The WAC tournament got rolling yesterday and so did Gary Trost. And what else is new? Every year since he came into the meet as Shawn Bradley's understudy two years ago and turned himself into an all-tournament player, Trost has been BYU's Mr. March.
"I get excited this time of year," said Trost yesterday in the Delta Center after scoring 17 points and nine rebounds to help BYU slide past opening-round opponent Hawaii. "This is when basketball gets fun. This is why you get the bumps and the bruises."In Trost's case, he means literally. For him, 1992-93 hasn't been a no-contact season on or off the court. Even before the season began he found himself in a pressure situation. On the way home from vacation last summer he passed a car wreck in Idaho and crawled in and pulled a family from a burning car. There was no coach around and no crowd cheering and he went in anyway. His instincts took over.
This past winter, while traveling on the freeway between Provo and Salt Lake City, Trost got a look at another auto accident, this time firsthand. A car backed into his path and he could neither avoid the collision or the cracked ribs, facial lacerations and world-class black eye that came with it.
He didn't miss any games after the incident and while the flak jacket he had to wear to protect his ribs didn't exactly enhance his game, his stitched-up face did help give him more of a menacing look in the middle.
Trost's penchant for taking things in stride - no matter what crosses his path - seems to be something of an inborn trait. "He's got a good tolerance for pain and he's very aware of others," his father, Charles Trost, a Salt Lake City police detective, was saying yesterday as he watched what he called his senior son's "last hurrah."
"He cares what people think. He doesn't want to let anybody down. So he has this tendency to just keep on going."
Exhibit A in that line of reasoning is Trost's early basketball career, which was anything but stellar. He was cut from the ninth grade team at Granite Park Junior High and reinstated only because the coach at Granite High School, Charlie Whiting, had sensed a basketball future for the six-foot 14-year-old and asked that he be put back on the team. The only time Trost played was when Whiting was in the stands.
Trost's first two seasons at Granite High seemed to vindicate the junior high coach's assessment. The Farmers went 1-39.
The sole win? "It was over Murray," said Trost yesterday. "I'll never forget it. Charlie shaved off his mustache."
The students at Granite didn't have such long memories, however, and when they started coming to games wearing bags over their heads, Trost thought seriously about giving up on basketball. "When you're 1 and 39 you tend to look for something different," he said. "But for some reason I hung in there. I don't know why."
He only knows he was glad he did. He grew to 6-foot-9 by his senior season and Granite started to win. The Farmers went 12-8 that season, the students took the bags off their heads, and Granite made the state playoffs for the first time in eons.
Trost became the new kid on a lot of college recruiting lists - although not on the list of his school of choice, the University of Utah. Word filtered down that the university-next-door didn't need "another project" and that caused Trost some grief. But not so much grief that he didn't still line up recruiting trips to places like San Diego, Albuquerque and Honolulu.
He'd never been much of a BYU fan, even though both his parents were Cougar graduates, but then he stopped off in the office of Hawaii's head coach at the time, former BYU coach Frank Arnold, and all that changed.
Arnold, sensing (correctly as it turned out) that Trost had no real interest in Hawaii other than seeing Waikiki Beach with his own two eyes, sat the high school senior down and offered him some fatherly advice. He gave him a list of five requirements that the school of his choice should meet. Most of them didn't have anything to do with basketball.
"Basically it came down to being comfortable with where you're going to school, whether you're playing basketball or not," said Trost.
He thought about Arnold's advice on the plane ride home and decided BYU's lifestyle was for him. In a fortuitous turn of fate, BYU was simultaneously deciding the same thing.
His career started slowly enough. He barely played as a BYU freshman and then went on a two-year LDS mission to Philadelphia. Upon his return he was introduced to the 1990-91 freshman class and discovered he had to look up eight inches when he shook hands with the Cougars' 7-foot-6 all-world recruit - Shawn Bradley.
A lot of players might have thought that was worse to deal with than a 1-39 record, but Trost wasn't one of them. Without complaint he backed up Bradley two years ago during the regular season and then came on strong in the WAC tournament as BYU upset top-seed Utah for the title. Trost and Bradley were named to the all-tournament team.
Last year, with Bradley on a mission to Australia, Trost put up regular season numbers nearly the equal of Bradley's freshman stats (14.2 points, 6.6 rebounds) and, come tournament time, made all-tourney again as BYU grabbed its second straight postseason WAC title.
Whether the Cougars, and Trost, will make it three in a row this weekend remains to be sorted out. But yesterday's start gave no indication Trost has lost interest or changed his M.O. This is his time of the year, for one thing, and for another, he's already showed he's perfectly willing to sacrifice his body if he has to.