Murray Starts to End Doubts : UCLA: Highly touted freshman wasn’t sure about his ability until Harrick changed the starting lineup.

Less than a year after establishing himself as the all-time leading scorer in California high school basketball, Tracy Murray looked in the mirror and thought to himself: “I’m no good.”

Self-doubt engulfed the UCLA freshman as he sat in a hotel room in Berkeley and pondered a dreadful performance the previous night at Stanford: zero for eight from the field, no points in 20 minutes.

No points?

Murray scored 64 for Glendora High last March in a divisional state tournament game. He averaged 44.3 a game and led the nation in scoring. In an all-star tournament in Boston after the season, he averaged almost 35.

But at Stanford, in a game televised nationally by ESPN, Murray couldn’t find the rim.

The next day, he moped.

“It was like, ‘Can I play with these guys, or what?’ ” he said this week. “ ‘Am I going to bounce back from this?’ ”

He found out soon enough.

Coach Jim Harrick gave him the startling news the next day: Murray, despite a 12-for-45 shooting slump in the Bruins’ previous five games, would start at center 24 hours later against Cal. In the first nine weeks of the season, the 6-foot-8, 210-pound Murray had been used as a reserve.

Murray justified his coach’s faith by scoring a season-high 25 points against the Golden Bears, making nine of 10 shots and adding six rebounds and seven assists in a 106-97 victory.

He has been in the starting lineup since, averaging 18 points and 4.8 rebounds while making 61.3% of his shots, including 13 of 27 three-point shots.

Before the promotion, he averaged 9.1 points and 4.4 rebounds and made 39% of his shots.

“The addition of Murray has made our team more fluid, a lot better offensively,” Harrick said. “He’s made us a lot better club.”

In the six games Murray has started, the Bruins’ front line of Murray and forwards Trevor Wilson and Don MacLean has averaged 55.8 points and 23 rebounds, and Murray has outscored Wilson.

“He’s such a great scorer that if you cheat on their forwards, he’s going to burn you,” Arizona State Coach Bill Frieder said of Murray, who scored 17 points against the Sun Devils Thursday night in an 80-72 UCLA win at Tempe, Ariz. “He makes them that much more potent in the front line.”

A streak shooter, Murray has burned nets since before his first birthday. He was only 11 months old when his parents, Robert and Candy, put up a toddler basket in a room off their bedroom.

“He had a little tiny ball,” his mother said. “We have a picture of him shooting at age 2 and he’s got the (proper) form on his arm.”

Growing up in Pasadena, Murray honed his abilities in pickup games with his father, a 6-foot-3 service representative for the electric company and a former guard who played at Pasadena Blair High and Cal Lutheran University in the 1960s.

Though he once pitched a no-hitter in a youth baseball league, Murray didn’t care for the slow pace of the game and quit after one season. And, despite his size, he never played football.

Basketball, his father said, was in the family’s blood.

“Tracy and I used to battle until he got taller than I was,” his father said. “We wore the same size shoes for about a month and then he went right past me.”

Murray, who wore size-12 shoes for a month as a high school freshman and wears size-17s today, eventually cleaned up on outside competition, too.

He was eager to prove himself at Muir High in Pasadena, but four years before he was wooed by college coaches from across the country, Murray experienced more urgent recruiting pressures in his own neighborhood. Both the Crips and the Bloods, rival gangs, wanted him on their side.

Friends from junior high school tried to pull him in, Murray said, and one weekend while he was out, gang members called the house, harassing his parents.

“They said they were coming to pick me up,” Murray said. “We took that seriously.”

So seriously that the family packed up and moved to Glendora, about 20 miles to the east.

Some of Murray’s junior high friends took up drug dealing, he said. Some wound up in jail. Others were shot and killed.

Murray, meanwhile, concentrated on basketball at Glendora High, where he was moved up to the varsity a few weeks into his freshman season despite an exaggerated limp. For several months, he thought that his discomfort was caused by a severe groin pull.

But on Christmas Eve, Murray and his family got bad news. He was growing so rapidly that his hip had grown out of its socket. He was told that he would never again play basketball.

Murray was devastated.

“I actually started crying,” he said. “It was the worst Christmas of my life. Mom and Dad, they were crying, too. I even got a basketball for Christmas and that made it worse because I knew I couldn’t use it.”

Within a week, though, the Murrays had obtained a second, more positive opinion. Dr. Stanford Noel of Los Angeles told them that the problem could be surgically repaired.

Murray, who had grown three inches in three months before the operation, wound up with a 10-inch scar at the top of his left leg and eight six-inch screws in his hip, and within three months his limp was gone and he was playing again.

And, despite discomfort in his hip caused by the screws, he averaged 25 points and 10 rebounds a game as a sophomore. Then, after the screws were removed, he averaged 31.5 points and 12 rebounds as a junior. Last season, he averaged 14 rebounds, made 59% of his shots and doubled his point total from the previous two seasons, ending his career with 3,053 points.

In his last high school game, an 89-83 loss to Menlo Atherton at the Oakland Coliseum Arena, Murray took 19 rebounds and scored 64 points, equaling an arena scoring record established by former Golden State Warrior Rick Barry.

He made recruiting trips to Louisville and New Mexico--the Lakers’ Michael Cooper, a friend of the family, played at New Mexico--before ending the suspense after his visit to UCLA. He canceled trips to Nevada Las Vegas and Villanova.

About a dozen friends from Pasadena and Glendora had written him letters, urging him to stay in Los Angeles so they could more closely follow his career. And whenever he watched a game at Pauley Pavilion, UCLA fans urged him to sign with the Bruins, chanting his name.

“I was sort of embarrassed,” he said of the attention.

More than anything else, Murray chose UCLA because it was close to home. “It would have been hard for me to leave,” he said. “I’m homesick now.”

His younger brother, Cameron, spent the last two weekends in Westwood, hanging out with Tracy. A highly regarded prospect in his own right, despite his youth, Cameron is an eighth-grader at Goddard Junior High in Glendora and sports the same flattop haircut as his brother.

“Leaving the house was like leaving a Siamese twin behind,” said Murray, who has no other brothers or sisters.

Despite his high school accomplishments, Murray expected to see only limited duty this season, providing breathers for MacLean, Wilson and senior Kevin Walker.

But Walker, a starter at center all last season, struggled through the first month of the season and eventually lost his starting job to Keith Owens, a former walk-on.

Owens, though, is limited offensively, and produced only four points and four rebounds in three starts. He, too, failed to score in last month’s 87-79 loss at Stanford.

Two days later, Harrick made the move that he had contemplated for a month, promoting Murray to the starting lineup.

“He’s been marvelous for us,” Harrick said.

Not even Harrick, who was among those who considered Murray the No. 1 prospect on the West Coast last season, anticipated such production from the star of his second recruiting class.

An increase in body temperature has led to an increase in his productivity, Murray said.

As a starter, he is able to stay warm after pregame drills.

“Sitting on the bench for five or six minutes (as a reserve), you come in and your adrenaline’s not flowing,” he said. “You’re not sweating. Your stroke’s not there.”

In the last three weeks, Murray has found his stroke.

Don’t expect him to lose it any time soon, said USC Coach George Raveling, who attempted to land Murray for the Trojans.

“I don’t think he’s going to do anything but get better,” Raveling said. “He’s a future star. His game is going to broaden.”

And that awful night at Stanford, he hopes, will fade into memory.