PART OF THE PLAN

As dry as the sand in a long jump pit in mid-July, Bob Larsen’s deadpan sense of humor slinked to the surface again when he was summoned to the podium this month to say a few words in advance of his “last” UCLA-USC dual meet.

Larsen, soon to retire after 21 years as a member of the UCLA track coaching staff, 15 of them as head coach, surveyed his audience without offering even a trace of a smile.

“When you say this is my last USC meet,” he began, “I want you to know that I’ve been talking to my doctor. I do have a little medical problem, but I hope he’s being honest with me--it’s not that major. I do hope to be around in the future.”

That’s Larsen.

Master of the wry aside, champion of the no-frills understatement.

Larsen’s little medical problem is a recent diagnosis of prostate cancer.

Nothing to worry about, really, he says. “It’s something a lot of people my age are encountering,” he says matter-of-factly. “But it’s something that will be taken care of. I’ve researched it pretty thoroughly. And we’ve got some real good doctors here at UCLA.”

Initially, Larsen had been reluctant to go public with his condition, but when he saw the value of “getting the word out to younger guys that you better get that test,” Larsen agreed to discuss it in an interview.

“I’d just rather not be the example,” he quips.

Larsen says doctors caught the disease early because he had been tested regularly over the last four years. He has scheduled surgery for early June because he wanted to finish out the current track season and expects to be back on his feet--although “maybe not doing jumping jacks”--by the end of the month.

“It’s important to get the word out,” Larsen says. “Because timing is everything with this disease . . .

“I’d been getting the PSA [prostate specific antigen] test regularly and, after four years, there were indications that the PSA was higher than it should be. Last year, it all of a sudden spiked up high. It got my attention.

“Fortunately, I had a biopsy done just after the first of the year. We’re monitoring it, and we’ve got a plan to deal with it medically.”

Larsen, 61, says the cancer didn’t force his decision to retire, just nudged it along.

“I had contemplated this for the last few years,” says Larsen, who stepped aside as UCLA’s head men’s track coach after the 1999 season, serving the current season as a volunteer assistant.

“The cancer wasn’t the prime deciding factor. It affected my decision a little bit. It wasn’t that I couldn’t still coach and do everything, but it was something I needed to spend a little time thinking about.

“It was just one factor, the one that caught my attention a little more. The timing was right. It gave me a little more incentive to make the decision.”

*

The decision was made methodically, after considerable research and meticulous attention to detail--much the same way Larsen has approached his day-to-day coaching routine for decades.

Art Venegas, the longtime UCLA throwing coach who succeeded Larsen as head coach before the 2000 season, laughs as he recalls the two roommates that often accompanied him at out-of-town meets--Larsen and Larsen’s day planner.

“Administratively, one of his biggest strengths is his organization,” Venegas says. “Always, the day planner is completely up to date. I don’t remember ever having a meeting with him where he didn’t have everything on a list. He’d be talking to me and crossing out things. “One way to describe him is that he’s a very thorough individual. Details do not get overlooked. He wants to know, you know, if there’s a coaches meeting, is there dinner afterward and how many tickets are we allotted and can we bring our trainer? Everything’s got to be just right.”

Every morning on the road, Venegas says he would wake up and Larsen would be gone.

“He’d be off running,” Venegas says. “Every morning. I would say he’s very, very methodical about his life. Very disciplined. If he’s going to run, it’s got to be a certain way, a certain time.

“I don’t think I’ve seen his weight vary since I’ve known him. He’s always been slender, very fit, small-waisted. He’s constantly running and taking care of himself.”

Details.

Lists.

Consider this one as Larsen readies for his final NCAA championship meet, beginning today in Durham, N.C., as a member of the UCLA coaching staff:

Nine Pacific 10 team championships in 15 years as head coach.

Two NCAA team championships.

Four NCAA coach of the year awards.

Fifteen consecutive victories in the annual USC-UCLA dual meet.

An overall dual meet record of 118-3-1.

Three losses in 15 seasons?

“Hey, we shouldn’t have lost those three,” Larsen says with a laugh. “Doggone it.”

He ticks them off one by one.

“We lost once to Texas, 1991.”

(A down year for the Bruins. They went on to place sixth in the Pac-10, their lowest conference finish under Larsen.)

“We lost to Cal in ‘93, the only conference dual meet we lost. They had a bunch of fifth-year seniors and we made the mistake of scheduling the meet right after our second-quarter finals. We went up there and it was raining and our guys were so tired after finishing finals. Cal did a great job, but it still came down to the last couple of events. We couldn’t quite pull it out.”

And finally: “Florida last year. Although if the meet had been traditionally scored, instead of internationally scored, we would have won. It was that close.”

*

Another list:

Number of track coaches UCLA employed from 1946 through 1999: Three.

1. Ducky Drake.

2. Jim Bush.

3. Bob Larsen.

Or, to put it another way.

1. The man after whom UCLA named its track stadium.

2. The man whose plaque presently resides in both the National Track and Field Hall of Fame and the U.S. Track Coaches Assn. Hall of Fame.

3. The man with a better dual-meet record than either Drake or Bush.

Larsen acknowledges to some trepidation when he accepted the mantle after Bush retired in 1984.

“Oh yeah,” he says. “I look at the job like this: You’re just trying to keep it at a very high level.”

But, he adds, “For some reason, I always thought I’d end up [as head coach] at UCLA. I passed up many other jobs because I thought I had a chance. I was never tempted. In the back of my mind, UCLA was always special.”

Larsen had made a national reputation for himself while coaching distance runners at El Cajon’s Grossmont Community College to 11 national junior college records. In 1979, Bush approached Larsen about joining his staff with the condition Larsen would become head coach when Bush retired after a final five years.

“I thought the timing was right,” says Larsen, who accepted before the 1979-80 school year.

“Now that I look back, I was very fortunate. UCLA is a school with a high visibility, where there’s a lot you can do as a coach. Because of the academic and athletic prestige of the school, you have access to the best athletes.”

Larsen would rather not single them out--”dangerous territory,” he notes with a smile--but acknowledges a special affinity for the back-to-back NCAA champions of 1987 and 1988, a team that included future Olympians Mike Marsh, Kevin Young and Danny Everett.

“That 1987-88 group ended up so talented and accomplished so much, not only winning back-to-back NCAA titles but dominating,” Larsen says. “We had 80-some points (81 in 1987, 82 in 1988) and the second-place team had 29 or something like that.”

A distance specialist, Larsen takes pride in the U.S. indoor distance-medley relay record set by Jess Strutzel, Brian Fell, Michael Granville and Mark Hauser in 1999, along with the individual NCAA indoor championships won by Strutzel at 800 meters in 2000 and Mebrahtom Keflezighi at 5,000 meters in 1997.

After leaving UCLA, Larsen plans to continue coaching Strutzel and Keflezighi individually, with both athletes having qualified for the U.S. Olympic trials in Sacramento in July.

“It would be more difficult if I wasn’t going to continue coaching athletes,” Larsen says of retirement. “I’m not leaving the sport entirely. That part of the sport, working with individual athletes, I’ll have opportunities to still do that. I continue to enjoy that.”

He’s also looking forward to more time for himself, to not having to squeeze his daily running into a tight 20-minute time frame because that is only space available on the overcrowded day planner.

But first, there’s the matter of his health. Looking ahead, post-op, Larsen envisions golden days on the open road, a simpler routine of running for pleasure instead of running after the latest 400-meter high school prospect before Arkansas gets him first.

“Through exercise,” Larsen says, “more and more people are still very active later and later in life.

“After I get this cancer taken care of, I hope to be one of them.”