The Ultimate Homecoming

It's give-back time for CLYDE DREXLER, whose return to the University of Houston as coach offers hope for a program and a city that can't forget the days when the Cougars slammed--and glided--their way to national prominence

Eunice Drexler has come down early one Wednesday to her barbecue emporium at the corner of Dowling and Gray in the Third Ward. The sweet-voiced woman has traveled past the local landmarks--all those brooding, frayed, World War II-era buildings at the hem of the gilded Houston skyscrapers. The stately but weary-looking Wesley Chapel AME Church. Sir Brown's Hair Palace. Even an army of wooden shacks.

And, now, like always, like what seems forever, the sweet smell of burning wood and smoked meat blankets the neighborhood. For a couple of decades, Eunice Drexler has dutifully come to this corner.

Eunice is thinking about her son. About how, after he went away and finally came home, the city wanted so much from him that first time ... and he gave it to them.

She is thinking about how Houston is demanding so much from him again "He wanted to be in Houston," she says.

"And he still wanted a taste." Her son still wanted a taste of the sport that had paid the perpetually imperturbable superstar $6 million a year.

And he wanted it in Houston. It was the only thing that would make him happy after 15 years in the NBA, after being named one of the 50 greatest players in NBA history, after finally winning an elusive championship in 1995--with the Houston Rockets--when he was miraculously traded to his hometown team on Valentine's Day of that year. That time, the first time he came home, he instantly gave the city what it wanted.

Then, last year, unlike most people, Clyde Drexler got to come home--for the second time.

A year ago, Rockets guard Clyde Drexler, never having coached before, was handed the University of Houston basketball program--where his basketball life, his basketball persona, had really been born, just a few mean streets from his mother's restaurant. It was one of those once-in-a-dream, gravity-defying moments--boundless and big enough to replenish an entire famished city's soul.

Houston went from an all-time attendance glow in '97-98 to selling out Hofheinz Pavilion for the season for the first time in history--from the luxury suites to all 271 of those expensive courtside seats. There were billboards glaring with the glow from his slyly seductive Cheshire grin. He was suddenly the only coach pictured on the Conference USA media-guide cover. He was given a TV show. A radio show. A five-year deal that--with incentives--could pay as much as $300,000, a quantum leap over the pay of fired coach Alvin Brooks. Gushy stories filtered out that he had put a clause in his contract encouraging him to take classes and finally get his degree. Filmmakers called about making Cinderella-story documentaries. Hundreds of kids called about playing for him.

He settled into his splendid suburb, enjoying his six-mile run every morning, flashing by on his rollerblades, shopping for antiques, indulging his interest in foreign language and tooling the city in that big, blue Chevy Suburban with his wife, Gaynell, as they go to watch one of their four children play soccer. All summer, Clyde the Glide told people he was finally all the way home--for good, forever.

At his very first game, against Texas--with Hakeem, Rudy T. and the national media on hand--it looked as if he had gone behind the curtains and turned the Third Ward into Oz on the Gulf Coast. That night, even Hakeem had some pregame doubts, but now it was clear: Drexler could orchestrate a game. He managed the clock, he knew when to uncork his talented point guard, he countered the Longhorns' shifting defenses, he protected a 71-69 victory.

That night, it was downright mythic, thunderously stirring, watching him stand courtside with his old, retired, oversized number 22 jersey floating in the rafters and looming over the entire basketball pavilion like the Grand Old Flag--a potent reminder of the plays when he and another college player named Olajuwon positively owned the city as part of a team that called itself Phi Slama Jama.

That night was the best night of the season, one of the best nights of his life.

Since then, there have been endless blown layups and numbing blowouts to Cincinnati, North Carolina State and UAB. Moses Malone Jr., a freshman guard with a famous father, defected from the team in December and blasted Drexler over playing time: "It was frustrating," he told the Houston Chronicle. "To me, it was like I was playing with a knife in my back. I couldn't play my game." Finally, one of the most promising recruits in school history was almost swallowed alive by unpleasant allegations about his high school records.

And now, the coach's first season winding down and the Cougars having lost 13 of 23 games, nothing really has changed. Clyde Drexler's team is, at a generous best, mediocre.