Bozeman Comes Off the Bench

"He has his hands on more players than you can imagine," said Curtis Malone, founder of D.C. Assault.

"He knows more than I do, and I'm supposed to be recruiting," said Kurtis Townsend, an assistant under Bozeman at Cal who now holds the same position at Kansas. "I swear, if you asked him, Todd could rattle off the top 20 rising juniors in Yugoslavia. He's obsessed like that."

Bozeman thinks he would be a better head coach now than he was at Cal. His skills haven't eroded, he said. If anything, they've developed. He spent four years scouting in the NBA, and he observed a Philadelphia 76ers training camp. Because he's one of them now, he's developed better relationships with elite summer league coaches. His tie with D.C. Assault means he already has an in with more than a dozen college-bound players.

Bozeman would love to be back in college basketball next season, but few coaches are hired as late as June. Even with his renewed patience, he sometimes grows eager. He wrote the NCAA earlier this year to ask that his show-cause ban expire in April or May to give him a better chance at coaching during the 2005-06 season. The NCAA declined.

"I'm coming to terms with just having to wait," Bozeman said. "I can't look at anything like it's do or die anymore. When you absolutely have to have something, that's what gets you in trouble."

Building Up the Bears

He used to live by have to's.

He had to be a head coach by 30, so he put his career on fast forward. In four years, he vaulted from high school assistant coach to George Mason graduate assistant to Tulane assistant to Cal assistant.

He had to become the best recruiting assistant coach in the country, so he remade himself into someone high school players would like. He wore out-of-the-box Nike shoes and full warmup suits. He listened to hard-core rap. He talked with laid-back indifference.

While other coaches called top-rated point guard Jason Kidd to talk about basketball, Bozeman called to talk about Kidd's girlfriends. Even when Kidd indicated he'd lost interest in Cal, Bozeman kept calling. He became like Kidd's older brother, or so the point guard said when he committed to Cal in November 1991, giving the school its most celebrated recruit in a decade.

Three years later, Bozeman spent a month studying Islam before he visited Shareef Abdur-Rahim, a highly regarded forward from Marietta, Ga. When he got there, he greeted Abdur-Rahim's mom with a cultural bow and told her about Cal's burgeoning Muslim community. If need be, Bozeman said, Cal could schedule practices around religious obligations. Abdur-Rahim committed a few weeks later.

"Being recruited by him was more like being befriended," said former St. Albans guard Anwar McQueen, whom Bozeman recruited to Cal. "He got it to a point where more or less I was literally checking in with him, not the other way around."

Even when Bozeman reached his goal and became Cal's head coach after the school fired Lou Campanelli on Feb. 9, 1993, he hardly slowed down. During 3 1/2 years as head coach, Bozeman worked at a maniac's pace to amass a 63-35 record and take Cal to three NCAA tournaments. Everything else in his life suffered.