(STORMING THE COURT:
St. John’s coach Steve Lavin returns to the Pauley Pavilion today to face the UCLA Bruins, a team he coached for seven seasons )
LOS ANGELES — St. John’s coach Steve Lavin has a seemingly impossible task at hand.
He must find a way to span 14 years, cross 3,000 miles, lead a team of players he didn’t recruit into Pauley Pavilion and try to post consecutive wins over storied programs — Duke and UCLA — and
perhaps change the perception of who is Steve Lavin.
And he thought playing eight ranked teams in a row earlier this season was daunting.
“Big week,” St. John’s assistant coach Rico Hines told The Post. “But Steve’s one of those bigger than life guys. He’s Supercool.”
And Lavin’s under super scrutiny going into today’s game against the Bruins. On a Thursday telephone conference call, one Los Angeles reporter asked if Lavin still uses as much hair gel as he did in 1996, when he began a seven-year coaching stint at UCLA.
He does not, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t run his hand through his hair and still lubricate a squeaky bicycle chain.
The 46-year-old Lavin, who has led St. John’s to a 13-8 record with losses to St. Bonaventure and Fordham and wins over Georgetown and Duke, is notably different yet remarkably similar to the 32-year-old Lavin who in led UCLA to a 145-78 record with six NCAA Tournament appearances — including losses to Detroit and Iowa State.
He was criticized for being too young and maybe too Cali at UCLA. He took a recruit for a bicycle ride in Manhattan Beach, an approach one would be hard-pressed seeing Roy Williams using. Lavin also raised eyebrows for riding an exercise bike while watching top recruits in the summer of 2002.
By the end of the 2003 season, when UCLA went 10-19, Lavin was fired and the poison-tipped arrows struck home.
“It’s tough for me to see a team that talented and for someone to give up on it the way he has,” Baron Davis, who remains a Lavin friend, told the Los Angeles Daily News
.
Lavin hasn’t changed his Supercool recruiting approach. He strolled highly-prized St. John’s recruit Norvel Pelle, an art buff, through Soho and took freshman Dwayne Polee Jr. to Jay Z’s 40/40 club. His changes as an individual go beyond the reduced hair gel quotient.
Lavin now is married. He misses his West Coast parents Mary and Cap, who taught him X’s and O’s as well as the art of speaking in near poetic prose. His staff — including Gene Keady — is older and more diverse. Practices are closed.
Yet the perception in Los Angeles remains that Lavin’s UCLA teams were wildly inconsistent.
“He wasn’t known for getting in early and staying late,” said one longtime UCLA official. “And sometimes you saw that in how his teams played — great one night, a no show the next.”
Lavin called that take on his work ethic preposterous.
“I would hardly be considered a balanced individual in terms of the disproportionate amount of time focused on basketball from Day 1,” Lavin said.
There were skeptics from Day 1 that believed a 32-year-old getting his first coach job at the program John Wooden that created the greatest dynasty college basketball has ever known, was doomed to fail. Lavin equated coaching UCLA with a running Fortune 500 company.
“Some of the other more challenging aspects of it when you’re young at UCLA is the management of a program — hiring coaches, the demands of media and boosters and donors, the natural crisis management that comes up in a season for every program across the country,” Lavin said. “Those are the things where age and experience elevate your decision-making and allow you to see with more clarity.”
Lavin sharpened his vision at ESPN for seven years where his Pearl Drops smile and loquacious analysis made him a rising star. In his interview with St. John’s athletic director Chris Monasch, the two joked that UCLA was on the schedule.
“UCLA is unique,” Lavin said. “You’ve got the Green Bay Packers with Lombardi, you’ve got the Yankees, you’ve got the Lakers, you’ve got the Celtics with Red Auerbach, the Knicks with Red Holzman. There are certain sports entities or institutions that are just unique from any other.”
Lavin is trying to build a UCLA-like tradition at St. John’s. Though he’s tried to pain this as the next game on the schedule his players know otherwise.
“We know how much that means to him,” forward Justin Burrell said. “He references it often as far the intensity when he first came. He told us about a lot of things that went on there.”
A win at UCLA (15-7), coupled with last Sunday’s 93-78 win over Duke and the nation’s second-ranked recruiting class due to arrive next fall surely will help sharpen the picture of the more grounded 46-year-old East Coast Lavin and fade the image of the carefree 32-year old West Coaster.
“I hope and I would think he would get a pretty warm reception,” said UCLA coach Ben Howland. “For 12 years of his life he worked very hard. He was part of a national championship team. Since he’s been gone he’s been nothing but positive toward UCLA.”
Lavin said in his 12 years at Pauley as an assistant and head coach, he doesn’t ever recall being in the visitor’s locker room. He expects to have an entourage of about 40 friends and relatives in the House That Wooden Built.
“As we get closer to taking that bus ride from the hotel to Pauley Pavilion, the surreal aspect will hit me,” Lavin said. “I’ve never allowed myself to look forward and reflect on what it means to come back as an opposing coach.”
It means coming back as the new Steve Lavin.
