L.A. Stories -- Henry Bibby, Usc

HENRY BIBBY and STEVE LAVIN have taken different routes to high-profile coaching jobs. For Bibby, a long and winding road has led him to USC. Across town at UCLA, Lavin has risen from an unpaid volunteer to head coach. The common denominator is success.

It is 2:53 in the afternoon and Steve Lavin is dangerously close to breaking rule No. 3 (BE ON TIME - No excuses). The last people to do so, Jelani McCoy and Kris Johnson, were benched for the first six minutes of UCLA's game against Saint Louis.

So Lavin hurries with his story, which is difficult to notice, because everything the 32-year-old coach does is at a Pepsi-driven pace fueled by continual consumption of the caffeinated soft drink.

He is talking about rule No. 22 (Share the orange juice), and you get the feeling UCLA needed a taskmaster in the post-Jim Harrick era.

With Lavin, Bruin attitude has returned to UCLA.

One can see it on the court, where the Bruins (13-3 Pac-10, 19-7 overall) have clinched the conference title and NCAA tournament berth. The Washington Huskies (9-7, 16-9) will get a glimpse Thursday at Edmundson Pavilion.

And one can also see it in the UCLA locker room and the coach's office.

Bruin Attitude is embodied in a list of 23 stipulations - Lavin doesn't like the term rules - that UCLA lives by. A few are: "Study during study hall" and "No more no-look passes" and "No cussing" and "Share the orange juice."

The latter required some explanation.

"We'd get a shipment of orange juice sent to the locker room every week, and some guys would load up about 40 or so in pillow cases and take them home," Lavin said. "If you're not going to share orange juice, you're not going to share the basketball, and you're not going to make that extra pass that could win a game.

"If you're not good to each other off the court, sharing and being friends, it's hard to be good teammates on the court. The guys got a kick out of that one, but if you think about it, it's all connected."

Of course it is. Nearly everything, according to Lavin, is connected to basketball.

The previous Bruin coach didn't have such stringent stipulations. He let the players express themselves in ways UCLA alumni and administrators frowned upon.

Just before the season, UCLA fired Harrick, 58, with four years left on his contract, saying he had falsified an expense report related to a dinner for potential recruits and later lied about it to school officials.

Harrick says UCLA was just looking for a reason to get rid of him, and he is threatening to go to court over the failure to reach a contract settlement with UCLA.

The fallout with the school also caused a rift between Harrick and Lavin. The former coach didn't endorse his assistant as his replacement. He told an ESPN interviewer he didn't think Lavin had what it takes to be a head coach.

The two men haven't spoken to each other since.

"Normally, your former mentor is the guy who helps you out the most in your first coaching job," Lavin said. "But that's not the case. He's not there at this point and isn't someone I can look to."

Their relationship is dicey at best, but Lavin talks freely about it. He will talk about anything from philosophy, to poetry, to world hunger, and somehow steer the conversation back to the concepts of the pick-and-roll and the importance of offensive rebounds.

Seven minutes before practice, he is telling stories about his basketball-coaching father, his childhood in the suburbs of San Francisco and orange juice.

And it all relates to basketball.

It was George Raveling, the former USC basketball coach, who told Lavin to accommodate the media whenever possible. Or maybe it was Mike Krzyzewski. Or Gene Keady. Or John Wooden.

Hard to keep up with the game's best coaches feeding you advice every day. Lavin has stolen bits and pieces from each of them.

"A nugget of wisdom here, a little there, and pretty soon you have a bounty of knowledge from the greatest master teachers," he said. "I've learned from and watched them for years."

Now they watch him.

"I certainly like Steve's attempt to get more discipline from the players, both on and off the court," said Wooden, who coached UCLA to 10 national championships and regularly attends home games. "Doing that, despite the fact he's a young coach and (was) very close to the players in his role as assistant coach, was a very courageous move."

Wooden was instrumental in Lavin's hiring, both as an interim and permanent coach.

Lavin's career has been meteoric. From an unpaid volunteer three years ago, to an anonymous assistant making $16,000 a year last season, to a head coach of the most storied college basketball team.

His four-year contract, including money from a summer camp, will pay him about $400,000 annually.

"He really isn't Forrest Gump, but I think his success sometimes does throw people," said Lavin's father, Cap Lavin, who was voted the Bay Area's high-school player of the 1940s and played at the University of San Francisco. "They think he must have gotten where he is through networking, or that he must have taken all the right (public-relations) courses."

The younger Lavin is close with the game's best coaches and has incorporated parts of all of them into his style. His gelled hair and tailored suits draws comparisons to Pat Riley. His boisterous on-court mannerisms liken him to Rick Pitino, and he shares an intense practice philosophy with Bob Knight.

It is the latter trait - a revised approach to today's ideas and virtues - that caught the attention of UCLA administrators. They like that the Bruins run to the bench during timeouts and have ceased showboating, which Harrick didn't mind.

Lavin hasn't been afraid to be strict; five times starters have been benched for team infractions.

"If I'd done anything but be myself, I'd have been second-guessing myself forever," Lavin said.

"It might not have worked," he said of being tough with the players. "The guys might have rebelled, and we might have won two games, and I'd be coaching high-school hoops next year.

"That would have been OK. . . . If I'd let them do what they wanted, I couldn't live with myself. You can learn from all the best, but in the end you have to be yourself."

Lavin's approach hasn't been without its failings.

The Bruins suffered a 48-point defeat to Stanford, the worst loss in school history. And they lost their first three games against ranked foes.

UCLA Chancellor Charles Young and Athletic Director Peter Dalis said they would wait until the end of the season to hire Harrick's replacement, but decided on Lavin, believing he had restored a sense of responsibility and discipline to the Bruin basketball program that both men implied had been lost.

"He's like a bridge between the old school and our generation," Bruin guard Toby Bailey said. "He's the '90s type of coach. Someone with ties to the past and how the game used to be played and how it's played today. . . . When we got blown out by Stanford, nobody got down, and we turned around and won the next four."

Credit Lavin and rule, ahem, stipulation No. 12: "No hanging head."