A Group of Nobodies Dubbed Cal State Who Made Basketball History in 1978 by Advancing to the West Regional Final Before Losing : THEY BELIEVED

By CHRIS DUFRESNE

March 31, 1986 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Eight years ago, a guard named Keith Anderson would choose to dribble into a lane instead of shooting a jump shot.

It doesn’t sound like much today. Time, master of diluting emotion and memory, again accepts the blame.

But put yourself in the shoes of the 1978 Cal State Fullerton Titans and feel for a moment the goose bumps they felt for a few days one March. Put yourself on the floor of The Pit in Albuquerque and become the Cal State Whos, the little team that could, who were but one heartbeat away from hoop heaven and the Final Four.

Relive the final 14 seconds of their favorite season again, when forward Greg Bunch grabbed a missed Arkansas free throw in the NCAA West Regional title game and whipped a pass to Anderson who, with the Titans trailing by a point, frantically dribbled down court toward a miracle only they believed could come true.

Thirteen, twelve, eleven . . .Follow Anderson across mid-court as a nation bites its nails for the team that came to the NCAA playoffs without a prayer or even a press guide. Ten, nine, eight . . .Run to the top of the key with Anderson, whose nothing-but-net jump shots had already knocked two tournament superteams into the abyss.

Seven, six, five . . .Go to the free throw line with Anderson and wait for him to shoot only to witness him dribbling the ball through a crowded lane. Watch someone strip the ball free. Listen again for the foul that was never called. Chase Jim Counce as he runs the other way with the ball toward a layup. Look up again at the scoreboard: Arkansas 61, Fullerton 58.

Feel what it is to have someone take an ax to your balloon.

“I can still see (center) Steve Shaw and Bunch crying,” Anderson recalled recently of the moment. “Then I started crying. I looked at myself and said, ‘You messed up.’ There was nothing to say. I didn’t get dressed. I ran out of the locker room past parents and reporters and went straight to the bus. I wanted to walk from the arena to the motel but it was about 15 miles. I felt that bad.”

It wasn’t so much the shot that hurt as much as the finality of the moment. A season the Titans swore would never end was over, and it felt much the same as a swift kick to the stomach. Finally, they had to let go of the reins.

But theirs will remain one of the NCAA tournament’s most memorable stories, scripted by a group of no-names who ultimately would do what no one ever imagined.

Remaining is the memory of a coach-turned-pyschologist named Bobby Dye, who would stretch young minds to outer limits and wring drops of talent from bodies that had little to offer. “He almost had a Jim Jones-type affect on us,” Bunch, team leader and star, said of Dye. “If he would have said to walk into the river and drink this, we would have done it. I would have followed him anywhere.”

To this day, the transformation of the ‘77-’78 Titans remains much a mystery. This was a team that could scratch out only a third-place finish in its conference, the Pacific Coast Athletic Assn., one that made it to the NCAA’s only by virtue of winning the PCAA tournament.

So anonymous was the Titans’ NCAA arrival that one NBC analyst thought their nickname to be the Cherokees. He wasn’t alone.

We knew the Titans to be that funny-looking team with the bean-pole forward (Kevin Heenan) who wore welder’s goggles to protect an injured eye.

“We were like the Misfits of Science,” Bunch said.

Yet, from this collection of rubble emerged a team that would crash one victory party after another.

The first came in Tempe, when the Titans knocked off No. 4-ranked New Mexico--complete with a Michael Cooper--in the first round of the regionals. Then came the University of San Francisco and basketball’s answer to Kong--a plane-swatting, trouble-causing, ever-dunking, seven-story center named Bill Cartwright. But so, too, fell the Dons, on a last-second shot by Anderson.

The Titan season would end in defeat two days later, but not soon enough to ever forget.

“They were a delightful team,” said broadcaster Dick Enberg, who announced the regional title game. “They epitomized a team where you go out on the street and get some guys, play them out of the position, and then throw in a couple of chemistry majors. At least that’s what he (Heenan) looked like. It was like, look what they got out there. I used to drive by the campus. I knew the Rams trained there. I guess I couldn’t quite imagine something sprouting out of that environment.”

“That moment was like watching yourself die. It was extreme ec s tasy to extreme depression in one second. The realization hit. It was over. It was so abrupt, like getting a call one day that someone you know is dead. It took me days to recover from that letdown. If I live to be 200, I’ll never forget that.”

--end of the Arkansas game described by then-Titan assistant coach Mel Sims.

So meet again the 1978 Titans; Greg Bunch and Michael Linden, Keith Anderson and Mike Niles, Steve Shaw and Kevin Heenan and coaches Mel Sims and Bobby Dye.

Eight years have passed since the loss to Arkansas. Players and coaches have scattered, most choosing not to stay in touch. Bunch is working for a cable television company in South Gate. Anderson is a meter-reader for Southern California Edison in Compton. Guard Linden returned home to Yonkers, N.Y. and is still playing basketball. Heenan, who works in real estate, lives in Costa Mesa. Center Steve Shaw is a high school basketball coach in Redondo Beach. Bobby Dye is the head coach at Boise State University. Power forward Mike Niles is in jail.

More than anything else, it is the story of Niles that unites the Titans again after all these years. “We Believe,” the Titans’ rallying cry of eight years ago, is now “We Can’t Believe.”

Today, Niles sits in Riverside County Jail awaiting trial. The charge is murder for hire, a crime punishable by the death sentence.

Mike Niles and trouble constantly were courting each other. Coaches Dye and Sims knew well the risks involved when they lured Niles from the streets of South Central Los Angeles to Nutwood Avenue and the Fullerton campus. Niles was an orphan, a street-wise black and one-time gang member. He was much the outsider in Orange County, but Dye would take Niles by the hand and all but nurse him through college.

During the season of 1977-78, Niles was a vital part of the Titan persona. He was 6-foot-6 with body and scowl by Mr. T. His stare could weaken legs and chatter teeth. In terms of keeping the peace, Niles to the Titans was the big brother at home you always threatened to call whenever your life was in peril.

Off the court, he could be as nice as your mailman and was good enough to spend a season in the National Basketball Assn. after leaving Fullerton.

Dye and Sims thought they had reached him in time.

So that’s why it pains them so to hear police accounts from a story that unfolded Dec. 13, 1984.

On that night, the body of Niles’ wife, Sonja, was discovered on the sidewalk in front of their Corona home. She was dead, the result of a gunshot wound to the head.

After the body was discovered, the Corona police department received a phone call from Niles, who was in Los Angeles. Police said Niles, fearing something was wrong with his wife, asked police to investigate.

Niles was asked to return home. When he did, he grew hysterical at the site of his fallen wife. Police said Niles fell to the ground and flogged himself into exhaustion.

He was then handcuffed and arrested for suspicion of murder.

Police believe Niles paid a man named Noel “No, No” Jackson $5,000 to kill his wife in order to collect on a $95,000 insurance policy.

Niles, who flunked a polygraph test, will plead not-guilty.

His trial, postponed several times, has been rescheduled for Oct. 6.

His is the one story of the ’78 team the Titans want to forget.

“All I know is what I hear,” Dye said recently of Niles. “I love that kid, and we’ll just have to wait to see what happens.”

Said Bunch: “All you can think about is all the practices you shared, all the shower rooms, parties and all the elbows under the boards. It seems like it was yesterday. You don’t want to believe it. I was overwhelmed. But when I think of Niles, I’ll think of No. 40, of him being part of a dream team. That’s what I’ll remember.”

“I go to games and people still tell me what I should have done against Arkansas. Bunch got the rebound and gave it to me. I was thinking of giving it to Linden to create something, but there wasn’t that much time. I came down the right side. I knew we were down by one and had to score. Everything was perfect. I had the shot before I got close. It was the one I had hit all game. I never sit back and wonder why. It happened so fast. I’m still looking for the ref.”

--Titan guard Keith Anderson

Fullerton’s season was more a scream than a dream on the night of Feb. 17, 1978, when the Titans fell to 6-5 in the PCAA after a loss to the University of the Pacific.

So you think opponents were biting there nails over these guys?

--Greg Bunch, the senior and string-bean thin at 6-6, was the team’s star, but even Dye wasn’t interested in him out of Pacific High School in San Bernardino. No one else was, either. Bunch had to prove everyone wrong.

--Mike Linden was the point guard no one wanted. A talented street player from New York, he carried a reputation as long as Long Island. One story circulating had Linden convicted of stealing government checks. Sims checked it out and discovered that Linden had never been charged. But if Linden’s life were put to song, it would be scored “Call Me Irresponsible.” More than once at Fullerton he got in his car on Friday and drove across country to Yonkers for the weekend. Amazingly, he often would make it back for Tuesday practice.

--Kevin Heenan was a shooting star out of El Dorado High School in Placentia but at 6-4 and 150 pounds he was skinny enough to honor in verse--”Oh my goodness, oh my soul, there goes Kevin down the hole.” In other words, UCLA wasn’t wooing him. When he seriously injured his eye early in the season and later adorned a pair of goggles, Heenan looked more an insect than a forward.

“I was always skinny, ugly, gawky and white,” Heenan says today. “I was your typical nerd. Putting on the goggles only made it worse.”

--Steve Shaw was a 6-8 center of little repute. A community college transfer from El Camino, he was Bobby Dye’s pet project. Shaw was an overachiever who made up in intelligence what he lacked in basketball talent. A perfect player for Bobby Dye’s system.

--Keith Anderson was “the other” player at Verbum Dei High School, where he played with future UCLA stars David Greenwood and Roy Hamilton. He wasn’t highly recruited and signed with Fullerton early. But, as most would soon find out, he was a talented player and a great clutch shooter.

--Mike Niles was raw talent but a tremendous gamble. Sims saw him play in a summer league game and convinced Dye to take a chance. Niles was in constant academic trouble and eventually was declared ineligible for his senior season.

All things considered, this wasn’t exactly the team you’d take to the Olympics.

But something happened to the Titans shortly before they entered the 1978 PCAA Tournament. This team may have looked like a bunch of goof-balls in sneakers, but something was going on here.

“We jelled at the right time,” Dye recalls. “We made a commitment. Everyone took a role and didn’t worry about themselves or their stats.”

Linden took command as point guard. He was a great ball-handler and passer who sacrificed points for assists. Heenan, with his great outside shooting, was the designated “zone buster.” He kept teams honest. Anderson was the clutch shooter, Bunch the spiritual leader and Niles rebounder and enforcer.

Behind Dye’s back, the Titans would mock their coach’s cliche-infested speeches that most often began with a hearty, “Hey, we can beat these guys.”

But soon the Titans started to believe.

Heenan remembers a Dye speech, at halftime of a San Jose State game near the end of the PCAA season.

“He was livid,” Heenan recalled. “He pulled up a chair, put his foot on it and started pointing fingers. And then he walked out.”

Dye would be just warming up, though.

The Titans entered the PCAA Tournament as the third-place seed and defeated San Jose in the first round.

But next came conference champion San Diego State, the team that had administered the Titans sound floggings in two conference games.

Dye, only for the sake of change, switched defenses. He instituted a spread-court offense called “the high and wide.”

Over and over, the players heard the Dye war cry “We can beat these guys.”

Late in the game, the Titans were convinced.

Fullerton was leading by five when San Diego Coach Tim Vezie called a timeout with a little more than 10 minutes left. It was a tactical mistake. The Aztecs would have received an automatic timeout at the 10-minute mark.

“Dye kept telling us that they were cracking,” Heenan said. “He was saying their coach didn’t even know how many timeouts were left.”

The Titans beat San Diego State, 64-50.

In the PCAA title game, Steve Shaw blocked eight shots as the Titans beat rival Cal State Long Beach, 64-53.

Next stop, Tempe and the big time.

ROUND I: THE LOBOS

It’s not as though the Titans were underdogs in the first round of the NCAA tournament, but the University of New Mexico, which was hosting the west regional championships in Albuquerque, had arranged its victory party before the game. And could you blame them? The Lobos led the nation in scoring that season. Some would joke that they had more talent than the Titans had fans.

Assistant coach Sims remembers he and Dye sitting in their office, staring at the New Mexico roster.

“We didn’t really believe we could do this,” Sims said. “But we kept saying, ‘We can’t let the kids know. We have to make them believe.’ It’s amazing what you can do with the human mind. Dye was textbook during the tournament. He said all the right things at the right time. It’s mysterious how he knew.

“A couple of Dye’s pre-game talks rivaled Rockne and Patton. Really. I would plant a seed then he would plant a seed. It’s like the doctor who gives you a placebo and says this will cure you. We made these guys believe something that might not have been true.”

Fullerton 90, New Mexico 85. It was the first time Fullerton had scored 90 points since December. Two Anderson free throws late in the game preserved the win.

The 500 Fullerton fans in attendance poured onto the court and absorbed ecstasy.

A television announcer wondered if all the Fullerton players were on scholarship.

Dye would be proclaimed “The Wizard of Nutwood.”

New Mexico Coach Norm Ellenberger wasn’t proclaimed the wizard of anything.

“We’ve got six months to look at this now and in six months we’ll still be shaking our heads,” he said.

The Titans, who were more than grateful when a bus awaited them at the airport following road games, were shocked when hundreds of rooters met the team plane in Orange County.

“It was like we won the Super Bowl,” Anderson recalled. ROUND II: CINDERELLA VS. GODZILLA

It would be five days before the Titans would meet the University of San Francisco in the regional semifinal game in Albuquerque. There was pain in waiting. In five days, you see, the Dons would still have 7-foot center, Bill Cartwright, and Fullerton would still have no way of stopping him.

The Dons were undefeated and the nation’s No.1 team for most of the season before slipping to 22-5.

Steve Shaw, the Titans’ 6-8 center, would be thrown into the cage against Cartwright, the nation’s premier collegiate center. He likened covering Cartwright to “leaning up against a wall.”

Cartwright dominated early, scoring 19 points before halftime. The Dons led at the half, 44-32, and opened a 15-point lead early in the second. But the Titans lived for comebacks. How else would they play it? Dye put reserve center Greg Palm on Cartwright early in the second half and it paid off. Cartwright scored only nine points in the final 20 minutes.

The Titans, meanwhile, pecked away at the lead. And you hadn’t heard the last from Steve Shaw, either. With about two minutes left and the game tied, Shaw blew by Cartwright at the free throw line and threw in a left-handed layup to put the Titans up, 72-70.

“Yeah, it was kind of fun,” Shaw recalls.

But there was more to come.

Winford Boynes of the Dons came back to tie the game, setting the stage for Anderson.

The Titans called time out with 13 seconds left to set up the last shot.

Anderson takes it from there.

“Dye told us to start working for the last shot when he put the towel up,” Anderson recalled. “But he never put the towel up. So I just took the ball and went. I put a move on (John) Cox and put it in.”

There were still three seconds left when Anderson swished his shot. The Dons tried to call time out, but had none left. Heenan made the technical and the Titans had made some history, 75-72. ROUND III: THE FALL

By the time the Titans reached the regional final, they feared no one. In fact, they were hoping to face UCLA, but the Bruins didn’t stay in the tournament long enough to grant Fullerton’s wish. Instead, the Titans settled for Arkansas and its three Basketeers--Sidney Moncrief, Marvin Delph and Ron Brewer.

And what would another little 15-point halftime deficit mean to a team of destiny, anyway? “We got ‘em right where we want them,” Dye told his team.

And so they did. The Titans, on cue, staged another furious second-half rally. They employed a devastating full-court press, forcing 15 Arkansas turnovers. Before you knew it, Anderson had given the Titans a 58-57 lead with 1:42 remaining.

But that was as good as it would get. After Anderson’s shot, Brewer put Arkansas in the lead for good with a long shot of his own.

The Titans had one last shot with 14 seconds left.

“We had everything going,” Sims said. “We had Anderson with the ball. It was a text-book ending. I remember saying that we were going to win. I remember yelling at him when he got close to shoot the jumper, shoot the jumper. I would bet 10,000 to one that’s his shot. For the first time he did what I couldn’t predict.”

In a moment, it was over.

Bobby Dye won’t ever forget.

“To be that close . . . “ he said. “Sure, I wondered what might have happened. We would have drawn Kentucky in the Final Four. We had such great momentum at the time. We had an incredible belief in ourselves. It was almost an invincible feeling.”

So, what ever happened to . . . THE COACH

Bobby Dye, now 48, returned the following season at Fullerton. Whether he should have is another question. Dye was a hot property, receiving job offers from Cal to Purdue. He chose to stay.

“We can all reflect back,” Dye said recently. “I had some nice opportunities. I often wondered what might have happened. The reason I stayed at Fullerton was that I liked that group. I thought we had something special. It didn’t work out that way.”

The 1978-79 Titans returned every starter except Bunch and Shaw and won 15 of their first 18 games. Then they collapsed. Dye suffered from high blood pressure. Linden, his point guard, went AWOL during the season, returning home to Yonkers.

Things would never be the same.

Later, Dye would be turned away from the one job he wanted, San Diego State.

Despondent and weary, Dye resigned from Fullerton mid-way through the 1980-81 season.

He would reappear a year later at Cal State Bakersfield, a Division II school. There, he turned around a losing program and twice led his teams to the Division II Final Four. His two-year coaching record at Bakersfield was 50-11. Then, it was on to Boise State, where he recently completed his third season.

Dye turned that program around too, leading Boise State to its first back-to-back winning seasons since the school was upgraded to Division I.

Things haven’t gone so well lately. Boise State finished with a 14-16 record this season.

“We had so many good things going for us with the Titans back in 1978,” Dye said. “It seems like all those good things are going bad for us this year. What goes around, comes around, I guess.”

And Boise is a long way from Fullerton.

“There was a special feeling on that team,” Dye said. “I feel bad about having not seen any of the kids. There’s been a lot of time and distance.” DR. YEAST

Ability levels seemed to rise when players shared a basketball court with Greg Bunch. His was a fitting nickname. Bunch was Fullerton’s first true superstar, the heart of the Cal State Who team--leader and intellect.

Today, at 29, he is the Sales and Marketing Manager for Group W cable in South Gate.

Bunch joined the New York Knicks after his senior season at Fullerton and played three months in the NBA before being released. Bunch was cut by the Portland Trailblazers the next season and then went overseas, where he helped lead a city-team in Finland to a national title. Bunch played the next year in England and then spent three years playing in Spain.

There, he learned a second language and met his fiancee, Piedad Martinez.

He can’t remember the last time he picked up a basketball.

“I don’t enjoy it anymore,” Bunch said.

The memories, though, are another thing.

“That’s what the clips are for,” he said. “In 20 years, when no one remembers Cal State Who, all I’ll have to do is open a scrapbook and that intensity will transcend to the point where you wished you could go back in time. I’ll wish we could have played those games again. Then, I’ll snap out of it. You cherish it, but you continue.” GOGGLES

Kevin Heenan has gained 50 pounds since his playing days at Fullerton, and still looks skinny.

He’s 28 now and is a real estate property manager in Newport Beach. In 1981, Heenan married former Titan woman’s basketball star, Debbie Ricketts. They have a 1-year-old son, Ryan.

After college, Heenan played basketball a season for Athletes In Action and then toured with a small-town team in France for nine months. When he returned, he went to work for the post office and stayed there two years before entering real estate.

Heenan doesn’t play basketball anymore.

“But I always think of that year,” he said. “Especially at NCAA playoff time. That was a weird year for me because my dad had died. Then, I got hit in the eye. We weren’t supposed to win, but I can always remember Dye saying that we weren’t just going there for a cup of coffee. Maybe we were crazy, but we believed him.” THE CENTER

Steve Shaw, 29, is the head basketball coach at Redondo Union High School. And should you ever happen upon one of his games, you’ll notice his team running the old Fullerton offense. Shaw will get down on his knee like Dye used to and clench his fists in the air.

“You’d be foolish not to take some things from coach Dye,” Shaw said. “We run the high-and-wide offense. It’s the same thing.”

Shaw, who is married, got his teaching credential at Cal State Dominquez Hills and spent three years coaching at Aviation High School before accepting an invitation to play basketball for a city-team in Switzerland.

When he returned to the states, he hooked on as a substitute teacher at Redondo and was hired on staff the next year. He became the head coach last season.

It is not beyond Shaw to sit his team down and tell the players yarns about impossible dreams on a basketball court.

After all, Shaw lived one.

“Out of 100 times, what happened to us at Fullerton probably happens once,” Shaw said. “It probably couldn’t get much better than that. It’s probably what keeps a lot of guys in coaching, you know, maybe having a team that does what is not expected.” YONKERS

Mike Linden, in a dispute over playing time, quit the Titans the year after the Cal State Who season. But he’s been playing basketball ever since. Linden, even at 30, still is a self-proclaimed gym rat.

Linden played for a while for the Lancaster Red Roses in the Eastern Basketball League. He says he can still scratch out a living playing in summer pro leagues.

To this day, he can recite intricate detail about those Fullerton games he played more than eight years ago.

Linden was different than the rest. He was moody and unpredictable--remember those cross-country car rides--and never felt at home at Fullerton.

“I had never even heard of that school,” he said. “People to this day don’t know where that school is.”

Linden, being an outsider, doesn’t think he was treated fairly at Fullerton.

He was a player who could beat any Titan in a game of H-O-R-S-E, yet froze when forced to shoot in a game.

Yet, for one special season, he was the perfect point guard.

“We weren’t the best of friends off the court,” Linden says today of his teammates. “I kind of came and went. A lot of the talent I had people never saw. I had to sacrifice. As a player, any time I got on the court--I don’t care if it’s against Julius Erving--there is a way to be beaten. You just have to find that way.” THE ENFORCER

Mel Sims said he always had a funny feeling about Mike Niles, the player he recruited.

“He was a savage rebounder, we needed a guy like him,” Sims said. “I always said if I was going to war, and was in a trench, Niles was the guy I’d call.”

But, Sims added, “I thought I’d read about him again.”

His story taints more joyful memories.

Anderson: “I don’t know what to say about it. I don’t understand. I don’t want to believe it. We all went to school together. I thought he was one of us. He was a Titan.”

Heenan: “I thought once he had gotten to the pros, he had straightened his life around. I’m disappointed, but then again, he had every chance in the world. He was treated like a king at Fullerton and in the pros. And then this happens.

Shaw: “He could be one of the nicest guys you ever met. Obviously, a lot happened in his life that we couldn’t imagine going through.”

Sims: “Me and Dye spent every minute talking to him. Dye would take him to his house and Niles would baby sit. The kid was a jewel, but you were always wondering if something was going to happen. He was the classic hard-luck guy, a survivor on the street. We were going to take him to Orange County, acclimate him to this society and into main-stream America. We thought we had got him there. Evidently, we didn’t turn the corner.” MR. CLUTCH

A thousand times since the Arkansas game, Keith Anderson has recreated the final seconds in his mind and taken the jump shot. And every time he makes it. Perhaps unjustly, he will be remembered for that moment more often than all the times he won in the final seconds. Who will remember the time he came off the bench as a freshman to beat Cal State Long Beach at the buzzer?

Today, Anderson, 28, lives in Anaheim with wife Jill, a former Titan cheerleader. Anderson works for Southern California Edison and plays as much basketball as one can without soon being declared single.

Friends still kid Anderson about the shot he never took. And he just smiles because he knows they always will.

“My friends keep saying, ‘Why didn’t you shoot from the top of the key?”’ Anderson said. “Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be. But of all the times it should have worked . . . “