere of influence. This season, only four of 12 are from Ventura County. Two are from Georgia and one is from Illinois.

Mathews initially caused a ripple in the community by using so many outsiders, but criticism faded, Hull said, once these same outsiders graduated and began showing up on big-time college telecasts as “so-and-so from Ventura Junior College.”

Said Remy McCarthy, Mathews’ counterpart at Oxnard College: “He gets very good players and coaches the living heck out of them. He does a great job of coaching.”

On the current roster, 11 of Mathews’ players are black. But he doesn’t feel his being black makes recruiting black players easier. “It’s how the kids perceive you, how they relate to you,” Mathews said. “It’s communication. If you’re a coach, you’re going to coach different backgrounds.

“If you can’t relate to a kid from Beverly Hills, you’re not going to get him. The same with South Central.”

Despite his impressive 215-50 record at Ventura College, including a school-record 22-game winning streak to start this season, Mathews hasn’t been contacted for head coaching jobs at other schools--”except for a courtesy call from Cal State Fullerton” after John Sneed was fired last season. Although he applied for the top job at UC Irvine in 1991 after Bill Mulligan resigned, in 1991, Mathews says he really isn’t as eager as he once was to leave Ventura.

“I was 34, 35 when I came (to Ventura) and I thought I’d be here three or four years and be gone to a big school,” he said. “Now it would have to be an outstanding Division I job, an offer I can’t refuse.”

Dunlap, of course, doesn’t want to lose Mathews. “My plan was to first get him to like this place,” Dunlap said. “Then get him into real estate--buying a home. And finally, get him involved” with a woman.

The plan worked perfectly. Mathews, a divorcee with two children, bought a condo, became engaged to an Oxnard woman and is “happy” in Ventura.

Except, of course, during games, when perfection somehow eludes his players. “I’m focused and intense and that’s what I want my players to be,” Mathews explained. “It upsets me when they’re not. But I can say anything I want to these kids because the bottom line is: The college, the community and I care about them.”