A HOUSE DIVIDED : Most fathers who double as coaches of their children point to a strain in their relationships. Some go as far to protect themselves from charges of favoritism that they will single out their child as the whipping boy.

It was a tough day. You broke three shovels in the ditch and your boss spent eight hours loudly proclaiming his belief that only Moe, Larry and Curly were more dense than you. You finally got home, kicked off your work boots and settled into your easy chair. And seated on the couch was your boss, who spent the next four hours expressing surprise that you were able to find your way home alone.

In the morning you arrived at the breakfast table and found your boss there. He casually mentioned that it was easier training his beagle to sing opera than it has been training you to dig a hole in the ground. And the verbal barrage resumes at work.

No one, it would seem, could live with that kind of nonstop criticism. But some young men, for a term of as much as four years, are forced to. They are not U.S. Marines, although some of them might think of the service as a relief.

These are young men who call their father “coach.” Or call their coach “father.” Or in some cases, call him nothing at all. They practice under his critical eye 15 hours a week and play a game for three more hours. And in most cases, the game comes home with them along with the sweaty socks.

A father coaching his son is nothing new, and not all that uncommon. Al McGuire, whose Marquette University basketball team won the 1977 NCAA championship, coached his son, Al Jr., at the school from 1971 to 1973. Press Maravich coached his high-scoring and floppy-socked son, Pete, at LSU in the same sport from 1966 to 1970. John McKay coached his son, John Jr., at USC from 1972 to 1974 in football.

They’ve all experienced the tingling high of watching their child excel. They’ve watched him hit the winning shot, throw the winning touchdown or make the winning catch. But they’ve also experienced the down side of such a relationship and felt the frustration of trying to treat their son like any other member of the team. Many coaches admit to going to such lengths to protect against charges of favoritism that they single out their child as the team whipping boy.

Jim Harrick, the Pepperdine University basketball coach, calls one of this year’s players his son. Harrick also has called Jim Harrick Jr. other things. Harrick, a 5-11 point guard who broke into the starting lineup midway through the season, is not the star on the Pepperdine team. But he runs the offense effectively and earned his starting position with three seasons of sitting on the bench during games and practicing hard.

“I called him Headache, because that’s what he was,” Harrick said. “He was nothing but a headache for a long time. That was his nickname. I embarrassed him in front of the team, and I really regret that. I’d stop practice and scream at him. I’d throw him out of practice. I do it to other players, but it’s kind of different when you do it to your own son. I felt pretty bad sometimes.”

Harrick’s wife, Sally, was often caught in the middle. She, too, felt dreadful sometimes.

“One game this year Jimmy lost the ball, and Jim called a timeout,” she said. “He took him out of the game and I was watching them and Jim walked by Jimmy and smacked his leg hard. Jim would never do that to another of his players. I saw that and it hurt me so much.”

But along with the bad moments in the relationship between a coaching father and his son come fine memories. Sally Harrick’s happiest moment came this year in a game between Pepperdine and Loyola. Her son started and played his best game ever, scoring a career-high 11 points, including three three-point field goals, and handing out his season-high of eight assists to help Pepperdine to a 94-84 victory.

“I remember he hit two straight three-pointers and was just playing so well,” she said. “And I remember looking at the bench and seeing the look on my husband’s face, a special look. A father looking at his son. Jim was so proud of Jimmy that night. After the game my husband said, and I’ll never forget it, he said, ‘You know, it finally came around. He did everything so perfectly. It all came out in this game, everything I’ve tried to teach him over the years, it all came out tonight.’

“I think back now on that night and I see that look on my husband’s face and I get choked up just talking about it. It was a special time. That was the reward. That was the highlight of this whole situation.”

Cheryl Redell is the wife of Crespi High football coach and former professional player and coach Bill Redell. Each of their three sons has played football for his father at Crespi, and while they speak in glowing terms of the family relationship they’ve formed, Cheryl and Bill always will remember the darkest moment. Two years ago, Bill Redell Jr., a center at Crespi, suffered broken ribs and kidney damage during a game and was rushed to Rancho Encino Hospital.

“Billy was taken off the field in an ambulance,” Cheryl said. “I left with him in the ambulance and Bill came to the hospital later. The doctor told us that it was pretty bad and Billy would maybe need surgery on his spleen.

“Bill and I were in the emergency room, just waiting to find out what was going to happen, and Bill just came unglued. He was really shaken. We cried and Bill talked about what a rough game football was and now, having it hit so close to home with his own son, well he was just overwhelmed. Right then he said he was going to quit coaching. He said ‘I can’t do this anymore. I have to get out of the game.’

“And at that point I agreed with him. Our son was hurt really bad and I thought it was all a pretty stupid game. We stayed at the hospital into the wee hours of the morning. It was a pretty bad scene for us.”

Redell suffered no permanent injury and even recovered in time to play in Crespi’s final game of the season.

Coaches admit that it’s difficult to see their son in the same light as the rest of the players on the team. UCLA psychology Prof. Robert Bjork said it’s very difficult.

“You can say you treat him and view him like any other member of the team, but you can’t,” said Bjork, who specializes in human cognitive processes. “In the periphery of your vision you’re monitoring what he’s doing more than the other players. It would seem impossible not to do that. The kid is, after all, your son. It’s just human nature.”

Bjork sees the situation as one that is bound to produce tension.

“It’s kind of a fascinating business,” he said. “The perplexities and dynamics involved are really multiplex. You have the father-son relationship, but then also the relationship between coach and player. And also the relationship between your son and his teammates and how that colors the coach’s relationship with the team.”

But what does a psychologist know about the real world of athletics and coaching? Perplexities, dynamics and multiplexes aside, just what does the good professor know about sweaty locker rooms?

Plenty. During the past eight years, he has coached one or both of his sons in city basketball recreation leagues and summer leagues. And despite his gloomy analysis of such situations, he has had the time of his life.

“Somewhat to my amazement, the experience has been good,” Bjork said. “For me and my sons it’s been a positive experience. The feeling I have is that if I told them I didn’t have the time anymore for coaching, they would be dismayed.”

Bjork, however, said he has committed one of the mistakes most common in father-coaches. When it’s time to line the players up for verbal beatings, guess who has been at the head of the line? When it’s time to sit one player down in order to get another player some court time, guess whose rear end hits the bench first?

You got it. The Bjork kids.

“The guys working with me as coaches have repeatedly told me I come down too hard on my own kids,” he said. “In hindsight, I know that’s true. You’re much more inclined to yell at him and to monitor him, particularly in a critical way, than you do with the other kids. You free yourself from criticism if it’s your son’s playing time that you reduce.”

That seems to be the most common link in all such relationships.

Even the Redell family members admit that the coach did not view his sons as he did the other players. From Redell’s oldest son, Randy, a former Crespi quarterback now studying at the Air Force Academy: “Dad was tough on me, both on the field and at home. The Air Force is nothing compared to the discipline I got from him. I never once felt anyone was thinking I was playing because I was the coach’s son. He made sure that didn’t happen.”

“I’ve enjoyed it immensely,” said Redell, the Crespi coach. “It’s not often that a father has the chance to spend this much time with his sons. But I know I’m harder on them than I am with the other players, and maybe that’s so people will never be able to say they played because they were the coach’s kids.

“Sometimes I think my mistake has been in never seeing them as good enough. A lot of fathers see their kids as being better than they really are. But I’ve always felt they have to prove they should be in there, prove it more than the other kids. My assistant coaches have always noticed it. They’re always telling me to climb off my kid’s back.”

Crespi assistant Larry Cummings confirmed that observation. “It’s more in the tone of voice that he uses rather than what he actually says,” Cummings said about Redell. “The tone is more heavy with his own kids.”

At Pepperdine, the elder Harrick said he has experienced the same feelings as Redell.

“In many ways I’ve been just like a parent in Little League,” Coach Harrick said. “I just wanted Jim to do so well. But at the same time I made sure he got no special treatment. I probably made it harder on him than anyone else.”

Saugus High basketball player Jackson Clark has been coached by his father, John, for the past two seasons. Clark, a 6-1 senior and a reserve forward, has helped Saugus into the Southern Section playoffs by averaging six points and five rebounds a game. He has played about 20 minutes a game but said the pressure of the situation has been almost too much to bear.

“If I had it to do again, I’d like him to just be my father and someone else be my coach,” Clark said. “It’s very hard to deal with. Maybe next year, or in two years, I’ll be glad he was my coach. Right now I’m not so sure.”

But two weeks ago, after a painful loss to Canyon that knocked Saugus out of first place in the Golden League, both Clarks were very glad to have the other so close.

“In the locker room after the game, Jackson came up to me and we just looked at each for a second or two,” John Clark said. “And then he just put his arms around me and hugged me and he started crying, crying in my arms. Giant tears fell on the floor, and they weren’t just his tears. We both cried, holding onto each other and saying how much we loved each other.

“It’s something I’ll always remember when I think of these couple of years in our lives.”

Jim Harrick Jr. said he’d gladly repeat the experience. “I like the situation,” he said. “It’s been beneficial for both of us. I’d definitely do it again. It’s been fun.”

But Coach Harrick said the friction that the situation has caused could have started a brush fire.

“I’m really glad he went to Pepperdine and is getting a fine education, but there have been a lot of problems,” Harrick said. “Maybe it would have been better if he had gone somewhere else and played for another guy.”

In addition to the problems between father and son, problems arise from the son’s relationship to his friends and teammates.

Most coaches, even the good ones, can be the subject of criticism by their players.

“What do you do if you’re a player and you hear all the bad stuff the other players are saying about the coach, and the coach is also your dad?” Bjork said. “Even the best coach is subject to verbal abuse when he’s not around. If it goes on with the coach’s son around, what does the son do? Does he ignore it? Does he join in? Does he defend his father?

“And if it doesn’t go on with the coach’s son around, then he gets an isolated feeling, a feeling that he’s not one of the team like the other kids are.”

There are examples of all.

Hart basketball player Mike Michelson, whose coach and father, Doug, was suspended for the final game of this season because of an altercation with an official, hears what his teammates say about his father.

“They criticize my dad once in a while,” said Michelson, a guard who started in all 24 games and was named to the All-Foothill League first team after averaging 12.5 points and 5 assists in about 29 minutes a game.

“But I know they don’t really say much when I’m around. I kind of feel like the middleman. I can’t alienate my dad and I can’t alienate my teammates. I know they’re quiet when I’m around. A few times I’ll walk by and hear them say the coach is this or that, and they see me and they’re real quiet.

“A lot of times I get an empty feeling over it. I feel like I’m missing out on what’s going on.”

Butch Hawking is a standout player for the Simi Valley basketball team. The 6-1 junior guard has averaged 10.1 points a game this season and his 5.9 assists per game puts him third on the school’s all-time list. But in his only season playing at the varsity level for his father, Coach Bob Hawking, he has heard what his teammates say.

“Every once in a while I hear them criticize dad and I feel bad,” he said. “I feel like I should step in and defend him. I walk into a group of guys and they quit talking, but I know what they’re talking about. It makes me feel pretty awkward. These guys are my friends and I know I’m not always involved with them with things like that.”

And from Jim Bittner Jr., a star running back at Moorpark College the past two years who was coached by his father, Jim Sr.: “Sometimes guys criticized him when he wasn’t around, even though I was there. They said things about him because they were mad. I didn’t like to hear it, but I just tried to ignore it. I didn’t feel I should step in and defend him, and I guess sometimes I even went along with it. I’m sure some of the guys were hesitant to say things about him when I was around, but I know a lot of them weren’t hesitant at all.”

The coaches know the situation exists. For many, that’s the most difficult part of coaching their sons.

“Your son gets a lot of the bull,” Saugus Coach Clark said. “He hears the parents complain about the coach and reads the newspapers about the coach and he hears some kids saying that the coach is a jerk, even hears his teammates saying it. It’s tough for a kid to hear someone say the coach is a moron when the coach is also your father. It’s tough on Jackson. I know that he has a lot more pressure on him than the other kids when he walks out of the gym.”

But Clark has been coaching his son and his son’s friends for years. Most of Jackson’s teammates see nothing unusual about the situation.

“Sometimes we say things about Coach and don’t realize that Jack’s around,” said Russell Morse, a starting forward on the Saugus team. “You feel embarrassed and try to cover it up, pretend it didn’t happen. Jack doesn’t say anything to us about it, but I guess it must hurt him. If it was my father and I heard the guys talking about him it would hurt me.

“But most of us have played with Jack and for his dad for a long time, and we don’t have many bad things to say. We’ve all been together since the sixth grade. We’re used to it.”

When they walk into the practice gym, the sons of coaches have yet another problem: What do you call the man with the whistle? Few call him dad. That would evoke some strange looks from teammates and some awkward feelings for the son. Some call dad coach, which also brings an awkward feeling for the son but at least appeases his teammates. But most don’t call him anything.

“I can’t call him dad or coach,” Simi Valley’s Hawking said. “Calling him dad sure wouldn’t work and it feels real strange calling him coach. I guess I just use eye contact with him.”

“He calls me Jim, but I just call him ‘Hey,’ ” said Jim Harrick Jr. “I can’t call him coach. I can’t call him anything, really. When I say ‘Hey’ he knows who I’m talking to.”

All very confusing for fathers and sons. But no one should be more confused than Mike Cassidy, a 10th-grade basketball player at St. Genevieve High. Mike’s dad is Pete Cassidy, the basketball coach at Cal State Northridge. Mike’s coach at St. Genevieve is Pete Cassidy, too. But not his father Pete Cassidy, just another guy with the same name. Both Pete Cassidy’s were born in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn.

Mike is considering attending CSUN in a few years, and hopes to play basketball there. His father isn’t sure it’s a great idea.

“I have mixed emotions about it,” said Pete of CSUN. “The kid is my son. It would be tough. Having your son around you all the time would be great. But on the other hand is the peer pressure placed on him because I’d be his father and his coach. I wouldn’t want his college experience to be a downer in any way.

“But frankly, I’d love to have him.”