Photo by Robert Burroughs

Aztecs scrimmage

Smokey Gaines slid into a booth in a dimly lit Chinese restaurant one Monday afternoon not long ago, scanned the menu for about five seconds, and then laid it down. The restaurant is one of those anonymous eateries that can be found in almost any San Diego shopping center, but Gaines, who is head coach of the men’s basketball team at San Diego State University, has made this particular one a regular lunching spot for the last three years. On this visit he was looking for a little solace in the familiar surroundings: over the weekend his team, favored to win the Western Athletic Conference title for the first time ever this year, had dropped its first two conference games, one a blowout against archrival Brigham Young University.

Smokey Gaines

Photo by Robert Burroughs

As the waiter approached, Gaines grinned at him. The two exchanged pleasantries, but Gaines’s grin faded when the waiter suddenly asked in a loud voice, “How could you lose by so much?"

“I know, I know,’’ Gaines replied, waving his hand in the air. It was a question he had obviously had his fill of in the last two days.

With a nervous laugh, the waiter added, “See, when you’re winning, nobody says anything. But when you lose…

“When you lose, even the man from Hong Kong is on your back,’’ Gaines said with a wink.

The waiter’s complaint was not the sort of thing Gaines has heard much of since he took over as basketball coach at State in 1979. After a dismal first season record of 6-21, he directed the team to 15-12 and 20-9 seasons in 1980-81 and 1981-82, respectively. This year, in spite of a disappointing 5-5 conference record, the Aztecs are 14-7 overall and are well on their way to their fifth winning season in the last six years. But every year, it seems, the pressure to win is greater, and, as Gaines is finding out, there is a lot more at stake these days than school spirit.

Gaines is a tall, trim man with the good looks of a television personality. At forty-one, his hairline is just beginning to recede at the temples, leaving him with a broad forehead that clouds with wrinkles when he is concerned. He is given to wearing immaculately tailored suits with silk ties and matching handkerchiefs; when he is standing near the Aztec bench during a game, the cuffs of his perfectly cut pants are only millimeters off the floor.

Gaines burst like a meteor into San Diego's sports atmosphere when he first arrived in 1979. The city’s newspapers soon were bulging with one-liners from his interviews and press conferences. He told reporters he believed in higher education. “You know, 6-8, 6-9, 6-10.” When he discovered he had a returning player at State who had averaged only one point per game the year before, Gaines complained, “That’s one point more than a dead man. You get one point just for showing up.” And when someone suggested to him that he’d be elected mayor if he could win ten games with State’s talent-poor team, he said, “Let me be governor, I’ll win twelve.”

Gaines is more serious these days, and he admits the jokes and flamboyance of a few years ago were a ploy to draw attention to himself and away from what was a lousy basketball team. Promotion is one thing at which Smokey Gaines is very adept, and he isn’t shy about saying so. “I could sell air to put in a bottle,” he told me once. (Gaines is articulate but he still uses the vernacular he learned in his native Detroit.) ”I always be good at everything I do.

“That first year [at State] I just didn’t have no players. I had to get the attention of the public, to keep it off the game. We in the entertainment business right here, you know. We buckin’ for the entertainment dollar. If I’d come here and been very serious and sat in my office here and didn’t speak, then [State] would have had just another [basketball] program. But with me bein’ a colorful coach, or however you might want to put it, I think that helped this program a lot. You can’t buy the kind of recognition we gained by that.”

But Gaines will need more than his promotional skills to satisfy the demands of his job over the next few years. Although he downplays it, there is growing pressure on him to win, particularly this year when the Aztecs were preseason favorites to win their conference. “Let’s be realistic; this is a profession where you are judged according to your performance on twenty-eight nights a year,” says one of Gaines’s assistant coaches, Mike Brunker. “If you finish last in your class at medical school, they still call you doctor. But if you finish last in the Western Athletic Conference, you’re gonna get fired.”

More importantly. State is also hoping Gaines can turn the men’s basketball team into a rousing financial success. College basketball has become a big business, and the lucrative TV contracts and sold-out arenas that a playoff-caliber team can generate — particularly in an era of drastic budget reductions for California’s colleges and universities — are increasingly attractive. The fifty-two college teams that make the NCAA playoffs this year will each get about $125,000, primarily in television revenues, and the four that go to the championship tournament will get more than $500,000 apiece. That money goes a long way; State’s basketball program has a total 1982-83 budget of $305,000, and extra revenues are always needed to fund less popular sports such as swimming and volleyball that are a constant drain on a university’s finances.

“Basketball teams can be a good way for colleges to make money quickly,” explains Jim Brovelli, head basketball coach at the University of San Diego (which, like State, is in the process of upgrading its basketball program). “It’s a low-overhead sport — there’s not a lot of equipment, and fewer players [than football]. The travel expenses are not that high.” And unlike football, where at least fifteen or twenty good players are needed for a top-notch program, “basketball is a sport where you can [beat most opponents] with one or two top players,” Brovelli points out.

Although Gaines is being counted on to give State’s basketball program a healthy financial glow, he actually arrived in the middle of the school’s effort to develop a high-powered athletic program. Pressure from booster groups such as the Aztec Athletic Foundation helped set the machinery in motion; as foundation board member Gil Frank, chairman of the Bank of Southern California, puts it, “We’re the eighth largest community in the country; we deserve a major college athletic program.” In addition, once State decided in the mid-1970s to pull out of the Pacific Coast Athletic Association and make a bid to join the more prestigious Western Athletic Conference, it had to impress the schools already in the conference with the quality of its athletics (the schools wanted assurance that if they played a new opponent regularly, the games would be well-attended and would make money). So State began upgrading all of its athletic programs, including men’s basketball. It was a big step for what was at the time still a relatively small-time school, and it was also a bit of a gamble. It meant risking losing fans if State lost consistently to tougher opponents. It meant diving headlong into the sordid world of recruiting high school basketball players from all over the nation, a world in which secret payoffs and special deals — the vast majority of them violations of the NCAA’s official regulations — are commonly made. And it also meant spending more money. Under Tim Vezie, who coached the basketball team at that time, the Aztecs began leasing the Sports Arena for their home games, and playing traditional basketball powers such as UCLA and DePaul rather than Fresno State or the University of the Pacific. By the time State joined the WAC in 1978, Vezie had put together a team that could hold its own with almost any opponent, and in the next two years a total of four Aztec basketball players were selected in the National Basketball Association professional draft.

But pressure was already threatening to blow apart the whole program. Unbeknownst to the public, Vezie’s contract for the 1918-79 season stipulated that he would be fired unless his team won eighteen games and finished first in the WAC. It was a clause that Vezie would later futilely plead he had agreed to sign under duress. State’s basketball team won only fifteen games that year, and to make matters worse, as the season was ending, an article in the Los Angeles Times disclosed that four of the school’s former basketball players had charged Vezie and his assistants with violating NCAA regulations by giving them under-the-table payments, credit for classes never attended, and other favors. Vezie denied most of the charges; he claimed the players were dissatisfied with his coaching philosophy and frustrated because they had become academically ineligible. State immediately launched an investigation, and although some of the players’ charges were found to be true, the NCAA decided not to put the school on probation. Part of the reason for this may have been that Vezie was fired almost as soon as the investigation began.

Still, the incident sullied the reputation of State’s major new basketball program. The man chosen to clean it up was David “Smokey” Gaines, who grew up in the ghettos of Detroit with a dream of someday playing for the Harlem Globetrotters. He achieved that dream, and more; with his selection as head coach at State, he became the first black head coach of a major college basketball program in California. As Gaines himself is quick to point out, “That’s somethin’.”

Like most of his young friends on Detroit’s Hastings Street, Gaines played basketball almost constantly from an early age. His family of nine children was poor; Gaines’s mother was a five-dollar-a-day cleaning woman, and his father, a subcontractor, deserted the family when Gaines was eleven. The nearby playgrounds and recreation halls were a proving ground for local talent, and the players who rose to the top could remain aloof from the hustling and gang activity that went on around them. “One of my goals as a kid was to play for the Harlem Globetrotters,” Gaines told me one day in his office on State’s campus. “We got the opportunity to see the Globetrotters play, and also, there were some ex-Globetrotters living in the area. We really looked up to those guys.

“Basketball meant a lot to me. The competition was tough. Hey, in Detroit, everything’s tough, to tell you the truth… But [playing basketball] taught me to deal with competition, with the elements around me. And when I was able to deal with the elements around me, I was able to deal with everything else when I left. Because it was tougher bein’ in the ghetto.”

Gaines also credits his Detroit childhood with instilling in him a drive to succeed. It is a drive that still bums within him today; it is one of the most noticeable things about him. “At that time, a lot of older people would sit on the porch and say, ‘Hey, son, you got to have a trade. You can have a degree, but if you don’t have a trade, it’s a problem. Because it gonna come one day that the guy who have the trade gonna get the job. ’ Now, I was a pretty good little athlete at that time. And I could see the majority of the guys who left [the ghetto and went to college on athletic scholarships], didn’t get a degree. They went to school for a year or two and then they’s right back in the neighborhood, doin’ nothin’…joinin’ the service, or workin’ as a delivery boy, or whatever. I didn’t want that. So I said to myself, ‘Hey, if I leave Detroit to go to school somewhere, I’m definitely going to get a degree before I come back.’”

After starring at Northeastern High School (long-time residents of the Motor City can still remember Gaines leading his team against the Austin Prep School team of Dave Debus-schere, who went on to gain fame with the New York Knickerbockers), Gaines enrolled in LeMoyne College in Memphis, Tennessee. He was a standout in college basketball, too, averaging more that twenty-eight points per game over three seasons. By the time his eligibility as a player was up in 1963, he had obtained a bachelor’s degree in elementary education, with a minor in physical education. Gaines was selected by the Detroit Pistons in the sixth round of the professional draft that year, but when he was also invited to try out for the Harlem Globetrotters, he decided to spurn the Pistons’ rookie camp and flew to Chicago, where the Globetrotters were holding tryouts.

Jesse Evans, Smokey Gaines, Mike Brunker

Photo by Robert Burroughs

A total of 117 players had been invited to the Globetrotters camp. When the team announced it had openings for only four, Gaines made sure he was one of the four. “To sum up Smoke in one word — he’s a survivor,” says Mike Brunker, who has worked for Gaines as an assistant coach for seven years, three of them in San Diego. “He approaches the game of basketball as if it’s a street fight, and he wants to come out the winner.”

Gaines started for the Globetrotters in 1963, using his expert ball-handling and dribbling skills to clown for the crowds. The team visited sixty-four countries in seven months, then went to Europe for a two-and-a-half-month tour. It was educational, Gaines says, but when asked to recount anecdotes from his Globetrotter days, he talks instead about how wearying the travel was.

He took several leaves of absence from the Globetrotters in the next few years, and left the team for good in 1967. After a year of warming the bench for the old American Basketball Association’s Kentucky Colonels, he returned to Detroit and worked at a series of odd jobs (including a stint as a furniture salesman) while obtaining his master’s degree in physical education from Eastern Michigan University. He got the degree in 1970, but the studying didn’t stop there. About this time Gaines, who admits he has wanted to be a comedian all his life, sent away for tapes of jokes and one-liners, then memorized them while trying to think of ways to tie them in to his own experiences. He still pulls those same jokes out of his excellent memory from time to time, using them and reusing them as the situations arise. “When I was a kid, we were so poor we couldn’t pay attention. We had to borrow it,” he will say, and a grin will spread across his face as he waits for a reaction from his listeners.

In 1973 Gaines was working in Detroit as a high school basketball coach and a rec hall leader in a Job Corps program when Dick Vitale, head basketball coach at the University of Detroit, hired him as an assistant. When Vitale moved into the position of athletic director four years later, Gaines became his hand-picked successor as head coach. “I learned a lot from Dick Vitale,” Gaines says of his former mentor. “I credit him with a lot of the things I use now in the promotional side of this business. You gotta be a good promoter.”

You must also coach winning basketball, and from 1977 to 1979 Gaines’s team won forty-seven games and lost only ten. But in 1978 Vitale was named head coach of the Detroit Pistons, and a new athletic director, Larry Geracioti, took over at the University of Detroit. From the start, Gaines and Geracioti clashed. Gaines was not happy with the salary raises offered to him by Geracioti, and felt the new athletic director secretly envied him because of Gaines’s popularity. Geracioti was a “five-foot-five little dictator with a little man’s complex only Napoleon could rival,” Gaines once told reporter Mike Granberry of the Los Angeles Times. More recently, he said of Geracioti, “We just couldn’t get along . . . and there’s no need to work in a place where you don’t get along with the people.”

When the job at San Diego State opened up, Gaines jumped for it. “It meant more money,” he told me, “and my marketability at that time was pretty good.” One other coach was seriously considered for the job — Cal State Fullerton’s Bobby Dye — but it was Gaines who proved to be the favorite of the students, returning players, and a majority of the selection committee. “ He was so enthusiastic,” recalls Mary Alice Hill, an assistant athletic director at State who was on the committee. “We were looking for someone who could turn our program around and put it on another level. We were in the WAC already, but we weren't doing that well [in terms of both wins and attendance]. He brought all these packets and promo materials to the interviews, things he had put together at Detroit to get people to the games. ’' The materials demonstrated a sales ability that the committee thought State’s basketball program needed badly, and they made Gaines an almost unanimous choice.

Since coming to State, Gaines has put his sales ability to full use. Aside from his prominence with the local media, he has spoken in front of virtually every conceivable civic group, from the Rotary Club to the Catfish Club, in an effort to drum up interest in the Aztecs. In the off season he frequently plays golf with alumni and other boosters, “cultivating” their financial support. (“What do I shoot on the golf course?” he asked rhetorically when I queried him. “Well, it depends on how much I'm bettin’.”) He has introduced a slick media guide (which includes a plug for “the nation’s fastest-rising basketball program”) and has coined a public relations slogan — Aztec Fever. But Gaines’s critics charge he has simply copied these strategies from his former boss, Dick Vitale. Vitale promoted something called Titan Fever for the University of Detroit’s Titans, and had the gym’s lights dimmed and a spotlight focused on the players as they ran onto the court before home games. In 1980 Gaines tried to arrange for a spotlight to be used for introducing the Aztec players at the Sports Arena, but problems with the arena’s liability insurance scuttled the idea.

But beneath his salesman's exterior, Gaines can be a demanding, sometimes exasperating person. As an assistant coach he gave Vitale his complete loyalty, and he expects his own assistants to give him the same. In a well-publicized tiff with one former assistant at the University of Detroit, Willie McCarter, Gaines first invited McCarter to come to San Diego, then accused him of “backstabbing” when McCarter changed his mind after being offered the head coaching position at Detroit. And Andy Stoglin, an assistant to Gaines in San Diego, left State after one year because he felt Gaines was too exacting in his demands for loyalty, among other things. However, Stoglin, now head coach of Southern University in Baton Rouge Louisiana, said recently, “Loyalty is important. Smokey used to say, ‘Assistant coaches make suggestions, not decisions.’ I had problems with that at first, but now that I’m a head coach, I see. . . . You’ve got to rule with an iron fist.”

Gaines can also be extremely sensitive to criticism. When sports editor Kevin Kragen of the Daily Aztec, State’s student newspaper, wrote a column last fall previewing the basketball season, he mentioned the forty-point loss to Brigham Young the previous year and the team’s lack of fundamentals. Gaines told Kragen soon afterward that if he continued to write negative stories about the team, he (Gaines) would retaliate by refusing to talk to him. “He be nitpickin’. He tryin’ to make a name for himself,” Gaines said when I asked him about the incident. “We’re tryin’ to stir up interest [in the basketball team] on the campus here. Why bring up stuff from last year? I told him that someone might be callin’ me for a recommendation on him some day, and that I wouldn’t be able to recommend him if he’s always lookin’ for a little dirt. . . .”

A streak of authoritarianism runs in Gaines, too. For one thing, he imposes a strict dress code on his players. Neatly cropped hair and coats and ties have become a hallmark of the Aztec basketball team. “It’s not no big thing, really,” Gaines says of the dress code. “But say you’re an alumni of this university here, and you own a big company. If you see these guys, and you impressed with ’em, you might say, ‘Hey, I need good people like that in my company.’ Know what I mean? I’ve seen [the University of] Hawaii’s players, and they get on a bus or a plane somewhere wearing T-shirts and stuff; they look like bums. But we look good."

Gaines also works his players hard. Before practice in Peterson Gym (on the San Diego State campus), they seem to run up and down the court endlessly to warm up. “Come on, let’s go, let’s go! Gettin’ ready for the rainbow!” assistant coach Jesse Evans often calls out as the fatigued players run. It is a way of encouraging them to try harder; the rainbow, of course, is the NBA. All of the players dream of playing in it someday, but since only about one percent of all college players actually make it as professionals, their chances are slim indeed.

Michael Cage

Photo by Robert Burroughs

During practice, Gaines usually stands to one side in a maroon sweat suit, watching the players intently as they run through passing and shooting drills. Occasionally he shouts criticisms or encouragement to them — “Weak side help! Good job, Keith, good job! Move the goddamn ball!” — and he is not above joining the scrimmage himself to show his players how he thinks the game should be played. Gaines has said that practices are his favorite time of the day because they allow him to focus his thinking purely on basketball, and they do seem to relax him. One day, when the players were taking a break, I watched as Gaines picked up a basketball at half court and casually threw it at the basket one-handed, baseball style. The ball arched high into the upper reaches of the gym before hurtling down through the very center of the basket, a perfect swish. Gaines smiled only faintly, but when I asked him about the shot later, he grinned. It won him a lot of money in bets with his former teammates on the Globetrotters, he said.

Gaines’s forte as a coach (aside from promotion) is recruiting, and he has assembled a talented group of athletes at State this year. Among them, senior guard Keith Smith is a fast, intelligent player who runs the offense, and led the conference in assists last year. Eddie Morris, a six-foot-six senior forward who is nicknamed “Slim” for obvious reasons, can shoot from the outside as well as leap as if he is jumping on a trampoline. Sophomore center Leonard Allen, probably the most soulful player on the team, stands six feet, ten inches, and, if anything, can jump higher inch-for-inch than Morris. Often somewhat tentative in games, Allen favors decisive, soaring, two-handed slam dunks in practice that often leave the backboard rocking. The most talented player of all, however, is Michael Cage, a junior forward with tremendous strength. Cage is six feet, nine inches tall, and his 225 pounds seem all muscle and perfectly distributed on his frame. On the court he often runs with the slow, shuffling gait of a plough horse, but Cage is anything but slow; he is currently grabbing more rebounds per game than any other college player in the nation, and if he maintains that kind of statistic, he is certain to be drafted by some professional team.

Gaines travels all over the nation to recruit players. It is a costly business, and State's recruiting budget for basketball alone has doubled in the last few years to about $35,000. Many of today’s top athletes come from relatively poor families (as did Gaines), and that, combined with the intense competition among colleges for new players, creates what Gaines calls simply “a mess.”

“The average fan really doesn’t realize what a big business the recruiting of a young man is,” he complained, listing phone calls, repeated visits, and the constant cajoling and reassurance that a coach must give to a player as well as the player’s parents. On top of that, “kid's got thirty-five or forty [other recruiters] tellin' him he’s great, so he gets spoiled. You know how it is. A guy got two or three young lookin' at him, he think he Cassanova. When you put that undue pressure on the young man for the first time, you’ve got problems.”

Michael Cage knows something about those problems. In his senior year at West Memphis High School in Arkansas, Cage was recruited by representatives of universities in Arkansas, Texas, Georgia, Kentucky, “just about every college in that area,” he recalled one afternoon as we sat near Hardy Tower on State’s campus. “A lot of money was offered, and everybody had their little secret contracts they wanted to give me, like a free $200 worth of phone calls every month if I would go to their school. A few offered to purchase my mother and father a van so they could drive up and see me play.

“It got really tough . . . bundles of letters and brochures, phone calls all night long. Every time you look up there’s some guy knockin’ on the door, tryin’ to give you T-shirts or gym shoes. I don’t know, man. It made me feel sad. I felt like, ‘Why is everybody tryin’ to give me money? Why don’t they treat me like a person?’ But I had no one to share my feelings with.

“It caused a split with my parents. We separated; we separated badly. We're what you might call a true Southern Baptist family — go to church every Sunday, read the Bible. . . . But my father got uptight, and you know, it finally got so bad, man, that my mom wouldn't even cook me breakfast in the momin’.”

Cage’s parents wanted him to attend the University of Arkansas, but Cage himself was favoring San Diego State, partly because he wanted to get away from the South and partly because he liked Gaines. “I remember when I told coach [Gaines] that I wanted to go to a school where no one would know me, he could easily have taken advantage of me. But not one time did he do that, man. We’d talk for hours on the phone and we wouldn’t even mention San Diego State. We talked about life.” Later, when Cage became frustrated and told recruiters to back off, Gaines was the only one who actually stopped calling. “I was impressed by that,” Cage admitted. “It’s kind of funny, you know. He never offered me anything [other than a scholarship], and yet, and still, this is the place I came.”

Gaines giving a speech at halftime

Photo by Robert Burroughs

Gaines insists he couldn’t offer recruits illegal financial inducements even if he wanted to, simply because State doesn’t have the budget or the zealous, wealthy boosters who make such gifts possible. State’s athletic facilities are aging and cramped, too, and even the scholarships Gaines has to offer (worth about $3500 a year to residents of California and $6000 to those from out of state) pale in comparison to many schools.’ “We can't compete with UCLA or Indiana off the court because we don't have the proper facilities, we don’t have the proper alumni, we don’t have the resources [they have],” Gaines says. “Let’s not fool ourselves here; when you compare us to UCLA, you’re talkin’ a Volkswagen against a Rolls Royce. But I think one edge I have over other coaches is communicating with people. I think that’s my best trait, to tell you the truth. I can talk to anybody. I can even talk to a dead man — ’long as he don’t talk back.”

Gaines is, in many ways, the ideal college recruiter. Since coming to State he has said repeatedly that he wants to recruit gentlemen first, students second, and athletes third, and he often emphasizes the importance of using basketball as a stepping stone to a degree and success. It is a formula that worked for him; and that, coupled with his ghetto background, gives him a lot of credibility. “I’m here because of basketball, man,” he observed one afternoon in his office. “Without basketball, I couldn’t have gone to sixty-some countries, and played with the Globetrotters. But like I tell my players, ‘You take that basketball, you wheel and deal that basketball, and you get opportunities with that basketball. But there gonna be a certain time when you gotta let the basketball go. While you got the opportunities, make good on ’em. If you don’t take the opportunities, you lettin’ the basketball use you.’ ”

While Gaines's rapport with players is one reason he has been such a successful recruiter, his friendship with NBA players and scouts is another. A prospective player visiting State cannot help but become aware of these connections because the walls of Gaines’s office are decorated with photographs of him with sports celebrities like George Gervin, Kellen Winslow, and Moses Malone. There are also posters of basketball stars like Darrell (“Doctor Dunkenstein”) Griffith and Darryl (“Chocolate Thunder”) Dawkins — humorous posters in which the athletes are mugging for the camera, but reminders of the stardom offered by the pro leagues nonetheless. Gaines clearly enjoys associating with such stars, and sprinkles their names into his conversations. It has to be impressive to an eighteen-year-old, even though Gaines insists he is honest with recruits and does not tell them they have a good chance of making the pros from State. “That’s what they want to hear, but I can’t guarantee that. That's only a bonus. What I can guarantee is that if they follow our guidelines, they will get their ultimate goal — that’s a degree.”

Whether the message gets through or not is not entirely Gaines’s fault. But it is certain that many players, used to thinking of basketball as a quick ticket to riches and fame, are bound to see Gaines’s connections to the pros as important. Keith Smith, the team’s quick, savvy leader on the court, told me after a practice that he “had never heard of San Diego State before Smokey came here.” (Smith, like Gaines, grew up in Detroit, and transferred to State from Eastern Michigan University as a junior.) “He was the main attraction for me. This is a showcase kind of a [team], and Smokey’s had players go to the pros. Life doesn’t end if I don’t make the pros; who knows what the future holds. But I would very much like to play [in the NBA]. I guess it’s been a dream I had since I was a kid.”

I asked Smith if he thought pro scouts would look seriously at State, still a relative unknown in the world of college basketball, and his answer seemed to indicate one more reason the burden of winning is on the team this year. “I think we can attract the pro scouts through winnin’,” he said. “Winnin’ will bring them around. The main idea is to win.”

But winning is something that eluded the Aztecs through the first few weeks of 1983. After losing two games in succession to Brigham Young University and the University of Utah, the team played the University of Hawaii on January 22 and was trounced thoroughly, 98-75. Gaines called it the worst game he had seen a team of his play since coming to San Diego, and added, “We’ve got to forget about the WAC race now. What we’ve got to do is try and get out there and play basketball again.” The game turned on free throws, which have been a sort of Achilles’ heel for the Aztecs this year. Against Hawaii they attempted the unusually high number of forty-seven free throws, but could make only twenty-five.

In spite of Gaines’s recruiting ability, it is often said he is poor at coaching players in the technical aspects of the game, and with the Aztecs 0-3 in conference play the critics became vocal once again. It is true that in practice and in games, Gaines leaves much of the technical advice to his assistants, particularly Brunker. But the Aztecs have been hurt this year by injuries to two key players (forwards John Martens and Eddie Gordon), and by poor free throwing, and neither one is something Gaines or any other coach can do much about. At any rate, after the Hawaii game. Gaines surprised most of his critics by changing his game strategy from the run-and-gun offense that had virtually become his trademark to a slower, more patient style of play. It was something the team worked at doggedly in preparation for their next game against Colorado State University, and it was an indication that Gaines can indeed make a prudent tactical change in order to use his players to better advantage.

Keith Smith

Photo by Robert Burroughs

The Aztecs met Colorado State University later in January. The game was played at relatively cramped Peterson Gym because of a scheduling conflict at the Sports Arena, and even though the crowd was only 2156 strong, the building's rafters seemed ready to collapse from the noise. State jumped to a commanding 34-17 lead in the first half, and it was obvious that Gaines’s new game strategy was working well. Instead of forcing a fast break at every opportunity, the Aztecs were passing more, and getting the ball inside to Cage and Allen for easy lay-ups and dunks. Although they squandered their early lead (mainly through poor shot selection), they recovered soon enough to pull away again toward the end of the game and won handily, 59-45.

During the game, however, it was announced that one of the gym’s two game clocks was not working, and there was a slight delay as the officials verified that they had any way at all of keeping time. It was a graphic reminder of the second-rate facilities in which State still houses its supposedly first-rate teams. Gaines’s own office is not in the gym or the building next door, but in a trailer across the street — a fact that he claims hurts his recruiting. “It's tough enough to get the kid to come out here,” he fumes. “Then I’m talkin’ to him about goin' big time, and what does he see when I take him to my office? Kid walks up, says, ‘What? It’s a trailer!’ Once you get inside, it look nice, but. . .

On a wall in Gaines’s office is an artist’s sketch of a new recreation center that would include a 10- 12,000-seat arena for basketball (Peterson Gym seats only 3700). It is the school's ultimate goal to build such a facility, but it would cost between ten and twenty million dollars, and it is unlikely to become a reality any time soon. Two years ago a proposal to increase student fees to fund the center was voted down by the students, and the government of California is certain not to provide any money in the current economic climate. Unfortunately, the school does not have a large, wealthy group of alumni to draw from, either. Instead of the doctors, lawyers, and industrialists that colleges such as USC and UCLA have for alumni. State’s graduates tend to gravitate toward professions such as accounting, teaching, science, and physical therapy. The school's sole fundraising booster organization, the Aztec Athletic Foundation, was able to provide only $300,000 in cash last year for all of State’s athletic programs. “There isn’t the allegiance to State that a lot of universities around the country have,” laments booster and foundation board member Gil Frank. “The fans here want to group around a winner... but it takes a lot of money to have a successful major college athletic program, and a lot of the alumni here couldn’t care less about San Diego State. Maybe when you get [an education] for almost nothing, it just doesn’t mean a hell of a lot to you.”

Gaines says there is little or no pressure on him from overzealous alumni — he claims he wouldn’t stand for it even if there were, because when he came here, he says, “this program was dead.” Yet he sometimes responds to his critics in a general way by stating, “Give me the same facilities as Indiana or UCLA — give me the proper facilities to recruit the top players — then make the assessment about how good my coaching is.” For the time being, though, he will be judged by the talent he can bring to Peterson Gym.

The win over Colorado, State’s first conference win of the year, seemed to inspire the Aztec players. At practice the following day they were running harder than ever and attacking the basket from all directions in their drills, player after player leaping high and slamming the ball through the hoop. Gaines, meanwhile, was mapping his strategy for an upcoming Saturday night home game against Wyoming at the Sports Arena. He decided to stick with his slowed-down offense, but he noted that Wyoming is a much quicker, stronger team than Colorado — the Cowboys finished first in the WAC last season — and it was clear the new offense would be put to a stiff test.

On January 29 at the Sports Arena, however, the game plan worked perfectly at first as State again established an early lead, 21-10. Cage and Allen were dominating inside, sweeping off rebounds and sending down slam dunks that had their teammates leaping off the bench. But after awhile the Aztecs seemed to lose their concentration and began forcing shots, and Wyoming’s Cowboys battled their way back into the game. With a little more than six minutes left in the first half Cage suddenly turned his ankle while going for a rebound, and crashed to the floor writhing in pain. After a few minutes he got to his feet and made his way to the bench, limping badly, his face glistening with sweat. But luckily the injury turned out to be nothing more than a mild sprain, and he returned to the game before the half was over.

The crowd cheered virtually every move Cage made on the court, but there were only 3854 in attendance, and at a 13,000-seat arena that means a lot of empty seats. Last year State averaged only about 4800 fans a game at home, and this year’s average is down to less than 3500 (although several of the year’s biggest games remain to be played). The light crowds are a constant source of puzzlement and frustration to Gaines and the rest of the athletic department, and various reasons and solutions have been proposed. Gaines claims that people stay away from the Sports Arena (where the Aztecs play most of their home games) because of their dislike of Peter Graham, the arena’s operator. But Graham is not particularly well known to the San Diego public, and this explanation seems unlikely, at best. Some say State’s students don't like to drive to the arena from their dormitories and apartments on or near the campus, but Mary Alice Hill, the school’s assistant athletic director, points out that buses which have been rented to ferry students to the games “have cost us a lot more by far than the extra revenue we’ve generated.’’ It is occasionally suggested that San Diegans are simply not very interested in basketball, but USD coach Jim Brovelli, among others, disputes that idea. Brovelli said a modern, spacious arena on campus would probably help State’s attendance, and added, “I can’t believe this is not a basketball town. The bottom line is, you have to win. If you win, people will come to the games. I think that's true of any area.”

Leonard Allen

Photo by Robert Burroughs

State has been winning for five of the last six years, but perhaps that is not long enough to establish a tradition in the minds of local fans. Whatever the reason for the poor attendance, it has caused “the nation’s fastest-rising basketball program” to stay in the red. This year’s deficit will be the smallest in recent years, but it is still expected to fall somewhere between $50,000 and $80,000. In fact, if not for TV revenues of more than $50,000 this year, the program’s debt would be almost unacceptably large. Additional TV money might be the Aztecs’ financial salvation, but television has been a major factor in turning college athletics and recruiting into a big business, and an increase in broadcast coverage would probably create as many problems as it solves. The hold television already has over college games was demonstrated during the first half of the Wyoming game at the Sports Arena, when the action was temporarily halted by a foul on one of the Wyoming players. The referee suddenly pointed at both benches and called out, “TV time!” And for the next minute or so the game was suspended for no reason other than that a television station and its paying advertisers demanded it.

With a lead of only five points at half time, Gaines let his players catch their breath for a few minutes in the locker room before telling them, “Listen up right here. We gotta play smart. We gotta pass the ball against the zone — I keep sayin’ that. Move the ball, move the ball — we’ll get that shot. But we gotta be patient. We were patient at the first part of the game . . . now we dribblin’ the ball too much on the perimeter.” Brunker pointed out that the team was two-for-eleven on outside shots, and eleven-for-sixteen inside, where Cage and Allen were getting free. After a few more instructions, Gaines told the players, “Go real hard, fellas.” They gathered in a huddle and shouted, “Beat Cowboys!” before trotting out of the locker room for the second half.

The rest of the game was nerve-wrackingly suspenseful. Even though Cage continued to score inside, and forward Eddie Morris began to put in long-range jump shots, poor shooting from the free-throw line prevented the Aztecs from building a safe lead. Finally, with a minute left and the score 57-55 in favor of State, freshman guard Terry Carr stole a Wyoming pass and made both free throws when he was fouled. Leonard Allen came racing down court to play defense with a look of excitement on his face — All right! — and the Aztecs pulled away in the final seconds to win 64-57.

Afterward, as his players dressed in the locker room, Gaines leaned against a wall in the hallway outside, smoking a cigarette and responding to the questions of a small army of sportswriters. He was relaxed and subdued, and made a point of praising the Wyoming players and their coach. In a few weeks his team would be 5-5 in the Western Athletic Conference and out of contention for the title, but tonight he had a win and could savor it.

Gaines has said that he would like to stay at San Diego State, but he admits the current small crowds upset him, and that if the school cannot find a way to build the new on-campus arena he wants, he may look for a better job. “If I believe I can do better someplace else, I might do that,” he said as we were driving back to the campus in his silver Volvo one afternoon. “Once you be content with yourself, you’ve got a problem.”

Already he is dabbling in real estate, renting out a house in Del Cerro and building some apartments. The drive that brought Smokey Gaines from Detroit’s ghetto to the campus of San Diego State hasn’t diminished, not even after three and a half years of Southern California sunshine. “People out here are different than in Detroit; more laid back,” he told me earnestly. But when I asked if he hadn’t become a little more laid back, too, he laughed. “I’m not laid back,” he said emphatically. “No-o. Shit. Maybe if I get rich. ...”