After Subpar Seasons, Greens Losing Their Luster for Danley

Tom Danley is bending your ear, griping about his golf game, and you know how painful that can be.

“I used to shoot in the high 60s,” Danley says, head shaking and motor running. “Now, I’m lucky to break 100. The bottom of my golf game has fallen out.

“What do I do? Do I take some more lessons? Am I using the wrong shaft? The wrong driver? Am I playing the wrong course?”

If you know Danley, you know the punch line.

Danley doesn’t play golf.

No, his hobby, his release, his outlet--”my golf game,” as he calls it--wears red and black shorts and high-top sneakers and used to be the scourge of north Orange County.

For 23 years, Danley has been teeing up Katella High School basketball, and for the first 20 everything was straight down the fairway, on line with the pin. Danley helped open Katella in 1966 and immediately turned the basketball playoffs into a Knight tradition. Every year for 20 consecutive years, kids at Katella went to homecoming, went to the prom and went to the CIF basketball tournament.

That stopped in 1988. Nothing lasts forever. Danley says friends tried to tell him that. “They’d tell me, ‘Well, Tom, if you stick around long enough . . . ‘ “ he says. “Well, I don’t believe it eventually catches up with you.”

How does one explain the last three Katella seasons, then? Since 1986-87, the returns have been steadily diminishing: 8-14 to 7-15 to 6-17 this season. Likewise, Katella’s Empire League records have slipped from 4-6 to 3-7 to the 2-8 mark, which last Friday’s loss to Cypress ensured.

If this really was golf, Danley’s bag of clubs would have been resting at the bottom of some water hazard a long time ago.

“I don’t read the sports section anymore,” Danley says. “If I did, I’d be jumping out of a 10th-story window. I know (UC Irvine basketball Coach) Bill Mulligan knows how I feel. We’d be out there together, ready to commit suicide.”

Mulligan at UC Irvine, Danley at Katella. Everything up is down again. And the mighty shall be humbled.

For now, Danley is staying away from the window and off the ledge.

Staying in coaching, however, is another matter. Danley admits the weight of a third consecutive losing season hangs heavy on him.

“My wife keeps telling me two things,” Danley says. “ ‘One, remember it’s just a game.’ Of course, she hasn’t seen one of our games for the past three years.

“The other thing she says is, ‘You always told me that you’d stop doing it as soon as it no longer was fun.’

“Has it been fun? No. And it’s not so much the winning and losing. It’s not playing well. If we lose, but by the same token play our best, I take great pride in that. But we haven’t been achieving. We’ve been underachieving and that’s what bothers me.

“I start thinking, ‘Maybe it’s time to move on, to get out of the district or into another career. How long can you keep bashing your head against the wall?’ ”

Danley, 53, was the county’s original Little General, beating Gene Mauch by about 16 years. His high-pitched squeal--imagine Jack Nicholson on helium--rang in the ears of his players and officials, in gymnasiums from Brea-Olinda to Huntington Beach. “You just don’t want to go to war!” His face was as red as the ever-present sports coat on his chest, veins bulging from his forehead as his temper rose. Danley called them his “Victory Veins.” He wore them with pride.

Lately, though, the Victory Veins have vanished. So has the sideline frenzy. There have been reports of Danley sitting docile on the bench, politely clapping and telling one of his slouching Knights, “Nice effort.” Stranger still are the reports of Danley and Empire League referees co-existing in peaceful harmony.

This is a coach, remember, who once had a referee so thoroughly intimidated, a Katella player reached up under the rim and punched his fist through the hoop to knock an opponent’s shot out of the basket--and no goaltending was called.

Danley doesn’t deny the rumors.

“You can’t get blood out of a turnip, water out of a stone,” Danley says. “I have not backed off on the work ethic or the preparation one bit. Just the opposite. We’ve gone to the other extreme.

“But when you’re down by 12 at the half, you’re averaging 18 turnovers a game and the same basic problems keep occurring, if I get into that (intense) posture, I’m going to get a heart attack.

“There are some things I can’t change. If a kid’s 5-8, I can’t make him 6-9. I might be able to get him to play like he’s 6-feet, but not 6-9.

“We keep beating ourselves. Why take it out on other people, on officials? They’re not the reasons we’re losing. Half the games we’ve lost were not because of what the other team did. We’re beating ourselves, and that’s sad.”

Katella, which draws its student body from east Anaheim, never has been especially rich in basketball talent. Enrollment has been dwindling for years, down to the present low of 1,700, and this season, the Knights were leveled by injury and attrition. Danley lost four potential starters before the season opened--one getting expelled from school, two others quitting and another tearing up a knee.

Danley says he doesn’t want to discuss “the basketball situation” because “then you start getting into a sour-grapes situation. . . . You have coaches out there who read that and say, ‘Hell, I’ve been getting my butt kicked for 10 years, he’s got over 400 wins in his career, what’s he complaining about?’ ”

But not wanting to talk about something hasn’t stopped Danley in the past.

“I’ve just been damn lucky that for the biggest share of my career, I haven’t had some of these things happen,” he says. “ . . . My children feel bad for me, my past ballplayers, everybody feels bad for me. There’s just no talent. Of course, we’ve never had much talent here. Just a little bit, and we’ve been able to extend it.

“Don’t give me five ballplayers like Mater Dei has every year. Give me two--and I’ll give you a chance to win the CIF championship.”

Or give him one.

“Give me Los Al’s 11th man,” Danley says. “Give me a Steve Bennett, who never played after high school but was a great kid. Give me a Wayne Briggs, who didn’t have a hell of a lot of talent, but we got him a college ride just on his overachieving.

“Give me one or two cornerstones and I can build a team on that.”

Danley says he doesn’t need to coach. “Frankly, I outgrew that 12 to 15 years ago,” he says. He also is athletic director at Katella and has branched out into athletic administration, serving as president of the Orange County and California state athletic directors’ associations. That is a field that interests him.

“I need new challenges. I feel like I’ve got 20 years left to do something,” Danley says. “Do I stay in athletic administration? Do I stay in coaching? Do I move? Can I afford to move?

” . . . If I want to stay in coaching, do I go someplace else or do I stay here and try to ride it out? One option is to stay on as athletic director and take kind of a temporary leave of absence.”

Danley already has given that option some thought.

“Being an athletic director is more than enough work,” he says. “I can put in 10 hours a day without any trouble. Next season would start with a new coach on staff and I’d stay on as athletic director.”

This is a decision to be mulled over in the months ahead. “I’m going to run my summer camp and see how I feel,” he says.

Then again . . .

“If I could pick up one kid, a post-type guy, a 6-4 or 6-5 kid,” he muses. “With what I’ve got coming back, we could be competitive.”

That’s the trouble with golf. Even when you’re in the rough, the fairway is always out there, only a stroke away.