No Time to Stop : After Leading UCLA to NCAA Championship, Harrick Isn’t Satisfied, Starts Over Tonight

He has weathered seven scorching seasons under the heat lamp, though at times it looked as if he would wilt away for good.

One loss away. One year away. One blow-up or blowout away. Every stumble raised a hundred questions, every question was set to trigger the ejector button.

So, as he glides into his eighth season at UCLA with a new national championship banner about to rise to the Pauley Pavilion rafters, what is there left to ask of Jim Harrick?

For the crowd of students and fans lined up at the UCLA student bookstore last week, the demand was for a singular thing: his autograph.

With a new book to promote, Harrick marched over from the basketball offices to the student union, where he received waves of congratulations, kissed babies and sold a few dozen books.

His wife, Sally, stood nearby, smiling warmly and reflecting on the journey. Eight years ago, five years ago, even last year, could anybody have imagined this scene?

“When we first got here, we were kind of the new kid on the block,” she said. “But now, we’re part of the UCLA family.

“If you think back on it, you thought, ‘Oh yeah, we’d do this in less than seven years.’ But all of a sudden, it’s seven years. . . . Gosh, it just flew by.”

Harrick’s book is entitled “Embracing the Legend: Jim Harrick Revives the UCLA Mystique.” And, as the students and fans continue to line up for her obviously pleased husband, someone asks Sally Harrick: Is this a sign that UCLA is finally embracing him ?

“Yes,” she said quietly, “yes, I think that’s what it is. Right now, it feels right. It feels like we’ve been here forever.”

*

It wasn’t forever between UCLA national titles, but it was close enough for the restless Bruin nation.

Twenty years after John Wooden retired with the last of his 10 titles, Harrick brought home UCLA’s 11th. A few months later, Harrick, who was already tied up through the 1996-97 season, signed a contract extension that will last into the 21st Century, or forever, whichever comes first.

This is a fairly dramatic development for a man who was always considered the fourth-choice coach, who took the job after five others tried and failed to follow Wooden and a handful of more glamorous candidates decided not to even attempt it.

To many, Harrick was a fallback candidate who wasn’t up to the UCLA challenge. Sitting in his office now, Harrick concedes he wasn’t always positive himself.

“There’s always that lingering doubt,” Harrick said. “I’ve never doubted my ability, but you’ve always wondered, ‘Will you be in a position, will you be fortunate enough, lucky enough, talented enough. . . . Can you win a national championship?’ ”

Left unsaid is the knowledge that if he couldn’t win a national title, nothing else would matter.

“There’s always that doubt in every coach in America’s mind,” Harrick said. “It was in mine, also. And that doubt is gone. I don’t feel any better as a coach, but I know the things we did through the tournament, I guess they worked.”

Before last season, even as he racked up the 20-victory seasons and the NCAA tournament berths, the Don MacLean- and Mitchell Butler-led teams seemed to collapse at the worst times, against far inferior clubs, raising loud objections to the Harrick regime.

“When you choose this job, you give up your privacy,” said UCLA great Bill Walton, who had been one of Harrick’s biggest critics but throughout last year praised Harrick and the team. “When you come to UCLA, you give up the privilege of just being OK, of just being average.

“He’s done a great job, and it’s in a very difficult situation--because it’s UCLA, and you have to be great. That’s why everybody loves UCLA, it requires being special.”

Year after year, the Bruins’ inability to rise in critical moments, to play solid defense, to improve as their careers progressed, was blamed on Harrick.

Then came last season, led by three seniors who showed immense poise and dignity, and a team that played hard defense, ran the court with breathtaking ease, won its last 19 games, and, most important, got better and better as UCLA played bigger and bigger games.

“I think winning it all takes the monkey off his back, that scrutiny about whether he can coach or not,” said Kansas State Coach Tom Asbury, an assistant to Harrick during Harrick’s nine-year tenure at Pepperdine.

“The expectations will be there, if you have a couple of losses, the wolves will be back this year. It’s a very thankless position in that sense. But clearly, if you had to have it proved to you, last year proved he can really coach.”

Said current assistant coach Lorenzo Romar: “He jokes that everything you can think of a coach not being able to do, people have said he hasn’t been able to do. He couldn’t recruit, he couldn’t motivate players, his players don’t play defense, couldn’t shoot free throws. Anything you could think of, he couldn’t do it.

“He wins a title, now, all of a sudden, he can do it. Quite interesting.”

Those closest to him, and Harrick himself, say that his stubborn confidence in his own abilities is both his most under-recognized trait and the most important one in outlasting the UCLA coaching curse.

Not when the recruiting pool temporarily dried, not when the hot seat was turned up to full blast, not once did he ever second-guess his decision to come to Westwood, not once did he ever yearn for the gentle atmosphere of Pepperdine.

“As difficult as it was, I don’t think he ever wondered whether it was a smart decision to come to UCLA or not,” said Asbury, who replaced Harrick at Pepperdine before leaving for Kansas State. “At the worst time, at the darkest day, if you walked up to him and told him you could cast a spell and send him back to Pepperdine, I don’t believe for a minute he would’ve done it.”

But, after the first-round tournament loss to Tulsa that ended the 1993-94 season, Harrick now concedes that he felt uneasy--all the way through to the Bruins’ near-upset loss to Missouri in the second round of last year’s tournament.

“When you come off a Tulsa loss, you’re kind of goosey all summer and certainly all winter long,” Harrick said. “That puts the fear in you that it can happen again. You could be beaten in the second round by Missouri, and that would’ve spoiled a great, great year.

“I look back, and I lost a game like that in ’83 [at Pepperdine] to North Carolina State. Your team has to be good enough to take the other team’s best shot it can ever give you, and withstand it. And we were last year.

“Luck, divine intervention, whatever it was, it was there for us.”

And after delivering UCLA the long-sought title, what does the future hold for Jim Harrick? He’s 57, been through the worst times, and looks healthier now than ever.

Don’t expect to see him relaxing for a few years, letting UCLA slide, then retiring, say his friends.

“I don’t see him as being one of those deals where, ‘Whew, glad that’s over,’ ” Asbury said. “I think in a sense, he’s relieved because I think this provides him some security that was not there otherwise. But that is all he’s relieved about.

“He’s a competitive little . . . I’ll tell you that. I don’t think winning it means he doesn’t want to win another one really bad.”

With UCLA’s recruiting base as strong as it has ever been, with young and talented players littering his roster, with his eyes set on a long run of tremendous success, Harrick is not shy about his desire for more.

“Really, it’s made me greedier,” Harrick said. “It’s made me want more. I want to come back and do it again, more than anything.

“I want to be with the guys who won two, and separate myself from the guys who won one. I don’t want to sound arrogant or anything, but I just want more and more.”

Though Harrick quietly points to next year, when Charles O’Bannon and Cameron Dollar are seniors and, if they stay around, Toby Bailey and J.R. Henderson are juniors, as UCLA’s next good shot at a national title, he doesn’t back away from thinking about a possible Duke-like repeat and maybe even a three-peat.

“If we were fortunate enough to win it this year, I think we’d be in the hunt to win it next year,” Harrick said. “Whether we can win it three years in a row . . . you’ve got to be really fortunate. Could you get by a Missouri three times?

“Possibly. I wouldn’t downplay it. I like our confidence. I like what we accomplished last year, and how we went about it.”

And how deeply it bound him to the UCLA mystique, for now and forever. How magic is it when a man’s life dream turns into a legacy of his own?

“When I was at Pepperdine, looking out my window with a 180-degree view of the ocean, you contemplate why, why would you take the UCLA job?” Harrick said. “The answer is, it’s a great challenge to see if you can accomplish what we did last year.

“Can you win one, like Wooden won 10? Can you get your team into the top five consistently, top 10 consistently over a period of time? Can you recruit the best athletes?

“And that’s the reason you take the job, to see if you can.”