LOS ANGELES _ Fate, the fickle entity that brought Murry Bartow back to his father's UCLA, can only go so far in creating parallel story lines.
The younger Bartow is probably not getting run out of town, lest Angelenos first learn his name. Extraordinary is the barista who can get the spelling right.
"Very rarely," said Murry, who invariably reaches for a cup to find "Murray" scrawled across the side.
Before the season, when his schedule allowed such indulgences, Bartow could easily go 35 miles on a weekend bike ride from his apartment in Culver City to the South Bay and back without being recognized.
Given the Bruins-in-ruins state of his team in a city that increasingly dotes on its professional options, UCLA's new coach remained shrouded in anonymity even after replacing the dismissed Steve Alford last week on an interim basis.
The burden is nothing like that faced by his late father Gene, who, in his final weeks on the job at UCLA in the spring of 1977, showed up pale and gaunt to star forward Marques Johnson's New York hotel room, having cloaked himself in a heavy overcoat and hat to avoid being spotted in public.
"I remember my dad saying, 'Look, coach, it's not worth it, the happiness of your family, the stability of your family,' " Johnson recalled. "It might be a good idea to go someplace else.' "
Gene Bartow's sin was not having gone 52-9 in two seasons while winning as many Pac-8 Conference titles and reaching one Final Four, it was replacing the irreplaceable John Wooden. Before he died in 2012 after a 2{-year battle with stomach cancer, Bartow had relayed to a friend the encumbrance of his time in Westwood, noting that even if he won a national championship it would leave him nine short of Wooden's record haul.
Legacies can be complicated. Nobody knows that better than Murry, the onetime UCLA ball boy who is now running his father's program more than four decades later.
"It obviously puts a little different spin on it," Murry said.
