UCLA Coach Steve Lavin Getting His Baptism With Jelani Mccoy Situation

LOS ANGELES - Steve Lavin sits down in front of the reporters and the klieg lights, smiles into the cameras and immediately falls into one of his typical, fast-breaking soliloquies.

Talking about "getting better instead of bitter" and "developing the person, not just the player" and "building inch-by-inch, brick-by-brick and day-by-day."

"Lav-isms," some of us in the media began calling them last year.

Only this isn't last year. Lavin is no longer the gee-whiz kid thrust into his first season as UCLA basketball coach. If he is wet behind the ears now, it's probably because he sprinkled himself with some expensive cologne.

He dresses better, drives a nicer car and instead of his old $16,000-a-year assistant's salary, he just signed a five-year, $2.3 million contract.

He is the subject of national magazine stories, has his own diary on ESPN's Sportsnet, appears regularly on local talk shows and generally has become a mega-media star in just 13 short months.

The fun part is that Lavin seems to enjoy it. He is soaking it all up, having himself a grand, old time. Lav in Wonderland, you might even call it.

Except that Wonderland does not come without a price.

Building an image as a strict disciplinarian, a guy who will not bend the rules for even his best players, Lavin was confronted with yet a new challenge last week.

Call it the Jelani McCoy Crisis.

And for the first time, the coach has found himself pinned in a

corner in a different kind of zone press. A year ago, he managed to squeeze out of almost every tight situation. But his timing on this one was awful.

He announced on Monday that he had "partially reinstated" McCoy, who, at 6-foot-10, is his only legitimate big man. The junior center had been indefinitely suspended on Sept. 29, along with senior Kris Johnson, for unspecified violations.

McCoy's reinstatement wouldn't have looked so bad if it hadn't come only five days after North Carolina's huge front line had squashed Lavin's mini-Bruins, pounding them by 41 points in the Great Alaska Shootout.

So what about the morals and ethics Lavin has been preaching ever since slipping into Jim Harrick's old head coach's chair? Have they all gone by the wayside in a frantic attempt to pump UCLA's basketball program back up with the big boys?

On the surface, at least, it certainly looks that way. I mean, how quickly after the Bruins realized they were playing at a different altitude than Carolina did McCoy have an attitude adjustment? Did he suddenly get better at halftime, or what?

Sorry, Lav, but as coincidences go, this one was a definite reach.

Not that you would have known it at last week's news conference in Westwood. Lavin, working the room like a basketball version of USC's John Robinson, insisted that nothing had changed is his disciplinary methods.

"We've had periodic times when we've sat down with the players and their families and talked," he said, referring to McCoy and Johnson, who had been partially reinstated earlier. "Yesterday was just the time we (he and McCoy) actually met.

"I know there have been questions about the timing of it, and I think that's fine, for people to speculate. But we've got to have the kids' best interests in mind.

"If I was thinking only of winning games," he stressed, "I would have reinstated them (McCoy and Johnson) earlier. They'd both have been in Alaska."

McCoy and Johnson are back practicing with the team, but neither were to appear when the Bruins took on another bigger, stronger club, No. 8 New Mexico, in the John R. Wooden Classic this weekend at Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim.

Both, however, should now be ready to play when the Pac-10 season opens the first weekend of January. And so the skepticism continues.

That's OK. Lavin seemed to shrug it off. The coach even went out of his way to say that McCoy had provided an early hint he was taking the proper steps toward recovery by appearing at the team bus before it left for the airport and the trip to Alaska.

"That showed me a lot," Lavin said.

Somehow, it is easy to forget this is a man just beginning his first full, secure year of collegiate head coaching, a 33-year-old idealist suddenly forced to deal with problems he had never encountered until now.

Take recruiting. He scored big with this current class, led by Baron Davis. But he lost a potential inside force in Schea Cotton, who was ruled academically ineligible.

This year, he's already had commitments from a couple of highly regarded players, including Ray Young, a good shooting guard from Northern California. But again, he and the Bruins missed out on an even more prominent prospect when Teyshaun Prince, the 6-foot-8 forward from Dominguez High, signed with Kentucky.

"We're supposed to be the leaders with Gadzuric (6-foot-11 prep All-American Dan Gadzuric from Masachusetts)," Lavin said, "but you know how that goes."

Yeah. The same way it is all beginning to go. You win some, and you lose some. In between, you try to mold your program the best way you can.

Lavin is learning. He is still feeling his way. And if he is smart, he'll treat this latest round with McCoy as an educational experience.

"Never a dull moment, huh?" he said, offering a weak smile before the start of that stressful news conference Tuesday.

Lavin can be like that. He has the kind of disarming personality that makes you want to believe him.

"A young old-timer," Duke's Mike Krzyzewski, one of his admitted idols, has called him.

So much of Lavin's philosophy seems to be bridged between generations, leaning on the Woodens and Pete Newells in one area, the Krzyzewskis and Gene Keadys (of Purdue) in another.

"Coach Keady recently gave a two-hour lecture I attended called `Coaching Generation-X,' " Lavin reported last week.

At the rate he's going, Lavin soon will be able to give his own lecture on the subject.