Pacific heights

Sporting News, The, Feb 10, 1997

This is how Michael Olowokandi came to be the most surprising player on the most surprising team in college basketball: He invited himself.

For the team's first 12 games, Olowokandi, a 7-foot junior, found himself in the middle, literally, of Pacific's best start in school history. As the starting center, leading scorer (12.6 ppg) and top rebounder (7.4 rpg), he helped Pacific win 11 straight after opening with a four-point loss at Fresno State.

But in that l2th game, Olowokandi sprained the medial collateral ligament in his left knee. Six games later, Pacific is 16-2 and Olowokandi may return as soon as Thursday's home game against Utah State. If he does (the team will know better after Monday's doctor's appointment), it wouldn't be the most improbable development of his basketball career.

The son of a diplomat, Olowokandi was born in Nigeria and raised in London. He competed in soccer and track until the magic day, at age 17, when someone first handed him a basketball. "It felt good," he says. "It fit perfectly in my hands. I remember the first game I played, I had a lot of traveling calls, but I felt comfortable. The ball just kept going in."

Olowokandi enrolled in London's Brunei University, playing recreational basketball well enough that his friends encouraged him to take his game to the States. On April 3, 1995 -- his 20th birthday -- he did: "I wasn't a teenager anymore. I felt time was passing me by."

He got his hands on a catalog of American colleges. "I just opened to any old page," he says. "It must have had 30 schools on it. UOP is what I saw. I didn't check the enrollment, or the male-to-female ratio or anything. I just wanted to call a place.

"I was put through to the basketball office."

Where Pacific assistant coach Tony Marcopulos was enjoying his standard lunch of a salami and Swiss cheese on sourdough.

"I've been with (Pacific) coach (Bob) Thomason a long time," Marcopulos says. "My first year as a graduate assistant, he said, `When the secretaries go to lunch, we need a coach here to answer the phones because you never know when a @@footer might call.'"

And when the 7-footer finally did?

"He's yapping away in his thick British accent," Marcopulos says. "I can't understand a word he's saying. Finally I interrupt him and say, `How big are you?' He said, `Seven feet, 265 pounds.'

"So then comes the next question, which usually blows it for us. I say, `We don't have a scholarship.' It's about $25,000 a year here. His answer to that was, `That's OK I'll pay my own way."

For the next few months, Marcopulos and Olowokandi talked by phone. Meanwhile, he called Georgetown and Duke but didn't sense the personal touch he felt when he talked with Marcopulos."I was prepared to go to a place where people accepted me for what I am," Olowokandi says.

Olowokandi, ruled a sophomore athletically because of his two years at Brunei University, was raw but eager to learn. Our first day of practice, I said, `Mike, let's get on the block,'" Marcopulos says. "He said, `What's that?' He didn't know any terminology. He didn't know the markings on the floor. He couldn't catch the ball. He couldn't make a chest pass. It was like coaching a third-grader."

As Olowokandi improved last season, so did the team. Pacific won eight of its final nine conference games to finish second in the Big West.

Still, the team has done well without him, winning five straight before falling by four to New Mexico State last Saturday. The loss marked the end of the nation's second-longest winning streak.

"It's not a fluke," starting guard Monty Owens says. "We have a solid team with good, mature guys. It was just a matter of time before we busted out."

Respect has been hard to come by considering Pacific has beaten no ranked teams and plays in the Big West. But during the 16-game win streak, the Tigers outscored opponents by an average of 16 points a game, held all but one team to under 61 points and beat two teams from last year's NCAA Tournament (Georgetown, Santa Clara).

Perhaps even more impressive is that seven players have led the team in scoring and all but one of the wins came without Pacific's top returning scorer, Adam Jacobsen. The senior guard's season ended when he tore a knee ligament in November.

Plus, much of the team is a hodgepodge of no-names ignored by big-time schools. Starting guard Mark Boelter is also a walk-on without a scholarship. And starting forwards Vic Trierweiler (Michigan) and Corey Anders (Illinois) hail from the Midwest.

But even if Pacific, which is located in Stockton, 63 miles east of San Francisco, wins the rest of its games, Thomason, in his ninth year at his alma mater, knows the only sure way for Pacific to get its first NCAA Tourney bid since 1979 is to win the Big West Tournament.

"If we keep on being successful good things are going to happen to us," says Thomason, whose team's February 13 game against UC Santa Barbara is set to appear on ESPN. "Why limit goals? Why not try to win every game? So far, it's worked out pretty good."