Look homeward, Angel

  KEITH ENRIQUEZ/Daily Bruin Senior guard Rico
Hines has filled Earl Watson’s role as the heart and soul
of the men’s basketball team.

By Dylan Hernandez
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

Rico Hines never heard the boos and jeers, but on the other side
of the country, more than 2,500 miles away in Rocky Mount, N.C.,
his mother did, loud and clear.

The college basketball season had just begun and the Bruins were
struggling. Of all the team’s players, Hines appeared to be
having the toughest time. He couldn’t make a basket. Not one.
Jumpshots, runners, layups ““ he missed them all. Frustrated
fans, even those in UCLA’s own student section at Pauley
Pavilion, taunted him whenever he touched the ball.

“Sit down, Rico!”

“Rico, you suck!”

Hines never told his mother, Faye Bordeaux, how everyone had
turned on him, but she was informed of what was going on by others.
She worried.

“I hated it with a passion,” Bordeaux, a practicing
child psychologist, said of the boos and negative press her son was
receiving. “I worked really hard to foster a high self-esteem
in him, which is sometimes difficult to do with black males. I was
afraid it would negatively affect or crush him.”

But Bordeaux told herself her son would be fine. Faye
Bordeaux’s boy had been through worse. He was strong. He
wasn’t raised to fold. He could handle it.

She was right.

A few weeks went by and the Bruins were playing significantly
better. Much of the credit was being given to Hines, the senior
guard and team captain who had been inserted into the starting
lineup when freshman Cedric Bozeman went down with a knee
injury.

Although Hines finally got his first bucket of the season
against Alabama on Dec. 8 in the Wooden Classic, he still
wasn’t scoring much. But no one cared. People finally noticed
the intensity he brought to the team on defense, which had not
existed before he was a starter. They had learned to accept him for
the player that he was, and the boos became cheers.

In the waning moments of the Bruins’ game against
Washington in Pauley Pavilion on Jan. 4, Hines got the ball on a
fast break, beat the last defender to the paint and soared for a
dunk that sealed the 74-62 victory.

As he dangled on the rim, the crowd stood to applaud. Soon
after, the student section, the one that had booed him only a month
before, chimed in, chanting his name in rhythmic sequence:
“Ri-co Hines! Ri-co Hines! Ri-co Hines!”

Hines doesn’t have much to say when asked about how he was
treated early in the season by the fans and press.

“I’m just about winning,” Hines said.
“To be honest, I never used to read the newspapers. And when
I’m out on the court, I don’t hear anything. I
don’t care what anybody says. That’s how I grew
up.”

Hines added that getting his first basket of the season against
Alabama wasn’t particularly special to him.

Perhaps it’s true. But Bruin freshman Dijon Thompson said
Hines was elated after the Alabama game, jumping around saying,
“The monkey’s off my back! The curse is
gone!”

Whether or not the early-season struggles bothered him, Hines
did as he was taught by his family: if there’s a problem,
don’t complain about it; go out and fix it.

Bordeaux often calls her son a “communal child.”
Hines was born when Bordeaux, then named Faye Hardy, was still a
senior at North Pitt High School in Greenville, N.C. Hines’
father, Mickey Hines, was the star on the basketball team.

Hardy, who was offered a full scholarship to attend the
University of North Carolina, faced a tough decision: go to school
or stay with baby Rico. At the urging of her parents, who said they
would take care of her child, she went to college.

Until she graduated in 1983, Hardy returned home as much as she
could, but Rico Hines was mostly raised by Hardy’s parents
and eight siblings, three of whom still lived at home. They all
treated him as if he were their own son, making sure he always had
enough. They taught him to be tough, to be a good person.

“That’s how I’m able to deal with so
much,” Hines said. “I know they’ll always be
there for me. Everyone took a part in raising me.”

Even after he moved out of his grandparents’ house when
his parents got married in 1985, Hines remained tight with his
extended family. Distance between them wouldn’t change that.
As a senior in high school, Hines moved to Maryland so he could
transfer to national basketball power St. John’s at Prospect
Hall, but he felt as if he had never left the Hardy house.

His family members assured him they would always love him,
regardless of where he went: even if that place were UCLA. The day
before Hines held a press conference to announce what university he
would be attending, Hardy drove from North Carolina to Maryland
just to tell her son, “Don’t let distance decide where
you go. I’m always just a flight away.”

In his time at UCLA, Hines has suffered several setbacks. Before
the summer of what would have been his first year in college, the
NCAA clearing house declared him ineligible, forcing him to attend
a military boarding school until he reached a satisfactory score on
the SATs.

Once in Westwood, he was often forced to play out of position in
his first couple of years. Despite being only 6-foot-4, Hines was
the team’s center at one time and had to guard players much
bigger than he, such as Duke’s Elton Brand and
Michigan’s Robert “Tractor” Traylor.

And then there were the injuries that seemed to bite him every
year. He was even forced to miss all of last season as a medical
redshirt.

But each time he feels he’s facing difficulty, he
remembers what his family taught him: to not complain and to work
to correct the problem.

“He’s very well mannered and polite,” Bruin
head coach Steve Lavin said. “He has a maturity in him of the
old-school nature that I appreciate. He’s the old soul of the
team. You see that his foundation was put in place by his
family.”

Today, Faye Bordeaux, as the change in her last name suggests,
is remarried. She now lives 45 miles west of Greenville but
continues to wait for her son to call her everyday after a game or
practice. These waits often give her anxiety, as they did a week
ago when Hines suffered a concussion in practice but decided to
play against USC and Kansas anyway.

“I’m nervous all the time,” she said.
“I’m afraid he’ll call after practice and tell
me, “˜Mama, I sprained this,’ or “˜Mama, I broke
that.'”

Due to the concussion he suffered, Hines isn’t expected to
play this week on the Bruins’ trip to the Arizona schools,
but Faye Bordeaux won’t be spared of the usual worry.

Rico Hines will be sitting on the bench, but he may decide he
can play. After all, he is her son: strong and determined ““
the way she and her family raised him to be.