Trumbo’s Dreams Took Detour to Spain

The dream--to wear the purple and gold of the Lakers--isn’t unique among boys who grow up in Southern California. But Steve Trumbo put it in writing at an early age.

In a letter to the team penned in early elementary school scrawl, Trumbo promised that he would someday make people forget “Mr. Clutch,” “Wilt the Stilt” and “the Big O.”

Oh, yeah, and he’d sign autographs for anyone who asked.

But unlike most schoolboys, Trumbo got several shots at his dream.

Trumbo, who starred as a 6-foot-8 center at El Modena High School and was named The Times’ Orange County player of the year in 1978, turned into a 6-9 power forward at Brigham Young and was selected early in the third round of the 1982 NBA draft by the Utah Jazz.

And although he was cut by the Jazz the day before the 1982 season started, he played for the Lakers’ summer league team the next two years and each time was asked by General Manager Jerry West to come to preseason camp.

He declined each time in order to return to play in Spain, lured by something more concrete than a childhood fantasy: a guaranteed contract.

Now, nine seasons removed from BYU, Trumbo is thriving in Europe. He is earning nearly a million dollars in the second year of a three-year contract with a team in Barcelona. He and his Spanish wife, Carolina, have three boys--5-year-old twins Giovanni and Isaac and 2-year-old Axel--and a 6-month-old girl, Dakota.

National magazines follow his every public move--one, similar to People magazine, has done a feature after the birth of each Trumbo child. Like his Barcelona teammates, he cannot go to a restaurant without being recognized.

“Wilt the Stilt,” it seems, would be treated with no more reverence in a country whose fans took to basketball with a vengeance in the 1980s.

And yes, he signs autographs as graciously as he predicted he would.

His team, four-time defending champion FC Barcelona, opens the five-game Spanish league finals with Juventud on Sunday. But Barcelona, which recently was defeated for the second consecutive year in the finals of the European Champions Cup tournament--the major prize in European professional basketball--is hurting.

Two starters have missed the entire season, but more importantly, the team has just learned that center Audie Norris, an American from Jackson State who played three seasons with the Portland Trail Blazers, will miss the series with an injured shoulder.

That means the team will depend more on Trumbo, who is usually the first player off the bench. But he doesn’t admit to feeling extra pressure.

“I’m on a team where if I have a bad game, people are not going to say we’ve got to get rid of this guy, which is really important over here, because they change Americans really quickly,” Trumbo said by telephone from his home in Barcelona.

Trumbo’s situation is secure because he isn’t an American anymore. The U.S. State Department revoked his citizenship after he became a citizen of Spain in 1984.

After two seasons averaging about 25 points and 14 rebounds--the best in the Spanish league--with Valladolid, he was offered a four-year contract with a substantial raise by FC Barcelona--if he would become a Spanish citizen.

European teams are allowed only two foreigners on their rosters. Trumbo was able to become a citizen almost immediately because he was married to a Spanish woman.

To discourage marriages of convenience, the rules of the Spanish and European leagues require that a naturalized citizen sit out a number of seasons. For two years, Trumbo mostly practiced with his new team, playing only as an “American” in a few playoff games.

Trumbo hadn’t wanted to lose his U.S. citizenship, and when he contacted officials in the U.S. State Department to see if the action would jeopardize his status, he said he wasn’t given an answer.

A couple of years later, he got one--a letter from the U.S. State Department saying that he had lost his citizenship.

“At first, I was upset,” Trumbo said. “It was another thing to get over.”

But the appeal of the salary raise and further job security soothed the wound.

“I consider myself an American,” Trumbo said. “We own property in the U.S. I pay taxes in America. Our first two children are American citizens.

“I love Spain and everything but eventually I want to come back to the U.S. I’ve been told it won’t be much of a problem to regain my citizenship.”

Hardly a man without a country, Trumbo spends 10 months of the year in Spain and the rest with his family at the Orange home of his parents, Dale and Jo.

Trumbo, who will turn 31 this month, is the second-oldest of 12 children the Trumbos adopted. Frank Arnold, Trumbo’s coach at BYU, remembers visiting the Trumbo home when he was recruiting Steve and dining at two Ping-Pong tables. The family piled into a small school bus for outings.

Trumbo left this tight-knit Mormon family for BYU after also considering Utah and Oregon.

His height and bulk (230 pounds) and a vertical leap of more than 30 inches made him a powerful rebounder on a front line that included future NBA players Greg Kite and Fred Roberts. Trumbo still shares the single-game rebounding record of 23 in BYU’s Marriott Center.

In Trumbo’s junior season, that front line--plus the last-second heroics of Danny Ainge against Notre Dame--helped the Cougars advance to the NCAA quarterfinals, where they lost to Ralph Sampson’s Virginia team.

“Everybody talks about Danny Ainge as a coach on the floor--and he was--but Steve Trumbo was every bit the floor leader Ainge was,” Arnold said. “He was always directing traffic down inside.”

After averaging 13.2 points and 11.5 rebounds in his senior season, Trumbo was drafted by the Utah Jazz. He survived the cut to the 12-player limit, but on the day before the season, management decided to carry just 11, much to the dismay of Trumbo and 150 friends who bought season tickets to watch him.

It was quite a blow, but Trumbo immediately accepted an offer to play in Valladolid, northwest of Madrid.

“It got me at the beginning,” Trumbo said. “It kind of shocked me, but I went straight over here and tried to put it out of my mind.

“It took awhile.”

Much of the pain was eased when he met Carolina, a pianist who was the accompanist for the rhythmic gymnastics team that practiced near the basketball facility.

One of his teammates obliged when he asked to be introduced. It was a courtship by hand signals; neither spoke the other’s language.

“I flunked Spanish 1 and 2 in high school,” Trumbo said. “It was pretty fun in the first six months. Communication was all we had. We would go around town holding our Spanish-English dictionary and point out things.”

Not realizing that Trumbo had a reputation as a practical joker, Carolina was taken in by a number of tall tales.

One had him being adopted at 4 from the squalor of an orphanage. So when the movie “Oliver Twist” played on Spanish television, Carolina warned her parents to turn off the TV so as not to trigger memories that would be upsetting to Trumbo.

A couple of years later, after they were married, Carolina learned the truth--through a home movie in Orange--that Steve was adopted as a healthy infant.

When you live with Steve Trumbo, you learn to tolerate and sometimes even enjoy his antics.

As Arnold said, “I’d scold him and then turn my back and smile.”

Trumbo said he has stopped most of the mischievous behavior because he now has a family. But in the summer of 1988, some high jinks resulted in the loss of two seasons of effective basketball.

During training camp on an island in the Mediterranean, he suffered a shoulder injury jumping off cliffs with an assistant coach.

“He jumped off it, and I figured that if he jumped, I could dive,” Trumbo said. But when he hit the water, he knew it had been a mistake.

“I knew that I had done something wrong. I was so scared I didn’t tell anybody what happened. I didn’t tell the assistant coach for two weeks. I just played with my arm hanging there.”

During that season, he earned the nickname “Cervantes,” after the 17th-century Spanish writer who had a crippled left arm. Before the next season, Dr. Frank Jobe performed reconstructive surgery on the shoulder, and Trumbo missed the regular season before returning to the lineup for the playoffs.

In this, his first injury-free season in three, Trumbo enjoys the challenge of trying to salvage a league championship for his team and rarely wonders about playing in the NBA.

“I’d be taking a big cut in pay (in the NBA), I wouldn’t play much and would have to worry about making the team every year,” Trumbo said.

Still, he wishes he could have had the experience of playing in at least one NBA game.

“I don’t lose any sleep over it,” he said. “After getting married and having kids and getting more involved in the church, you learn that work is just work and that there are more important things in life.”