This Game Is Just Between Friends : Brandenburg, Grant Will Be Reluctant Adversaries Tonight

FORT COLLINS, Colo. — For 10 seasons, Jim Brandenburg and Boyd Grant have avoided coaching against each other. Friendship has been too important to risk on gamesmanship.

Tonight they have no choice.

Brandenburg’s San Diego State Aztecs will play Grant’s Colorado State Rams in a Western Athletic Conference basketball game at 6:35 (PST) in Moby Gym.

This unavoidable confrontation--their first since the 1977-78 season--was set when Brandenburg and Grant accepted new jobs within days of each other last March. They knew then that the friendship they established more than 30 years ago would be challenged at the same campus on which it was founded.

Brandenburg and Grant were teammates and roommates in the mid-1950s at Colorado State, then Colorado A&M.; Tonight they are back together on the snow-covered campus at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, one as the school’s coach, one as its challenger.

They have had 10 months to talk, think and prepare for this. But to their mutual discomfort, neither is sure the friendship has nothing to fear from the competitive strains of coaching against each other twice a year.

“I hope we can be mature about it,” Grant, 54, said this week. “I hope he would know when we take the basketball court that I want to beat the heck out of him. And I hope that is just the way he feels about me. But when the summer rolls around, and if I’m 0-2 against him, it still wouldn’t affect me from calling him and saying, ‘Jim, let’s go golfing.’ I hope I’m that big a person. I know it will be tough.”

Brandenburg shares the concern and determination to make sure 40 minutes of wanting to win doesn’t destroy 30 years of wanting to help.

“We’ll work hard at it so that we really can keep a separate and good relationship off the court,” said Brandenburg, 51. “I think we can, if we keep it in the proper perspective. I love him dearly.”

Such deep feelings are why the two purposely have avoided playing each other for so long.

“We figured there was no reason to put that strain on our relationship,” Brandenburg said. “There is always a little extra tension from a professional standpoint, and there is no use to put an extra set of dynamics into the friendship. There are too many people we would just as soon pick on and beat in Division I basketball than each other.”

Not since 1977-78, when Brandenburg was in his last of two seasons at Montana, and Grant was in his first of nine at Fresno State, have the two met. The game had been arranged before Grant took over in Fresno, and both said it was too late to break the contract. Grant’s team won, 49-44, over a Brandenburg team that included Micheal Ray Richardson, the future National Basketball Assn. all-star.

“I got homered,” said Brandenburg, half-laughing, half-serious. “Boyd played a slow-tempo game, and we wanted to play a faster pace. They drove us absolutely crazy.”

The loss left Brandenburg 0-3 against his former teammate. Grant also won two hastily arranged games in the mid-1970s, when he had a national junior college championship team at Southern Idaho, and Brandenburg was coaching the Montana junior varsity.

Brandenburg said he played the games as a favor to Grant after several scheduled teams canceled. The first time they met, it was close, Grant’s Southern Idaho team winning with a second-half comeback. The second time, it was a rout.

“The second year, we couldn’t get the ball past half-court,” Brandenburg said. “Finally, just to make a game of it, Boyd went to a zone. We still couldn’t get a shot off. Boyd called another timeout and told them to just stand back in the zone, and let us get some shots.

“Truthfully, I did try to beat him, but when I didn’t beat him, I felt good. We didn’t have any national rankings or standings to worry about, and he did. It was one of the few times the hurt of getting beat wasn’t too bad.”

But tonight Brandenburg and Grant have something at stake. Each is in his first season of trying to turn around one of the WAC’s weaker programs.

By the measure of wins and losses, Grant, who returned to coaching after a one-year absence, has had more success. The Rams began 9-2, matching the best start in school history, before losing last week to rival Colorado (60-44) and Utah (42-40) in their conference opener.

Brandenburg, who took over at SDSU after nine seasons at Wyoming, already has surpassed the Aztecs’ five victories of last season, but he is working hard to avoid his first losing season in 11 seasons of college coaching. The Aztecs are 7-9 (1-4 in the WAC) after a 60-57 loss at Air Force Thursday night.

This season has been a test for both men, one that has made them call upon early coaching lessons learned during their college playing days under Jim Williams.

“I watch (Brandenburg’s) team play on film, and he does a lot of things like Coach Williams used to do,” Grant said. “Coach Williams’ great ability as a coach was that he could take players with limited talent and place them in positions where they could be successful. He took players and got the best of their ability. I see that with Jim’s team.”

Williams coached for 26 seasons at Colorado State before he retired in 1980 with a 352-283 record. He still lives in Fort Collins and frequently consults with both men. He plans to attend tonight’s game but claims no rooting favorite.

“I’m going to sit right in the middle,” said Williams, 72, “and keep my mouth shut.”

Brandenburg and Grant differ on who has drawn more from Williams. Brandenburg says it is Grant. Grant says it is Brandenburg. It is one of those good-natured disagreements that is almost as old as their friendship.

Asked for his opinion, Williams found the disagreement between former pupils amusing.

“I figured that’s what they’d say,” Williams said, laughing. “Actually, they’re both half right. Jim took the offense, and Boyd took the defense.”

That is a switch from their playing days, when Grant was known as “an unrepentant shooter, a long-range bomber,” Brandenburg said. “We used to kid him that everyone else had to play the defense, do all the passing, do all the rebounding, so he could stand out there and shoot.”

“That’s almost always the case in coaching. A player’s weakness as a player becomes his strength as a coach.”

Grant came to Fort Collins from Snow College with Williams. He played three seasons (1954-57) at guard, averaging 13.4 points. Brandenburg was a class behind and a walk-on guard, but the two became friends and roommates. They shared a basement apartment with about six other guys one year. Rent was $14 a month per person.

“It was the kind of thing where if one of us got some money from home, we all had money from home,” Brandenburg said. “Then if the next guy got some money from home, we were in the chips again.”

Grant jokingly remembers Brandenburg spending more time at the movies than he did in the library. “Jim saw every movie made in the 1950s; he didn’t miss one,” Grant said.

Brandenburg never had the success as a player that Grant enjoyed. He was cut his senior year. But he always demonstrated an ability to understand the game.

“When I’d come out of the game, I’d sit by him, and he would tell me what I was doing wrong, what I could do right and how I could adjust,” Grant said. “The thing I liked about Jim, and I know it is tough for him to be this way in coaching, was he was such a good friend. He was always there to help you.”

The two have stayed in close touch since college, getting together for a yearly brainstorming session and talking on the telephone.

“I always make a note to call when he has lost a couple of games and needs someone to pick him up,” Grant said. “He is the same with me. If he thought I was struggling, he always called.”

Never was that bond more important than in the past few years, when the strain of coaching led Grant to quit Fresno State after a 15-15 season in 1985-86. He consulted with Brandenburg before he decided to return to his alma mater.

“I found his advice to be very honest,” Grant said. “I would not say he discouraged me, but he told me the truth.”

The difficult experiences of the past few years have taught Grant some lessons he hopes will not be lost on his good friend, a rival for the night. He sees some of the same traits that caused him so much trouble nagging at Brandenburg.

“In college, I found Jim to be a really good person, really fun to be with,” Grant said. “When I watch Jim coach, sometimes I can’t believe it’s really Jim. His intensity is so much different than when he was in college.

“It might have been there in an underlying situation, but I never did see that part of him. He was a good-guy person. I never saw him jump up and holler at people. Neither one of us were that style of guys, and yet coaching has made us both very competitive. That is the stress and pressure of the job.”

Neither man expects it to be any different tonight, or when they meet again in San Diego March 3, regardless of their friendship. That is why both approach these games with some caution.

“The biggest thing with me,” Grant said, “is that Jim would know that I was his friend before the game. That I wasn’t his friend during the game. But that I really wanted to be his friend after the game. That’s the way I’ll approach it.”

Thirty years of friendship mean too much to settle for less.