Role Call

Holton didn't get Jim Harrick fired in 1996--but only seven months after Harrick added him to the staff, he was the only assistant coach the UCLA administration publicly named as a central witness in the inquiry.

Holton isn't the brand name on this Bruin basketball coaching staff--he just is the assistant who ended up at the hospital last spring with the family of the program's most important player, point guard Baron Davis.

"While Baron was in surgery, Michael stayed for, like, two hours," said Davis' older sister, Lisa Davis, of Baron's reconstructive knee surgery. "He stayed out there with my grandmother and myself, just talking to us. I thought that was really, really great. So did my grandmother.

"I think he's a good father figure. And the guys need that, they need that badly."

Maybe they need it now more than ever at UCLA, which, after consecutive strong recruiting seasons--with Holton as the recruiting coordinator and Jim Saia as the No. 2 assistant--has a roster consisting almost completely of blue-chip freshmen and sophomores.

And as UCLA attempts to move away from the controversies of the last two seasons, Holton is being pointed to as a calm, experienced and thoughtful mainstay.

"Mike's really classy," said Pepperdine Coach Lorenzo Romar, whose recommendation upon leaving the UCLA staff led to Holton's hiring by Harrick.

"He didn't make the NBA because he had Michael Jordan talent. He made it because he was talented but also a very smart basketball player. UCLA went to the championship game when he was a freshman--and he played the point when he was a two-guard. He always was a stable force with the ball."

Stable force? Besides having NBA and Final Four playing experience, Holton, 37, also is the only married member of the Bruin coaching staff, the only one with children, and the only one who didn't attend San Francisco's Drake High in the late 1970s or early '80s.

"It's really important for the staff to have that balance--him being a family man," Lisa Davis said. "Just for these ballplayers to know that you need to go home to your wife and your kids and be a family person, have really good values. . . .

"I think they should give him a lot more responsibilities. Because he's been through it, he understands it, he knows the good, the highs, the lows, all those things. Nobody really knows the ins and outs unless you've actually been there, seen it, done it."

Holton has seen it, he has done it, he has been burned by it. He has made NBA money, made Larry Brown proud, and made a lot of trouble for himself.

And, most important in a sport and a program that has had more than its share of problems, made his way out of it.

Holton has never hidden his past, a brief problem with substance abuse that got him kicked out of the CBA near the end of his playing days.

From leaving UCLA with expectations of a long NBA career, to the battle for a roster spot, to the trips to the CBA, to his fall into frustration and flunking a random CBA drug test, Holton's life after UCLA was typical of the journeyman's odyssey in pro basketball, he says, and at times was terrifying.

"I chased this game," Holton said. "I played for four teams in six years. I was a third-round draft pick [in 1983 by the Golden State Warriors] who didn't make it. . . .

"I did the CBA and played a year and came back and made it [in the NBA] and started 59 games for the Phoenix Suns, thought I was on my way, thought I was going to have a 10- or 12-year career, be rich and famous and never work." Pause. "And got cut again the next year."

Then Holton starts rattling off his stops, like destinations on a late-night train ride: "Back to the CBA, traded in the CBA, picked up on the CBA all-star night after the game by Jerry Krause and the Bulls, signed to a 10-day [contract], a second 10-day. . . .

"It was Jordan's second year [late in the season], he comes back from the broken foot. I was guarding him every day in practice, so you're trying to turn 10 days into 20 days and you're guarding a hungry Jordan."

Holton also had stints in Portland, where he was part of a guard rotation with Clyde Drexler and Terry Porter, and finally with Charlotte, from 1988-1990. In training camp his second season there, Holton began experiencing numbness in his back, needed surgery, and was waived at the end of the 1989-90 season.

Then, with his back still hurting, it was back to the CBA, and desolation.

"A lot of his teammates were into lifestyles which they shouldn't be in, and chumming with them, he kind of got caught up in that fast track," said George Terzian, who was Holton's coach at Pasadena High.