He Managed to Make It Through the Wringer

Randy Pfund once did the Chicago Bulls’ laundry. He made himself useful any way he could back when the Bulls’ summer training campsite was Wheaton College, 25 miles from Chicago, where his father coached basketball and baseball with distinction for three decades after World War II.

“Yes. For a few years, I actually did their laundry. I confess,” the new coach of the Lakers said Monday with a laugh, happy to be working elsewhere now that the Bulls have finished one of their dirtiest series ever.

Now that Lee Pfund’s youngest son has been handed one of the NBA’s coaching plums, he becomes the latest in a series of creative individuals to pass through Wheaton, where the football stadium is named for local legend Red Grange. The Rev. Billy Graham graduated from Wheaton College. Bob Woodward studied journalism at Wheaton Central High, where John Belushi played linebacker. Both of the Belushi brothers are vividly remembered by Randy Pfund, who at 40 is closer in age to John’s younger brother, Jim.

Randy always wanted to coach. It was in his blood.

He and his older brothers, John, who lives in Los Angeles and works for a bank, and Kerry, who is employed by a clothing store back in Wheaton, all played basketball for their father. Lee Pfund’s first love actually was baseball. He pitched for 10 years in the Brooklyn Dodgers’ organization--even made it to the big show in 1945, making 10 starts, going 3-2 with a couple of complete games, getting four hits himself.

Once he began coaching, Lee stuck with it for close to 30 years, always at the same place. Possibly this explains a subconscious desire of Randy’s to remain in one place; to be true to the Lakers even when an outsider, Mike Dunleavy, is brought in ahead of him; to be loyal even when Pat Riley used money to lure him to New York, to not jump at the chance to coach the Sacramento Kings simply because they called first.

Never having played a minute of pro ball, Randy Pfund is an NBA anomaly, a Nobody’s All-American in a coaching fraternity populated by Wes Unselds and Don Nelsons and Lenny Wilkenses and Jerry Sloans. Then again, how many hoops did Dick Motta ever make? You can coach high school ball, can be a college assistant, can be a patient apprentice until fate lends a hand, same way Steve Fisher was at the University of Michigan.

“I think you prepare each day on the job for that eventuality,” Pfund said. “For that moment in time when somebody finally turns to you and says: ‘OK. You.’ ”

That moment actually came and went once. It went when Riley went, when the Lakers went outside the immediate family, when Pfund was sitting there on the very next seat on the bench, as eagerly as a substitute who is begging to be put into the game, with that look in his eyes that asks: “Me now?”

But the look he got back was: “No, not you. Not yet.”

On one level, Pfund knew how far he had come from two years of coaching high school ball in the Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn, eight long years of being a volunteer assistant at a small college in Santa Barbara. On another level, however, he felt he was ready, that he had paid enough dues, that he was every bit as qualified as Riley was when he got the Laker job, or as Dunleavy was when he got it.

It was then that he recalled Riley’s words upon offering him a position on his staff that he wanted somebody “without any scars,” somebody who had never been associated with some other team, somebody who could be indoctrinated in the Laker ways without bringing along a lot of previous disillusionments or preconceived notions.

“When that decision was made,” Pfund says, referring to Dunleavy being anointed ahead of him, “I got my first NBA scar.”

But coaching was his destiny, as it was his father’s. Randy stopped playing in 1974. A year later, his father stopped coaching. After raising three sons and then coaching all three, Randy figures 1975 was the year Lee Pfund felt entitled to play some golf and relax.

Particularly considering what happened 15 years earlier, when Randy’s mother, who goes by “Mibs,” and her husband were returning home from a basketball tournament in Evansville, Ind., when an auto accident left Lee Pfund with a severe, horseshoe-shaped head wound and his wife seriously injured as well.

Like something out of fiction, some Boy Scouts happened along and helped rescue Randy’s parents from the wreckage. Randy was barely 10 then, but he remembers hearing that, after his father took half-a-year leave from work to recover: “People said they never saw my dad as the same fiery personality when he coached after that.”

Will Randy Pfund have a fiery personality as coach of the Lakers?

“I will if I’m anything like my dad,” he says. “Which is a very good thing to try to be.”