They Still Long for True Home

By Paul Gutierrez

Nov. 21, 2004 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Earth is being moved at the southeast corner of Figueroa Street and Jefferson Boulevard. A hole is being dug in what used to be a parking lot and the foundation for the future of the USC basketball program is, at long last, tangible.

On the eve of the season, the Trojans’ six seniors can only look at the activity across the street from campus, shake their heads, mutter under their breath and smile at the irony of it all.

Especially Nick Curtis, Rory O’Neil and the Craven twins, Derrick and Errick. O’Neil and the Cravens signed with USC in the fall of 2000 and Curtis in the spring of 2001, just after the Trojans’ improbable run to the Elite Eight in the NCAA tournament prompted such heretical talk as USC’s turning from a football factory into a basketball school.

Ground was supposed to have been broken for the basketball palace at the dawn of their college basketball careers, not dusk.

“They told us when we came here that we’d be playing in the new arena,” Curtis said.

Added Derrick Craven: “They told me when I was recruited, otherwise I would have never come here. It’s highly disappointing. After the Elite Eight season, I thought it would be up and running.”

O’Neil concurred.

“It’s disappointing, but it didn’t happen,” he said. “At least this year’s freshman class will get a chance to play in it.”

The Galen Center, a $114-million, 10,258-seat arena that will also house the women’s basketball team and volleyball squads, is scheduled to open in 2006, when Gabe Pruitt, Nick Young and Emanuel Willis would be juniors and Lodrick Stewart a senior.

Curtis, though, could only hope that the joke would not be on this year’s underclassmen.

“When they had that ground-breaking ceremony [on Oct. 31],” Curtis said, “they were talking about 2006, but I told Rory it would probably be 2010.”

Pepperdine Coach Paul Westphal, who played at USC from 1970 to 1972, tells a story of being shown blueprints for a new basketball arena during his recruiting visit. Truth is, the fervor after former USC quarterback Carson Palmer won the Heisman Trophy nearly two years ago jump-started interest in the school’s athletic programs, and a resultant $35-million donation by booster Louis Galen gave the project renewed life.

It was needed. Much of the enthusiasm about the basketball program after its Elite Eight season has dissipated because the Trojans have not won an NCAA tournament game since.

In 2002, USC was seeded fourth and a popular pick to advance to the Final Four, but the Trojans dropped a first-round game in overtime to North Carolina Wilmington. USC then had 13-17 and 13-15 records -- the first consecutive losing seasons in Coach Henry Bibby’s tenure.

It all lends credence to speculation that Bibby, in the next-to-last year of his contract, is on the hot seat and, with six seniors and the Galen Center on the horizon, this is a pivotal season for all involved.

“I didn’t know if I’d ever see the day when they’d start to build it,” said Bibby, who is itching for a chance to coach in the new building. “Now we’re kind of out of the Dark Ages. And we owe it to [Athletic Director] Mike Garrett and the team he put together with Carol Dougherty [senior associate athletic director]. It’s a great, great turning point in this program.”

Part of the Trojans’ motivation this year, senior forward Gregg Guenther said, was to help Bibby’s future prospects at the school.

Fellow senior forward Jeff McMillan, who transferred to USC from Fordham after his sophomore season, echoed the thoughts of Guenther, a two-sport athlete who arrived at USC on a football ride but quit the football team this summer and earned a basketball scholarship.

“This year, everybody is on the same page,” McMillan said. “We don’t want to lose and for coach to have problems because of us. The nucleus has to be solid.”

And it can’t be easily distracted.

Not even by the conditions USC faces on a daily basis.

Because of prior bookings, the Trojans, who open their season Monday in the Sports Arena against UC Irvine, will not see the inside of their current home arena until the morning of their game for a shoot-around, meaning their opponents will have the same feel for it as they do.

A year ago, though, the Trojans had an unwanted visitor waiting for them on the court before a practice -- a dead rat.

“I couldn’t believe it,” O’Neil said. “It was disgusting. Coach Bibby had to go over and scoop it up.”

That’s not all the Trojans encounter in the Sports Arena, which is rarely shown to recruits when they come to USC for a visit.

“Dead rats, birds flying around, construction always going on,” Curtis said. “It was during the SARS outbreak last year and there was construction going on during practice and smoke was everywhere so we joked that we were in danger of SARS or asbestos.

“There was a hard-hat area in there too so we wondered if we needed hard hats just to practice.”

The antiquated North Gym on campus has served as a home with fewer distractions, at least when the building’s fire alarms are not sounding.

“That’s just the way they treat us,” Derrick Craven said. “We hardly get to practice in the Sports Arena. It’s hardly the same experience practicing in the North Gym as playing in the Sports Arena. I don’t want to be the one to complain, but that’s how it is.”

Which makes any time in the Sports Arena, diversions and all, all the more beneficial.

“We rolled to the gym in a van with no seats,” Curtis said. “A lot of guys just ride their bikes over there or walk. But it’s all fun when I look back at it.”

Though probably not as much fun as the USC seniors have had in owning their classmates at cross-town rival UCLA, the Trojans winning five of six meetings with the Bruins, including four in a row.

Or in the celebrations they’ll have in May -- all six seniors are on track to graduate.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Derrick Craven said, “I love the school.”