The worst loss for Gregg Popovich
Hall of Fame coaching career began at PomonaPitzer and almost ended after humbling defeat.
Little about the game that night in January 1980 felt worthy of posterity. No roaring crowd. No TV cameras. Nothing, really, but two woeful Division III basketball teams playing in a near-empty gym, each hoping to be just a little less bad than the other.
The home team, Pasadenabased Caltech, was fresh off a winless conference season — eight straight, in fact. The visitors, Pomona-Pitzer from the eastern L.A. County foothills, weren’t much better. Roughly half the young men on the court hadn’t even played in high school. These were students who happened to play basketball, not the other way around.
The arc of sports bends in mysterious ways, though. Four decades later, those present at Brown Gym on Jan. 30, 1980, marvel at how it all turned out. How, with the passage of time, the events of that night gained an unexpected significance. And now they delight in telling the story — or at least some of them do — of the night a future coaching legend and a historically inept team collided, of the unexpected outcome, and all that followed.
Caltech point guard Peter Edwards can’t recall whether he circled the Pomona-Pitzer game on the calendar. He does know he was sick of the losing.
Edwards, a senior, was the rare Caltech player who’d not only played in high school but also had been decent. As a wing at Brethren Christian in Huntington Beach, he’d provided steady defense and scrappy scoring. His future lay in academics, though. His parents had taken out a loan so he could attend Brethren.
Despite a 3.98 grade-point average, Edwards assumed he wouldn’t get into Caltech. The home of Einstein and Richard Feynman, it churned out Nobel Prize winners the way UCLA produced NBA stars.
Which is to say that no one went to Caltech to play sports. Other than a brief heyday during the World War II era, the Beavers — so named because they are “nature’s engineers” — could reliably be found in the cellar of the Southern California Interscholastic Athletic Conference. Every 10 years or so, the campus would debate whether Caltech should even have an athletics program.
These weren’t regular losses either. Caltech lost by scores like 9746 (Redlands), 111-44 (Occidental) and 117-36 (Whittier). Some teams took pity on them; others delighted in the thrashing. “Sometimes,” Edwards says, “I’d look up in the first quarter to see a score like 25-4 and wonder, ‘Why even keep playing?’ ”
Now, midway through his senior season, a reality was dawning on Edwards: He might well go 0-forcollege. Not only that, but Caltech boasted a conference losing streak that dated to 1971 and it now threatened triple digits. Best anyone knew, no SCIAC team, no team in any conference, anywhere, had lost 100 in a row.
Little hope appeared on the horizon. The Beavers had no chance against conference powers like Occidental. To get off the hook, everything had to break right against one of the league’s lesser lights. A team like La Verne.
Or, maybe, Pomona-Pitzer.
Caltech, Steve Johnson thought, now that’s a team we can beat.
For Pomona players like Johnson, a sophomore point guard, Caltech always had represented an oasis in the schedule, an opportunity to refresh and build confidence. And right now, Pomona really needed an oasis. Heading into conference season, it had but one win. And the new coach was none too happy about it.
Historically, sports, as at Caltech, had taken a back seat at Pomona. A liberal arts school of 1,400 at the foot of Mt. Baldy, east of Los Angeles, Pomona prioritized academics and culture. Coaches came from the ranks of tenure-track faculty to the point it had combined athletic departments with neighboring Pitzer College.
“The whole spirit of the program was the students should enjoy themselves,” said Steve Koblik, a politics professor at the time.
Then Robert Voelkel became Pomona’s vice president and dean of the college. A former walk-on player, Voelkel cared about sports, and basketball in particular. In the spring of 1979, determined to turn around the Sagehens program, Voelkel bypassed protocol and relieved the men’s basketball coach, a nice, mellow, tenured professor named Les Nagler, of his position.
Not long after, as the story goes, he offered the job to an Air Force Academy assistant named Reggie Minton. When Minton declined, Voelkel offered it to another assistant on the same staff, an intense young man with a background in Soviet studies.
His name was Gregg Popovich.
And so, in the fall of 1979, fliers began to appear on the Pomona campus, announcing basketball tryouts under the new coach. Johnson and a handful of others showed up.
Under Nagler, Pomona players were accustomed to a laissez-faire approach. The coach let you out of practice if a test loomed. Each week, Nagler had the team vote on the starters for games. (“Fortunately,” Johnson said, “we usually made the right decisions.”)
The new coach — skinny, hooknosed, fond of expletives — didn’t do laissez-faire. Once practice began, Popovich placed trash buckets at each corner of the court.
“You know, in case we needed to throw up in them,” Johnson said. He pauses. “We ran a lot.”
Do a drill the wrong and you heard about it. Loudly. Junior small forward Peter Osgood remembers shooting free throws during practice one time and not being able to see the rim because he was crying. “Basketball at Pomona had been something you did for fun but didn’t make a commitment to,” Johnson said. “He really got into us. It took a while for us to figure out why.”
Not all the players could endure it. The team was already short on talent — “We were terrible,” Popovich recalled — and now it lacked depth.
At least it had one star: Jay Cornish. A swingman with TV-star hair, Cornish had averaged 30 or so the year before (teams’ statistics have been lost to time). He could handle, shoot and pass. Equally important, his presence allowed players like Johnson, a spot-up shooter, to get open looks.
With Cornish leading the way, Johnson figured the team could at least be competitive.
Then, just before winter break, Cornish broke his hand. Not long after, he stopped coming to practices.
And now, heading into the last week of January, Pomona headed into the teeth of the conference season, only one win to its name.
Thank god for Caltech.
The week of the game arrived.
For some Caltech players, the losing streak — now closing in on a decade — weighed heavy. Not for senior Joe “Zas” Zasadzinski. He can’t even recall if he was aware of it. That’s the thing about playing for Caltech, he said: It changes your perspective on the nature of competition.
An affable post player, Zas had joined the team mainly to provide a counterbalance to Caltech’s grueling course load. Zas’ father had been in the military and, to him, the academic gantlet felt akin to boot camp; if you survived it, you formed a deep bond with your peers. Not all did. Some students spent eight to 10 hours studying every night, fueled by coffee and ambition. Some burned out; others dropped out.
“I realized I needed the exercise,” Zas said. “It helped with the stress.”
Still, he liked his teammates. There was Edwards, the team leader; center Greg Blaisdell, blessed with a high jumper’s hops but a Buddhist’s alacrity; Pat McMurtry, a fiery wing better at taking shots than making them; and of course Gary “the Whale” Tornquist, a lumbering big man who, as Edwards put it, was, “so slow that it was an advantage,” his methodical post moves acting as natural pump fakes.
The coach, Hudson Scott, struck most as a pleasant man who, word had it, excelled at coaching volleyball. He’d taken on the hoops team because no one else would. His motivation tactics consisted of saying things like, “Try to keep them under 100 and score 50.”
Caltech stood on the verge of an unfortunate distinction: fall to Pomona and its losing streak would hit 100. Though that ate at Edwards and McMurtry, Zas took it in stride.
“I wish I was better at being competitive,” he said. “But given my physical limitations, I didn’t spend hours playing basketball. The way some people talk about winning and losing, I guess it just didn’t bother me in the same way. I’d just focus on setting good screens.” He pauses. “Playing for Caltech was really the equivalent in some ways to heading to the gym for a lunch pickup game.”
That’s not how the new Pomona-Pitzer coach approached the game.
Early on, after one bumbling loss or another, Popovich had turned to his wife, Erin, the woman who’d been so supportive — who’d encouraged his dream of being a coach, who’d followed him to Colorado and now to this tiny, academic school in the boonies of college basketball.
What have I done,
he recalls saying.
Where have we come? Why did we do this?
A decade earlier, Popovich had been the leading scorer at the Air Force Academy, good enough to receive an invite to the 1972 Olympic team tryouts. By 1979, he felt ready for a head coaching job. Pomona wouldn’t have been his first choice, but when Voelkel offered, he and Erin gave it a go. The campus and academic atmosphere appealed to him.
Upon his arrival, Pop received a present from the outgoing coach, Nagler: a photo of the team. On the border of the photo, Nagler had scrawled: “My legacy — The 14 ‘Blue Chippers’ I left you. Good Luck! Coach Nagler.”
Looking back, Popovich recalled one moment in particular. “So it’s one of the first games of the season and all of a sudden, there’s a timeout,” Popovich said. “And I’m on the ref ’s ass, ‘I didn’t call time out!’ ” The ref points to Pop’s bench. “And he goes, ‘He did.’ And it was one of the guys on my team, his hair down to his shoulders.”
Popovich couldn’t believe it. “And I said to the guy, ‘What’d you do?’ He goes, ‘I called time out.’ I said, ‘Seriously? That’s what I do.’ He goes, ‘No, I always call timeouts.’ I said, ‘Not anymore you don’t!’ ”
As frustrating as coaching could be, Popovich dove into the Pomona culture off the court. Along with Erin and their two young kids, he lived in Harwood Court, a dorm, with the students. He befriended faculty, seeking out the handful of professors whose fire burned as his did, including Voelkel, a young history professor named Lorn Foster, and Koblik. Soon enough, he’d persuaded Koblik to be the “faculty advisor” to the team, in hopes it could sway admissions on borderline candidates. “I made up the position,” Popovich said.
The professors let off steam by playing on an intramural team, Koblik, Foster and Voelkel joined by Popovich, decimating the students. “Gregg could rebound better than anyone in Claremont, handle the ball better than anyone on the team,” Koblik said. “Remember, he almost made the NBA. He was a made basketball player, not a born one.”
Along the way, Koblik took it upon himself to act as a Pop whisperer. “My primary job was to stop him from killing anybody,” Koblik said.
Popovich might have faced a mass player exodus had he acted off the court as he did on it. But the contrast could be startling. “He’d invite us over to his house, and his wife would make cookies and ask
Playing for Caltech was really the equivalent of heading to the gym for a lunch pickup game. That’s not how the new Pomona-Pitzer coach approached the game.