Westhead Resumes His Mad Basketball Experiment -- Innovator's New Project: Retooling George Mason

FAIRFAX, Va. - See, the mistake is: We try to think of Paul Westhead as a basketball coach, which he isn't. Not really. Not like Bob Knight at Indiana, anyway, or Pat Riley with the New York Knicks or Gene Hackman at Hickory High. That's the flaw in logic, because Westhead sidesteps our categories.

Basketball coaches blow whistles, call timeouts and stalk their sidelines like little generals.

"Coaches like to be in control," Westhead said. "They like, when they're down 10 and call a timeout, to look clever."

But Westhead, well, Westhead . . .

"He's got different ideas about the game, and he likes to put those ideas to work," said Jack Ramsay, the former Portland Trail Blazer coach and National Basketball Association guru-about-town who also was Westhead's college coach three decades ago at LaSalle.

At age 54, Westhead has landed at George Mason University, in the deep Virginia woods of suburban Washington, outside the Beltway and outside the lines of conventional wisdom, playing Paul Ball and issuing practice uniforms with "Run the System" written on every piece of available mesh.

"I'm here to run my deal," he said, trampling over coachspeak about molding young men and spending quality time in the gym. "I'm here to show, once again, that this system works."

Basketball coaches build programs from the bottom. They teach fundamentals and build recruiting bases. But Westhead, he's not a basketball coach. He is a mad scientist of sorts - "but there's a reason in the madness," he said - always looking for a laboratory, always waiting for his own drummer to begin drumming so that he can begin marching.

"Running the system" is a mission.

And funny thing, what made Westhead an oddball at Loyola Marymount and an outcast in the NBA - "They view him as a wild innovator," Ramsay said - makes him a commodity now. Something to be packaged and sold.

"You need a gimmick these days," said George Mason Athletic Director Jack Kvancz, who then pointed an imaginary remote at an imaginary television. "You've got to compete."

George Mason was slipping, with 14 wins in the past two years under Ernie Nestor.

"We've done two years of hard time here, we didn't have any players and we were starting to lose our fan base," Kvancz said of George Mason, which plays in the 10,000-seat on-campus Patriot Center. "Plus, in this area, we've got John (Thompson) at Georgetown, Gary (Williams) at Maryland and (Mike) Jarvis at George Washington. I've got to have somebody with a gimmick."

Westhead began running the offensive half of his laser-show operation in the mid-'70s at LaSalle, refining a fast-break-by-the-numbers scheme he borrowed from Sonny Allen, who coached at Old Dominion in the '70s. Westhead takes devilish pride in describing how he forced one of Rollie Massimino's plodding Villanova teams to score 103 points to beat LaSalle in '78.

After winning an NBA title with the Los Angeles Lakers, and after having been fired, essentially, by Magic Johnson, and ditched after a single season with the Chicago Bulls, Westhead arrived at Loyola Marymount in 1985. That's when he added the defensive half of his system.

"For the first time in my life, I decided I was going to make the game even faster," Westhead said. "So we pressed fullcourt the whole game."

And if the principal memory of Westhead's Loyola tenure is the tragic death of Hank Gathers, there was also some transcendent (some would say sacrilegious) basketball played. There was a night in the post-Gathers NCAA Tournament of '90 when Loyola ripped apart Michigan, the defending national champion, 149-115, and set a slew of tournament records.

"This system, it can do things no other system can do," Westhead said. "If we had played another way, and played Michigan 1,000 times, we would have lost 998. Probably 1,000. Instead, we won by 34, against the defending national champions.

"When it happens, it's like another game," Westhead said. "It's not like basketball."

He becomes almost metaphysical at moments like these, a graying former Shakespeare professor waving his cape in the wind. He's been wounded so many times - Magic, the Bulls, Gathers' death - and yet he holds tightly to his passion. And he says things like this about the system: "To quote Somerset Maugham, `The difference between genius and insanity is the trembling of a leaf.' "

George Mason, winner of only eight of its first 23 games running the system, is averaging nearly 87 points a game, but giving up more than 94. There have been occasional humiliations, such as a 132-87 starching against Louisville and a 110-81 loss to James Madison.

"It's hard for Coach Westhead, because we're real bad," sophomore point guard Troy Manns said. "I mean, we're not real bad, but we don't have the athletes."

Kvancz said, "These are the same players who won 14 games in two years. But you see flashes. . . . He's taking gambles. Hey, if you're gonna play 63-62 games, you better always have 63. This way, there's pizzazz."

There is reason to believe it will get better, and there is an eerie similarity to Loyola Marymount. There, Westhead went 19-11 and 12-16 in his first two seasons. In the third, transfers Gathers, Bo Kimble and Corey Gaines became eligible. The Lions went 74-21 in the next three seasons and made three consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances.

At George Mason, Westhead has two Proposition 48 freshmen sitting out: 6-foot-8 Kevin Ward of Frederick, Md., and 6-2 Nathan Langley of Baltimore.

"Both of them can play," said George Mason senior Donald Ross. And in any case, Westhead has a five-year contract, which is good, because he has only one other scholarship to give next year.

So here he stays, teaching players to "rebound, outlet, shoot . . . rebound, outlet, shoot . . . " in hopes of playing so quickly that every opponent becomes Michigan in '90, crushed by the system. Training his players like track athletes, running them with parachutes trailing behind them to increase endurance.

"Here I am, once again, like Loyola Marymount," Westhead said. "If I do the normal things, get lucky, kick-start this thing, we go from eighth place to sixth and maybe to fourth and hang around there. If I come in and do my deal, we go from eighth to first again."

The eyes twinkle, younger than the man himself. Somewhere a scoreboard awaits his assault.

"I am fascinated," he said, "by the possibility of doing things better than the normal way would have you do."