UCI Basketball Coach, Wife Proud of Their Family, but Billy’s Special

Dorothy Mulligan, the pert, dark-haired wife of UCI basketball Coach Bill Mulligan, says she learned early on by her husband’s footsteps whether his team had won or lost. The Mulligans then lived in a walk-up apartment in Long Beach, and the stairway was a sounding board for the Mulligan state of mind.

“If the clipboard came in the door first,” Dorothy says, “I knew it was really bad.”

But that is also when the Mulligans--who were just starting a family--learned another lesson that has illuminated their lives since: that sometimes what seems to be a terrible loss can turn into an enormously satisfying victory.

That’s what their first-born son, Billy, has taught them. Billy should have come into this world by Caesarean section and didn’t. Instead, he was forced to fight his way out. In the process, he was unable to breathe properly for almost 5 minutes and emerged finally with a kind of cerebral palsy called athetosis.

“They had to break both his shoulders to get him out,” said Bill Mulligan, his eyes distant, his stockinged feet curled under him on a sofa in the spacious Mulligan home behind the UCI campus.

“We were pretty naive then and just put everything in the hands of the doctors. You didn’t go in with the mothers when they were giving birth in those days, and I was in the waiting room when the doctor came out and told me it was a boy. I started to get excited, and he said, ‘Hold on a minute; there’s more to it.’ What an understatement that was!”

The Mulligans were advised to put Billy in a care home immediately because he would be a vegetable all his life and it would be easier that way. Billy was kept at the hospital when Dorothy came home, despondent and despairing.

The new parents talked over the doctor’s advice, but there was never much doubt about what they were going to do. “We decided to bring him home, no matter what,” says Bill Mulligan. And 3 weeks later, they did.

They knew that heartache was ahead. What they didn’t know then was the joy and satisfaction of seeing Billy grow into a solid, successful human being who has learned to take life on its own terms--and enjoy it.

“This must be one of the most frustrating afflictions anyone can have,” says Billy’s brother, Brian. “His mind is good and sharp and tells his body to do things that it can’t. But still Billy is the happiest one in the family. We always treated him like an equal.”

The family--in addition to Billy, now 30--includes Shawn, 29, and Brian, 27, both delivered without complications by Caesarean section. Both the younger Mulligans are good athletes. Brian played for his father at UCI and is in his first year as a high school head coach. Shawn is a Marine Corps helicopter pilot. But all of them--parents and brothers--have found their greatest satisfaction in Billy’s success.

“The problem we always worried about most,” says his father, “was whether other people would know Billy was as smart as we did. We wanted him to progress, but we didn’t want to push him too hard and frustrate him. Every step with Billy was a new fight.”

Typical was the family’s move from Riverside to San Juan Capistrano when Mulligan took the head coaching job at Saddleback College. Billy was in special schools until he was 16, then he transferred into a public school in Riverside and flourished there.

But San Clemente High wouldn’t accept him because he was in a wheelchair, and although there was a good special education school nearby, Billy was miserable. So Dorothy and Bill Mulligan pounded on educational doors until they got Billy admitted, and he became the first cerebral palsy victim ever to graduate from San Clemente High School.

Billy followed his father to Saddleback, but didn’t make the next move with him. When Mulligan took over as UCI basketball coach 8 years ago, Billy became a familiar figure on the UCI bench, but he chose to attend Cal State Fullerton because he wanted to be a journalist and UCI had no communications department. He became a sports columnist at CSUF, pecking out his stories one finger at a time on a special typewriter and communicating through a talk box mounted on his wheelchair.

“The proudest day of my life,” says Bill Mulligan, “was when Billy graduated from college.”

All that happened a long way from the south Chicago neighborhood in which Bill and Dorothy Mulligan grew up. Both came from blue-collar families. Bill made up in feistiness what he lacked in size as a high school basketball player, and he never wanted to do anything but coach. So he enrolled at Chicago Teachers College, the gateway to the Chicago public school system, and his athletic career took a tailspin.

“I was first string as a freshman, second string as a sophomore, third string as a junior, and in my senior year they asked me if I’d like to go out for wrestling,” he says. “The new players just kept getting better and better.”

Mulligan was drafted into the military during the Korean War, and his college degree got him into Army Intelligence. He was enrolled in graduate school at DePaul in Chicago when he courted and married Dorothy. They’d known each other in junior high school, “but she was three grades below me so I didn’t pay much attention to her.” He was still in graduate school when a recruiter for the Long Beach school system offered him a job in California. Bill had been here only briefly and Dorothy never at all, but they jumped at the chance.

Mulligan coached Long Beach Poly High School for 8 years and served as an assistant basketball coach at USC for 3 years before he started his long, college head-coaching career at Riverside City College in 1966. He spent 10 years at Riverside and 5 at Saddleback before coming to UCI in 1980. In more than 30 years of coaching, he has had only one losing season: with UCI in 1984-85.

After a spectacular run at Saddleback, Mulligan was offered the head coaching job at both CSUF and UCI. “I didn’t want to move at all,” Dorothy said. “I’m pretty conservative, and it was comfortable at Saddleback. It was hard to walk away from tenure and security.”

But the challenge of a Division I program excited Bill, and he says he chose UCI “because I’d rather hang out at the Balboa Bay Club than Coco’s.” He also said that he was impressed by the support of then-UCI Chancellor Daniel G. Aldrich Jr. and the academic stature of UCI.

The latter has turned out to be a mixed blessing. While Mulligan said that UCI’s academic standing has attracted a few top-notch players, for the most part it has given Mulligan recruiting problems usually associated with big-time college athletics.

“We don’t even go into a kid’s house until we see a high school transcript,” he says. He wistfully remembers signing Eric Lechtner--who later led Wyoming into the NCAA--”and they wouldn’t let him in here.”

There are other frustrations at UCI. After playing for 6 years in the Crawford Hall cracker box, Mulligan finally got a first-class facility at the Bren Events Center--and now watches it, half-filled, with dismay.

He puts on a tremendous show with his style of basketball, and he works the campus and the community tirelessly to whip up interest, but it’s tough going. “I talk to these fraternities, and afterward the students say, ‘Yeah, coach, we’re with you all the way. We’ll see you at the Vegas game.’ And I say to them, ‘What about New Mexico State or Pacific?’ ”

One place Bill and Dorothy Mulligan clearly have succeeded is in raising their family. And the centerpiece of that accomplishment is, of course, Billy. Today, he is co-sports information director at Riverside City College, is living away from home and earning his way in the world. “He calls home all the time,” says his father proudly, “and now he’s grumbling about the phone bills.”

There are lots of other reasons for optimism in 1988. The first grandchild will be born into the Mulligan family next year: Shawn’s wife is expecting in March. UCI basketball is back to the run-and-gun game Mulligan loves, season tickets are up and two games are already sold out. And the Mulligans are thinking about taking their first trip to Ireland next summer.

Bill has even made it with his wife’s parents, who know nothing about basketball and have referred to him for years as the “gym teacher.” But they have long watched “Bowling for Dollars” on TV and admired announcer Chick Hearn. So last year, Dorothy brought her parents to Las Vegas for the UCI game, and Bill arranged a 15-minute session for them with Chick Hearn.

“Now,” he says, “I’m all right.” But a winning season will help, too.