9001080762 DETROIT FREE PRESS 900301 Thursday, March 01, 1990 METRO EDITION

SPT

1D Photo WILLIAM ARCHIE : Jud Heathcote is no publicity hound: "The less attention I get, the less mistakes they find." MITCH ALBOM Copyright (c) 1990, Detroit Free Press HE'S JUST PLAIN JUD NO-FRILLS HEATHCOTE STANDS JUST OUTSIDE SPOTLIGHT EAST LANSING -- So this is what Jud Heathcote does in the thick of the supposedly pressure-packed Big Ten title chase: He finds out one of his secretaries is pregnant, but she didn't want to tell him because things are so busy right now. The next day, Jud comes stalking out of his office and begins to circle the woman, sniffing like a dog. "Does Lori smell funny to you?" he asks the other office workers. "Huh?" "Does she smell funny?" "What do you mean?" "Well, my wife told me she was fragrant." "Fragrant?" "Yeah," he says, still sniffing, "I think that's what she said. Fragrant. Lori, are you fragrant? . . ." Well. What did you expect? He would walk around like a nervous wreck? Just because the big showdown with Michigan is tonight at the Breslin Center? Just because he lost arguably his best player, senior guard Kirk Manns, because of a stress fracture over the weekend? Just because, a preseason of no expectations, people are suddenly figuring that his Spartans can and maybe should win the Big Ten basketball title? You obviously don't know Jud Heathcote. But then who does? On the menu of this sports-hungry state, he has long been the "oh, yeah" coach. Sparky, Chuck, Jacques, Fontes, Bo, Perles, Fisher. . . . . . . and -- oh yeah -- Jud Heathcote. "Better for me," he says, sitting in his half-unpacked office inside Breslin. "The less attention I get, the less mistakes they find." That's Heathcote. Always a kicker. Congratulate him on his longevity, and he says "Yes, my 100th birthday is coming up." Thank him for an hour-long interview, he says, "Yeah, but I wasn't very good, was I?" It is the mark of a man who refuses to blow himself out of proportion. You see it in the way he dresses. You see it in the way he recruits. You see it in his face when he laughs and his head shakes and his eyes close and his mouth curls in a downward smile, like the painted lips of a clown. You see it here, in his office. Against one bare wall is a stack of boxes. Against another is a framed magazine cover of Magic Johnson -- back when he was Earvin -- leading Michigan State to Jud's first and only national championship. No thick leather. No rich wood paneling. No marble desk. No souvenirs from Spain. The carpet is green, the walls are white (real surprise, huh?) and on the bookcase is giant blowup of Heathcote. It's a nice photo. Except someone has glued a yellow paper mustache and goatee over his face. "My office staff," he says, delivering the kicker, "they keep me humble." Wait a minute. I thought that was Michigan's job. You know. The BIG SCHOOL in Ann Arbor? So dominant have the Wolverines been in recent headlines, that Heathcote may have wondered if anyone remembered which highway went to East Lansing. FRIEDER QUITS U-M, GOES TO ASU BO NAMES FISHER NEW U-M COACH U-M WINS NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP Jud? Well. Yeah. Jud's been here the whole time. He just wasn't making a lot of headlines. That's his curse. He doesn't walk out on a team. He doesn't throw chairs. He doesn't get caught offering sports cars to recruits. On a stage full of Bob Knights and Jim Valvanos, a guy like Heathcote, the son of a school teacher, a by-product of the Pacific Northwest, a gritty, hard-working, poke-you-in-the-ribs-with-an-elbow kind of guy, tends to get defined only by comparisons. He's not as good as such and such. . . . He's better than such and such. . . . And in recent years, the comparisons were almost always with Bill Frieder, the turbulent, dizzy and often controversial coach of the Wolverines. "The knock was always that Bill was the recruiter and I was the coach," Heathcote says now. "It was unfair to both of us, but Bill brought it on himself. He would talk about writing letters to recruits at 4 in the morning. You know why he did that? Because he couldn't sleep at night. I can sleep at night, so I get up and write the same letter at 9 a.m., and nobody talks about it. "Or the phone calls. They wrote how he made phone calls to recruits during halftime of his games. Wow! What a recruiter! But you know why? Because he couldn't sit still. He's always got to be calling somebody. I make that same phone call after the game, and nobody talks about it. "Bill created an image like he was the greatest recruiter in the world. But by doing so, he almost begged for the fact that his coaching paled by comparison." And that Heathcote's recruiting would never be as good. Ah, well. So be it. If he had to come down on one side of the forest, better it be the coaching side. This recruiting stuff could be nasty business. Especially because Heathcote refuses to cheat, refuses to offer a dollar, refuses to make false promises -- "I can't tell five separate kids they're my No. 1 recruit, it's just too dishonest" -- and therefore, he is a cripple before he ever leaves campus, he won't even be in the running for certain blue-chip players. So be it. That's not what coaching was supposed to be about when heathcote decided to get into it back before the war. Not the Vietnam war. Not Korea. Keep going. You're getting warm. It was a town called Port Orchard, on the shore of Puget Sound, just a ferry ride away from Seattle. There were mountains. There was cool rain. And there wasn't any money. "My father died when I was three years old," Heathcote recalls, "My mother moved us from North Dakota to live with our grandparents there in Washington. It was during the Depression. We all lived in the same house. We had no car, so I walked home from school, a couple miles, every day. Mostly what I remember is that I wanted to be a coach even then, even as a kid. Coaches were the guys I looked up to." Today, Heathcote, at 62, is built like a former loading dock foreman. Back then, at South Kitsap High, in the 1940's, he was pure athlete. Three sports. Third baseman on the baseball team. End on the football team. Center on the basketball team. Center? Yep. Not only that, he was the first All-State player they ever had. They even retired his number. (Although, in typical Heathcote fashion., he went back a few years ago to visit and found that someone had un-retired his number, and a kid was wearing it.) His coach back then was a Norwegian man named Stener Kvinsland. He's 76 years old now, long-since retired and in poor health. I got his phone number and called him in Washington. When he heard Heathcote's name, his voice jumped. It has been what, nearly 50 years? "I remember him as if he was alongside me right now," said the coach. "Do you know, he wrote me a letter not too long ago. He told me I was his father figure when he was a boy. I guess because his father died when he was so young. "And then, this is funny, at the end of the letter, he wrote, 'You're the reason I am a coach today. . . . I don't know whether I should thank you or not.' " Always a kicker. And now, Heathcote is trying to deliver another kicker. A Big Ten title. This year. Can that really be the Spartans with a 22-5 record, just behind Purdue and with a slight lead over defending national champion Michigan as they battle for the conference crown? It's them. And we shouldn't be so surprised. You can take Heathcote for granted, but you can't leave him there. Sooner or later he'll come back and bite you. He did it with the 1978-79 championship team of Magic and Kelser. He did it with the 1985-86 squad. COLUMN; JUD HEATHCOTE; COLLEGE; MSU