Billy Tubbs Is Pathfinder for ‘90s (or 100s)

Oklahoma, OK. Billy Tubbs said he was satisfied. Pleased with his young men. Oklahoma’s unbeaten basketball team had just run and run and run and run and run and run and run and won, 136-121, in 40 breathless minutes at Loyola Marymount Saturday, and Bo Kimble, Loyola’s leading scorer, had not burned the Sooners’, quote, defense, unquote, quite as badly as the coach had feared.

“Purty good,” Tubbs said, glancing at a stat sheet. “We held Kimble to 46.”

The look and style of college basketball is changing, and the face to remember is the one belonging to Billy Tubbs. He is not as readily identifiable as the Knights, Tarks, Thompsons, Diggers and Deans of intercollegiate hoopdom, but make no mistake, Tubbs should be. This is a man whose success alone merits recognition but whose approach to the sport itself has made him, to use Al McGuire’s description, a “pathfinder.”

By turning Oklahoma into a point-making machine, defying the patient, ball-movement, work-for-one-good-shot offenses that served so many of his predecessors, Tubbs has been as responsible as anybody for taking the college game into the ‘90s. Matter of fact, he has taken it into the 100s.

Score, score and score some more--that’s Oklahoma’s game plan. The best defense is a good offense.

And Billy Tubbs is not defensive about being that sort of coach, not even the least bit.

“Lemme tell ya somethin’,” he said Saturday night in a hallway at Loyola’s Gersten Pavilion. “There is more strategy in a game like the one you just saw than there is in any of those 50-55-point things you’re used to seein’. There’s lots more decisions for a coach to make, because there’s so much goin’ on. Everythin’s happenin’ very quickly. You ain’t got time to react to one play before you already got to be thinkin’ ‘bout the next.

“Lemme ask you somethin.’ Do you really prefer to watch one of them games where everybody walks the ball up the floor and takes all night to get a shot off? ‘Cause I don’t.”

Billy Tubbs, ladies and gentlemen.

The name is more suited to that of a country-western singer, and Tubbs’ background is pure Okie, pure Tulsa, although he did hail from St. Louis. When he came to the campus in Norman at the start of the decade, after twice taking a smallish Texas school called Lamar to the NCAA tournament, Tubbs found himself in charge of a program that enjoyed 20-win seasons exactly twice in 63 years.

Look at what he has done: 22-11, 24-9, 29-5, 31-6, 26-9, 24-10, 35-4 (NCAA runner-up) and 30-6 over Oklahoma’s last eight seasons. Billy Tubbs has become one of the sideline forces of college basketball, a coach to be reckoned with. Should the Sooners win 30 games again this season, they would be the only ones since Kentucky’s 1947-49 teams to do so back-to-back-to-back.

Alas, Tubbs’ reputation around the country has suffered.

He is best known, perhaps, for a petulant little gesture he made during a game at Norman last season, when he snatched a courtside microphone to address an unruly crowd. Behave, he ordered the pro-Sooner audience, “no matter how terrible the officiating is.”

Loyola Marymount tried a different method on a standing-room-only crowd that kept standing during the breakneck game against Oklahoma. “SIT DOWN,” the scoreboard commanded. But you couldn’t blame the fans for not obeying; nobody wanted to miss a moment of a basketball contest that resembled a Harlem Globetrotters audition, with baskets scored from every angle and every distance.

Tubbs was on his best behavior for the most part, although he did get slapped with one technical foul for salty language.

“The officiating was splendid,” Tubbs said later, mischief in his eye.

And the technical?

“Hey, guy couldn’t take a joke.”

Tubbs’ team had two weeks off to rest up for Loyola and needed it. Paul Westhead’s basket-weavers worried Oklahoma--and no wonder. Look at the rest of the Sooners’ schedule, which includes softies such as U.S. International, Northeastern Illinois, Angelo State and Alaska Anchorage.

Things will get tougher come January. Oklahoma’s conference schedule includes four games with Kansas and Missouri, two top-10 teams. Maintaining a gaudy scoring average won’t be easy. Then again, when you don’t throw more than three passes during any possession, points are going to happen.

“Hey, those of you who think Loyola doesn’t play defense better look again,” Tubbs insisted.

Appropriately enough, Oklahoma, averaging 134.5 points, defeated Loyola, averaging 120 points, 136-121.

Which pleased Billy Tubbs to no end--except for one thing, he said. His face didn’t appear on television enough, he said. Westhead’s, either.

“We got to slow it down some. I got to get a little TV time,” Tubbs said. “I heard ESPN put the camera on Paul once and they missed three baskets.”