BIG-TIME REBIRTH : Brawny Stanford Brings Back Memories of Old Glory

PALO ALTO — Just inside the glass doors of Maples Pavilion, there is a life-sized statue of the greatest Stanford basketball player of all. It is Hank Luisetti. He played 50 years ago.

Luisetti, now 72, lives in nearby Burlingame, but he doesn’t go to see Stanford play very often because he would rather stay home and play with his six grandchildren.

Still, the greatest of them all was interested to know that this year’s Stanford team began the season nationally ranked and that it may have an All-American in its midst.

“They haven’t had much,” Luisetti said, regretfully.

As sure as a 1938 Luisetti one-handed shot, which he is credited by some with inventing, the Stanford basketball program has not exactly covered itself with glory over the years. There have been moments, to be sure, just not for, oh, the last 40 years or so.

In 1942, Stanford won the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. tournament, and it felt so good, the school hasn’t been back since.

But now there is a quickened pulse on the Peninsula. Something is stirring deep in the heart of Maples, where season ticket sales are up. So, too, is Stanford, which is coming off its best record in 46 years, since Everett S. Dean coached the team to the NCAA title at Kansas City with hard-fought victories over Rice Institute, Colorado and Dartmouth.

In short, Stanford is back. And did you miss it while it was away? The pressure on these players must be immense.

“Naw, I’ll tell you, the only people it’s going to be hard on are the fans, who haven’t seen a good team before,” said Rich Kelley, a Stanford star at center in the mid-1970s. “The fans are going to be more nervous than anybody.”

This 1988-89 Stanford team has started the season nationally ranked for the first time in 25 years. The Associated Press had Stanford 20th in its poll, but the Cardinal began the season rated as high as No. 3 in something called “Basketball Annual.” Third? Even the confident Cardinal players think something’s out of whack.

“That must have been written by an alum or somebody’s brother,” forward Howard Wright said.

Last season, the Cardinal finished 21-12; beat Arizona when the Wildcats were the No. 1 team in the nation; elevated Todd Lichti to All-American status, and started Coach Mike Montgomery on the road to folk-hero status.

Montgomery is 41 and looks at least 10 years younger. He even wears saddle shoes. But the glasses that he said made him look like “Mr. Preppie” are gone. He’s wearing contact lenses now. He wears nice clothes, all right, but on the sideline, he doesn’t exactly have the same aura as, say, Lute Olson.

“Lute, nice clothes, but it’s more of a presence he creates,” Montgomery said.

And what of Montgomery’s clothes?

“Let’s just say I’ll never be on the cover of GQ,” he said. “I can make a lot of $400 suits look more like $150 real quick.”

Last year at Oregon, he somehow managed to tear his shoe during the game, but he didn’t let it affect his coaching. He has refused to retire the shoe, though. He got it repaired instead and returned it to the shoe rotation in the closet.

“Why not?” Montgomery asked. “It was a perfectly good shoe. I mean, it wasn’t like my sock was hanging out or anything.”

Montgomery’s greatest achievement this year may be getting a perfectly good team to win games after a slight repair job on the old style of play.

All in all, last year was a pretty fine year for Stanford basketball, a season in which everything seemed to get straightened out, which is never an easy task at this particular institution of higher learning.

To begin with, there is this thing about an identity crisis. Stanford is one of the few universities in the nation nicknamed after a color. After much hue and cry, the nickname Indians was changed to Cardinal in 1972.

The students had favored Trees, but the university administration pruned back that one. To this day, however, the Stanford band mascot is indeed a tree, or at least a person dressed as one, and he (she? it?) can still be seen swaying each basketball night at Maples.

There may be no such swaying on the court, but some of those Stanford players surely have bodies like tree trunks. Principal among them is center Eric Reveno, a brutish 6-foot 8-inch, 250-pound center who is back for his senior season after sitting out last year’s team rebirth with a back injury.

Mention Reveno to Lichti and get this two-word response: “An animal.”

Lichti also said Reveno is a hustler, a diver, a rebounder, a muscler and sometimes a fouler.

“He’s constantly fouling people because he’s so aggressive,” Lichti said. “The coaches have worked with him to try to calm him down. We all like to bang, and we’re not afraid to push. Rev loves that stuff.”

Reveno does his best work inside.

But there is more. Adam Keefe, a highly touted freshman, is 6-8, 230.

Keefe, from Irvine, got his nose broken by Wright in practice recently and had to play with a mask. Lichti and the other players took one glance at the mask and came up with a plan.

“It looked like kind of a Jason mask,” Lichti said. “We were thinking of writing Kill across the top of it, but Adam wouldn’t go for it.”

Maybe he should have tried Andrew Vlahov. A former member of the Australian national team, Vlahov is 6-7 and 225. Wright is 6-8 and 235 pounds and has more finesse than the rest--more than Vlahov, Stanford hopes.

At one time, Vlahov played Australian rules football, but now he concentrates on basketball and rooms with Lichti.

“He’s so used to playing the international game, he’ll sometimes plow through picks and thinks it’s nothing,” Lichti said. “Last year in the Cal game, he just steamrollered some guy, the guy went flying, Andrew looked at the ref, like, ‘What did I do?’ He’s a real intense guy.”

Oh, yeah?

“Like one time at the beginning of last season, in one of our scrimmages, he’s pushing a couple of guys around, gets a couple of quick fouls. So he says to me ‘You know, Todd, I don’t know if I was made for the American game.’ ”

Stanford’s game? Vlahov and the rest are certainly made for that.

Although he came here from the wide-open spaces of Montana, Montgomery is actually more of a congested-traffic, California-type guy.

He was born in Long Beach and graduated from Cal State Long Beach in 1968 with a degree in physical education, naturally. From Long Beach, Montgomery began his see-America tour by taking coaching jobs at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn.; Colorado State; the Citadel in Charleston, S.C., and the University of Florida.

His next state was Idaho. Montgomery was an assistant coach at Boise State for 3 years, then moved to Missoula, Mont., where he took a similar job under Coach Jim Brandenburg. When Brandenburg took over at Wyoming, Montgomery got his chance.

In Montgomery’s 8 years, Montana maintained its reputation for winning. Under Montgomery, the Grizzlies had no losing seasons, won at least 20 games each of the last 4 seasons and played in the National Invitation Tournament twice.

What’s more, Montgomery earned a reputation of his own as a coach who favored the, well, strength aspect of the game. Each time the Grizzlies played, their opponent got a physical education.

The best player Montgomery coached at Montana was Larry Krystkowiak, who had a lot of consonants and little finesse. Now a starting forward with the Milwaukee Bucks, Krystkowiak was not only strong, but smart. He was a first-team Academic All-American for 2 years at Montana, which, as it turns out, was probably pretty good training for Montgomery, now that he’s here.

Lichti, for instance, is a quantitative economics major. This field of study is explained as training so that Lichti can be a bank president and not a bank teller.

In the meantime, as Stanford busily churns out some of our nation’s future executives, Montgomery is seeing to it that his basketball program is one of matter over mind. He likes to coach big people, preferably tall, big, rough people. If Montgomery were mailing his front-line players somewhere, he would send them bulk rate.

Case in point: On Sunday night, Stanford lost to Indiana at Bloomington in a second-round Big Apple NIT game, but only after the Hoosiers shot 44 free throws, and 5 Cardinal players fouled out. Indiana Coach Bob Knight told USC Coach George Raveling in a telephone conversation that it was the most physical game he had ever seen.

According to Raveling, Knight said: “They wouldn’t even try to avoid the screens--they would just knock you over every time.”

Such a trait has been carefully developed. Before conquering with bodies, Montgomery had to change some minds. Tom Davis left for Iowa, and Montgomery became coach. So the team that is being so highly touted was brought here by Davis, not Montgomery.

One night 2 years ago, in Montgomery’s first season at Stanford, the Cardinal lost a game at home to UCLA. Afterward, Montgomery stood in the parking lot and stopped his players, one by one, and asked them to commit themselves to something besides losing.

“I think we went into the UCLA game with the idea that we couldn’t win, that Stanford never beats UCLA,” Montgomery said. “That stuff has just got to stop.”

Last season, it did. Stanford beat UCLA here in 2 overtimes, but that wasn’t nearly as important as Stanford’s 82-74 victory over No. 1-ranked Arizona before a sellout crowd at Maples.

“That game gave us an indication of how good we could be,” Lichti said. “But we also lost some games we shouldn’t (Santa Clara, Washington State, Washington, Arizona State). We played to the other teams’ level. This year, I think we’ve learned we have to go out and bury some people.”

Excuse me? Is this appropriate language for our young Iacoccas? Perhaps it is that Montgomery’s message is working. Among the players, having to deal with the losing was, oh, so boring.

“It was like, what’s done is done and now we’re going to be students,” Montgomery said. “Stanford kids. Which is all right, but it wasn’t what we wanted. We wanted basketball to be important here.

“You’re recruited to be a basketball player,” he said. “The fact that you’re bright and that you’re going to get this education, that’s just a plus. Let’s take pride that you’re a basketball player at Stanford, not that you’re a student at Stanford.

“Hell, you know, you just bust it and just do everything you can. And if it’s not good enough, you try harder the next time. I think everybody can live with that.”

Major buildup? Bring it on, says Montgomery, who believes great expectations are just that, great.

“Let’s face it--if you are going to have people come out and watch you play, you can’t be lousy,” he said.

No, guess not.

“People aren’t going to say, ‘They’re not going to be any good this year, but, boy, I’m really going to go and support them,’ ” he said.

Lichti, 21, is considered by some to be the top shooting guard prospect coming out of college in the spring. At 6-4 and 205 pounds, he has made most All-American teams, and the National Basketball Assn. people who have seen him like him a lot, too.

“The more you see him, the more he grows on you,” Laker General Manager Jerry West said. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all for him to be a first-round pick. He just knows how to play.”

Lichti didn’t make it to Seoul, though. He was one of the last 16 players on the U.S. Olympic squad before Coach John Thompson cut him. For that, Lichti was not all heartbroken. Thompson was adamant that Lichti pull up and shoot whenever possible, which is the opposite of Montgomery’s spread-it-around, deliberately paced style.

“I don’t think I ever became comfortable there,” Lichti said.

He is certainly fitting in nicely with Montgomery, who coaches not at all like Davis, an up-tempo guy from the tip-off. Kelley said he has observed a meeting of the minds between Lichti and Montgomery.

“I think it’s pretty obvious Montgomery has put the reins on his style a little,” Kelley said. “If Davis had been the coach for Lichti’s 4 years, I think he might have set some scoring records for the whole league. But he’s becoming much more of a team player.”

As it is, Lichti has a chance to become only the third player in Pacific 10 history to make the All-Conference first team each of his 4 years. The others were Bob McKeen of California, 1952-55, and Ron Lee of Oregon, 1973-76. The great players at UCLA played on freshman teams, so they never had chances.

Lichti grew up in Concord and excelled not only in basketball, but also in baseball, football and track. Once when he was in Little League, he pitched part of a game right-handed and then finished up by throwing left-handed. In football, he played quarterback and receiver.

Off the field, he learned to study--he had a 3.98 grade-point average in high school--and learned the principles of economics by collecting baseball cards. He began his hobby when he bought a crate of cards from his father for $1.

Already Stanford’s all-time leading scorer, Lichti averaged 20.1 points, 5.6 rebounds and shot 54.7% last season. It may be different this time around, though, and Lichti readily admits it. Last year, Stanford wasn’t really supposed to win and did. This year, it is really supposed to win and might.

Said Kelley: “They could just as easily go 12-12 this year, and all the hoopla will die out fast.”

Lichti said being ranked is being noticed, and who wouldn’t want that?

“We all want people to look at us and say, ‘Hey, those guys are going to do something this year,’ ” he said. “It might be a little added pressure, but for the most part, we have to keep that out of our mind and go out and play.”

Montgomery said it is clear to him that his team is riding such a nice wave of recognition because of Lichti, because of the win over Arizona and because all five starters, plus Reveno, are back.

But the expectations of winning have not yet affected Montgomery, who said he may worry about them later.

“Five years of this, where everybody takes for granted that you are going to be this good, like maybe UCLA--what a tough situation, because anything less than the best just isn’t acceptable--well, maybe then it would be tough. You wouldn’t get credit for what you’ve done.

“We’re a long ways from that at Stanford. If we don’t live up to expectations, I would be really surprised if anybody really says anything.”

Speaking of surprises, some experts have Stanford ranked No. 1 in the Pac-10, ahead of Arizona. Montgomery laughed that one off, saying Olson’s team is the clear-cut favorite until someone proves differently.

“The ranking, well, it’s a little bit out of whack, but what the heck?” he said. “At Stanford, how can it hurt you? They’re not going to take me to the guillotine if we don’t win.”

Not at Stanford. But if Montgomery does win--and win, and win--then there’s plenty of room for a statue next to Luisetti’s.