When they first met more than four decades ago now, the four freshmen on the University of San Diego’s men’s basketball team in 1983 didn’t need long to figure out who would lead them. Eric Musselman had all but elected himself within moments of moving into their dorm room.
“Before I could even drop my bag on the bed, Eric goes, ‘OK, we’re going to the gym,’” recalled Scott Thompson, San Diego’s 7-foot center. “He’d barely said hello.”
It didn’t matter that, at 5-foot-7, Musselman — the future USC men’s basketball coach — was more than a foot shorter than his freshman counterparts, with the other two checking in at 6-foot-11 and 6-foot-9. Or that Musselman carried himself with a swagger and confidence more befitting, even then, of a coach than a college freshman. He was so sure of himself, he actually pitched himself for the head coaching job as a sophomore.
“Father [Pat] Cahill was our athletic director,” Musselman said. “So before they named our new coach [in 1984], I went in there and told him, ‘Hey I think I can coach these guys and be a student athlete and a coach, and it’d be great publicity, the first time ever and all that.”
“And Father Cahill told me to get back to class.”
This week, Musselman will finally get the chance to walk the San Diego sideline as coach — albeit for the opposing team, when his Trojans take on the Toreros Tuesday. But in the 40 years since they left San Diego, Musselman has never strayed far from the teammates who spent almost every waking moment with him in college. They still communicate most every day via group text messages, in part to keep tabs on Musselman and the Trojans. They’ve traveled to watch him coach in West Palm Beach, Fla., in Reno, Nev., in Fayetteville, Ark. — even bought season tickets for the team he was coaching, whether they lived in the city or not.
Many of those friends will reunite Tuesday in San Diego to celebrate Musselman and the team responsible for two of the Toreros’ four NCAA tournament berths in program history. That stretch has remained the program’s heyday, as San Diego returned to the tournament just twice since its 1987 trip.
In the meantime, Musselman built a career as an NBA coach, lost it, and then built it back coaching college ball, taking two programs of his own to the NCAA tournament — with a third potentially on the way this season at USC.
Along the way he has kept his San Diego teammates close. And he tells his teams to do the same.
“The guys on that team, I could call them for anything to this day,” Musselman said. “You play with someone in 1987, and you’re still in contact and people are flying to Fayetteville, Arkansas to watch a game a year, it’s unique.
“It’s unique how much winning brought us together. Or did we win because of that? I guess you never really know.”
Musselman was the smallest in his class, and he played the least of the four, averaging just 1.3 points per game during his four years in San Diego. But he usually managed to make an impression on opposing teams anyway.
“He might’ve been the guy with the loudest mouth,” San Diego teammate Nils Madden says with a laugh. “We were always backing him up.”
Still, they usually followed his lead. It’d been that way from the beginning at San Diego. Musselman arranged their regular pick-up games. He kept the dorm room spotless. He was even the one rallying the group to go out after games. Any spare time outside of basketball was usually spent at the beach, working on his tan.
“When the rest of us were floundering around,” Thompson says, “he kind of knew what to do with his life.”
One day, during Musselman’s freshman season, then-Clipper forward Bill Walton walked into San Diego’s gym for an impromptu pick-up game. In picking teams, he left out Musselman, who didn’t appreciate the snub.
So Musselman grabbed the gym’s keys, turned the lights out and locked the doors.
“I told Bill Walton, ‘Hey man, I’m either in the first game, or we’re not playing,” Musselman said.
Right away, Musselman was “laser-focused,” his friends say, on following in his father’s footsteps in basketball. So San Diego’s staff held him to a higher standard as a result. When Thompson, a future NBA draft pick, broke his toe playing a game of barefoot football in the middle of their freshman season, it was Musselman who got the brunt of the blame.
“Eric got called out,” says Steve Krallman, another teammate, “because they thought he should have known better.”
San Diego still won the Western Coast Athletic Conference title for the first time that season, earning the school’s first NCAA tournament bid. But the 12th-seed Toreros lost to fifth-seeded Princeton. Musselman played one minute — and still took two shots.
That offseason, their coach, Jim Brovelli, left to restart the hoops program at his alma mater, San Francisco. That’s when Musselman so generously offered to take the reins.
San Diego ultimately went with Hank Egan.
But Egan came to rely on Musselman right away. Every game day, Musselman said, Egan would ask him if the team was ready. One day, early on, Musselman told him that he wasn’t sure.
Egan screamed at him, “Well that’s your job!”
The Toreros didn’t return to the NCAA tournament until Musselman’s senior year. This time, they were a No. 9 seed, with Thompson and Madden patrolling the frontcourt.
Auburn roared out to a lead early, only for San Diego to climb its way back. Musselman knocked down a three pointer during a brief stint off the bench, then threw another up soon after. Egan took him out.
Trailing by two, with six seconds remaining, the Toreros missed a free throw. When Auburn missed a free throw of its own, guard Paul Leonard drove the length of the floor, lifted up for a game-winning lay-in … and was called for double dribbling.
It was a devastating conclusion to the best four-year stretch Torero hoops has ever had.
“We were robbed,” says Marty Munn, a guard on that team.
“If Auburn would’ve had that, it wouldn’t have been called,” Musselman says. “I’ll put it like that.”
He can’t help but think about what might’ve been, with the eventual national champion, Indiana, waiting in the next round. But 40 years later, it’s not the heartbreak that sticks with him from that run.
When any of his old teammates happen to be in town, wherever he is, Musselman likes to have them speak to his team. He wants them to know how lasting the moment they’re in can be.
“I always have them talk to the team about relationships,” Musselman said. “To think, the team that I played with in 1987, so many of them will be at this game or they’ll come to a USC game. … That just doesn’t happen very often.”
But his teammates will tell you that’s a credit to the Toreros’ 5-foot-7 backup point guard.
“Eric has always been the bond, frankly,” Thompson says.
He still texts his San Diego teammates right after most USC games with updates. Assuming, of course, that the Trojans win. (The group text was left noticeably dormant Saturday night after USC fell apart in the second half of a loss to Washington.)
They’re all Trojan fans now by proxy. Though, Tuesday’s matchup — and all the memories it’s sure to conjure — could complicate those allegiances.
“These are like my brothers,” Musselman said. “And that really was the greatest example of what your college experience can be like.”
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