Where were you when the music stopped?
Phil Mathews and the Riverside City College men’s basketball team were just passing Magic Mountain, on the way to Lemoore for the state tournament.
“I’d had a bad feeling,” he said. “They said they were going to play without fans. I said, OK, we can do that. Then when the NBA called everything off, I said, that’s it.”
The call came, and Mathews told the bus driver to pull over, and he turned to his team and explained that a surprising 21-9 season would be stuck in the middle of the script, along with a first-round date with top-ranked San Francisco City.
Todd Dixon and Santiago Canyon were already there.
The team was walking into a high school gym to practice, and then the phones started going off. The Hawks were top-seeded in the South. Drew Alhadeff, the Cypress College coach and the Orange Empire League representative, was on the other end of Dixon’s phone.
“I got together with the assistants when we got into the gym,” Dixon said. “We decided we couldn’t end this season with a bad taste. We’re already here. Let’s have the best practice of the year.”
And the Hawks did. Actually it was two out of three games of pickup, first team to 25, Elam System style.
“They got after it,” Dixon said. Randall Walker’s shot wrapped it up.
Then the Hawks got back on the bus and visited West Hills College and the arena where it was all supposed to happen. They took their pictures, tabled their regrets, and stopped at Harris Ranch, which promises the best tri-tip in captivity and, according to Dixon, delivered.
“We got back at home that night,” Dixon said. “I’m glad we did all that. It would have been tough to turn around and go home.”
Riverside and Santiago Canyon live in the seven-eighths of the basketball iceberg, rarely seen or heard.
The Hawks had Antoine Jenkins, a rap entrepreneur who sat out last year but then averaged 25 points this year. They put up 32 three-point shots a game and shot 40.5 percent from there, playing centerless basketball, driving and kicking and going 28-2.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever have an offensive team like that,” said Dixon. “We could be down five and then up 10 in a minute and a half. People told us we reminded them of Golden State.”
Dixon coached and won consistently at El Toro until 2017-18. He still teaches there until the early afternoons, when he goes to practice at Santiago Canyon. The college first called him to teach an activities class, two nights a week. When it decided to start playing, it called again.
“I hadn’t thought about leaving, but I started thinking about taking over something from the ground up,” he said. “There was no history there. You could build your own philosophy. A fun challenge. I thought I’d look into it.”
Dixon had played at Southern California College, now Vanguard, for Bill Reynolds. As he drove to this interview, he wanted to find a guidepost. He walked into the gym and saw the letters “SCC” in blue and gold. That was it, he said, along with the spiffy gym itself, built by the same designers of the Meruelo Center at Mater Dei High. In three years the Hawks are 48-20.
Yet they’re in a tough neighborhood. Riverside held the Hawks 21 points below their average in a 76-72 win on Feb. 13. The Tigers were 5-7 on Jan. 14. They are freshman-driven, so Mathews anticipates next season, in lieu of anything else to anticipate.
Just a week earlier, everything was aligned. Phil’s youngest son Jonah had just beaten UCLA in a sold-out Galen Center, giving USC its third consecutive victory and a boost into the Pac-12 tournament. Phil went from there to coach Riverside’s regional victory over Santa Monica that night. His third state championship, after two at Ventura, wasn’t out of the question.
“Justin Labagh (the San Francisco City coach) had told his team that we were going to be the toughest team they’d play,” Mathews said. “We were coming in without fear.”
Santiago Canyon was prepping for Sequoias. It’s an 8-team tournament, with three games in three days. That’s grueling. At this point Dixon and Mathews are nostalgic for things that are grueling.
“This is unprecedented,” said Mathews, 69. “I’m in that age group where I can’t take any chances. So I’m watching a lot of movies. By now I think I’ve seen Godfather III 50 times.”
There’s something to be said for knowing the ending.
