Busy As A Bee In The Business Of Basketball

Insecure, ulcerated fellows that they are—a few victories are all that separate some of them from unemployment—most college basketball coaches would rather start a jockey at center than get ready for an opponent without a scouting report. And like ulcer patients they crave fat, soothing elixirs to settle their nervous stomachs. Enter the dossier, a thick, rich concoction full of information about the dreaded enemy. Does the little playmaking guard dribble to his left 51.8% of the time? Is the rangy forward so nearsighted he can't see the basket, much less hit it? Who throws the ball in on out-of-bounds plays? How many times does the student manager visit the water cooler? All that's in the package! Oh, peace! Oh, salvation!

Now, the rule has not been written that says the coach cannot do his own scouting or have an assistant do it for him, but consider the travel costs, the time, the fact that he is getting only his own opinion. So, enter right behind the dossier its author, or, more accurately, the man who is liable to be its author. He is Bill Bertka, proprietor of Bertka Views, the nation's biggest collegiate scouting agency, and, lest anybody think he is lying down on his jobs, president of a recreation-resort development company in Santa Barbara, Calif., head talent scout and opponent scout for the Los Angeles Lakers, host on a twice-weekly radio show and a weekly TV show (both called Sports With Bertka) and moderator of a weekly luncheon called the Santa Barbara Athletic Roundtable. Should he ever scout himself, Bill Bertka would no doubt conclude that he was a man who believed firmly that sleep was something that other people did. As usual, he would be right.

Bertka is his own most enthusiastic operative. Three weeks before the season-opening tip-off he immerses himself in basketball magazines and old reports—"to get my mind in tune with the game; you gotta be ready to go!" For a $55 to $65 fee, depending on expenses, Bertka or one of his hundreds of "associates" around the country (almost all of whom are ex-coaches) will scout a team and send the client a bulky package that includes clippings, brochures and 18 to 20 pages of diagrams, statistics, individual characteristics and tendencies. The slogan of Bertka Views: "We'll scout 'em—you play 'em—anywhere in the U.S.A."

"What that means, deep inside, is 'We'll scout 'em, but I'm not going to worry about who wins and who loses,' " says Bertka, an ex-coach himself.

At the 80 or 90 games Bertka attends each year he likes to sit up in the balcony, an attach� case on his lap serving as a desk as he riffles through papers, keeps shot charts on both teams, broadcasts the goings-on to himself and anybody unlucky enough to be sitting nearby, and scribbles the inevitable X's and O's. Most of his Christmas vacation each year is spent on the tournament trail away from his family; in just a four-day stretch last December, for instance, Bertka managed to squeeze in 32 teams. He feels guilty if he watches a game on television and doesn't take reams of notes.

"What sets Bill apart from other scouts is that he's so thorough," says Houston Coach Guy V. Lewis. "In fact, I'd rather have one of his scouting reports than see a team play myself. I've had other former coaches scout for me, but none give me the detailed, accurate report that Bill does."

An example was Bertka's advice given Lewis before Houston's 1967 NCAA semifinal game against UCLA in Louisville. "He felt we could press them," Lewis says, "and we did, successfully. In fact, they had more turnovers than we did. But the difference turned out to be UCLA's own press and Lew Alcindor."

"I'll tell you of a case where his report helped us win," says Stanford's Howie Dallmar. "There was a player who had a pretty good free-throw-shooting average, something like 75%, but the scouting report showed that he was closer to 100% in the first 10 minutes of each half. Under extreme pressure he would miss. That gave us a clue. If it was necessary to foul in the late minutes, we'd go for him. We did and sure enough he missed."

Naturally, Bertka is not goof-proof. Before the 1968 UCLA-Houston game in the Astrodome, Lewis assigned Bertka to scout the Bruins.

"I called Bill and talked to him after reading his report," said Lewis. "He had written that regardless of what we did there was no way we could beat UCLA. 'Bill,' I said, 'do you really believe that?' He answered, 'Yes, they're superhumans.' " With Alcindor injured, they were human. Houston won 71-69, snapping a 47-game winning streak.