Brian Walsh, a one-time fixture on the benches of a couple of Albuquerque area boys basketball teams, is a virtual hardwood gypsy of sorts, a mercenary for coaches appreciating his prowess with honing a tenacious defense.

Why does he love basketball so much? After all, looking at Walsh, you’d never say, “He’s gotta be a basketball player.” More like, “He looks like a wrestler … or a jockey.”

In other words, to be politically correct here, he’s vertically challenged. “I never even really noticed until a couple years ago; it never really crossed my mind,” he said about his stature.

“The common denominator is the camaraderie, that’s what I enjoy the most and would miss the most if I ever think about getting out of it,” he said.

The 40-year-old Walsh was undoubtedly having flashbacks in January when the Rio Grande Valley Vipers practiced in the West Mesa High School gym.

Walsh, 40, and the NBA Development League team practiced in the Mustangs’ gym because Tingley Coliseum, where the D-League games are played, was unavailable because of the just-ended ArenaCross event.

“Tingley Coliseum brings back a ton of memories and they’re all good; it was great when the Slam started,” he said. “We play in a lot of cities that Albuquerque’s tons nicer than and tons better to live in, but the perception around the league is it’d be nice to come into Albuquerque and play in a place that’s up to the standards of the great city we live in.”

As if West Mesa’s gym wasn’t enough of a flashback, the man who opened the gym for the Vipers was Brian O’Neill; Walsh had been his assistant at Cibola High from 1992-98.

Walsh, a graduate of Capistrano Valley High in San Juan Capistranoi, Calif., and a Pittsburgh native, attended Eastern New Mexico University, where he met O’Neill and obtained a degree in education.

When O’Neill left the school he played basketball for as a student to accept an assistant’s job at the University of New Mexico by Lobos head coach Dave Bliss, Walsh was the popular choice to be O’Neill’s successor.

But that didn’t happen: Ray Rodriguez got that head-coaching job at Cibola, and Walsh took his talents a few miles east to La Cueva High.

There, Walsh helped Bears head coach Frank Castillo — a former head coach at Cibola — guide the Bears to a spotless 25-0 record heading into the Class 4A championship game, which they lost to Hobbs, 78-72.

Walsh remained with the Bears in 1998-99, when they finished third at state, before finding an assistant’s position with the brand-new New Mexico Slam of the International Basketball League.

Castillo was sorry to see his hard-nosed assistant leave.

“Brian did a great job of relating to the players,” Castillo said recently. “They all respected him and liked him. He was in charge of the defense for our team. He did a great job and we still use some of the stuff he taught to this day. I only wish that he would have stayed at La Cueva longer.  He was well liked by the coaches, players, parents and the administration.”

But all good things eventually come to an end.

With the Slam, Walsh worked for head coach John Whisenant and with fellow assistant Marvin “Automatic” Johnson, a former Lobo star of the 1970s.

That “good thing” also came to an end after the 2000-01 season, and Walsh was looking for another job in basketball.

He found that at Baylor, where O’Neill had gone with Bliss. Walsh was with this version of Bears for two seasons, under a scandal ended Bliss’s tenure in Waco — leaving O’Neill and Walsh and the rest of his staff looking for jobs again.

In each of the four seasons that followed, Walsh has had a different team: the Dakota Wizards of the Continental Basketball Association (‘04-05), the Nebraska Canes of the United States Basketball League (2005-06), the D’League’s Colorado 14ers last season and now, a Vipers assistant after being a finalist for the team’s head-coaching post.

“What a long, strange trip it’s been” the Grateful Dead once sang.

Walsh is enjoying every stop along the way and took time to sit down with The Observer during the Vipers’ recent two-game visit to the Duke City.

“It’s great now, because I’ve been trying to chase this thing for a while and finally (my family’s) together,” he said. “I’ve been traveling with coaching — not with the kids, not with the family. Finally, my wife and kids are all together now in McAllen, Texas.”

The trip there nearly proved fatal for Walsh, who was rear-ended on I-10 by a drunk driver last summer,

“They knew that I wasn’t going to go unless I had some sort of stability, three or four years at least, because I’ve been changing every year,” he said. “Dakota won the championship in the D-League last year and they offered me the head-coaching job there at Dakota, but I didn’t take it because we weren’t going to have the family there.”

His wife, whom he met when the two were students at ENMU, preferred Texas to either Dakota. Married six years, the couple has two children.

“People think you’re really close to the NBA when you’re here, because it’s stamped on your underwear somewhere,” he joked. “But it’s really not close.

“Where I’m going to settle down is somewhere where, like I said, it can be a family situation,” he explained “It would be fine if it was overseas; I’ve tested those waters quite a bit but nothing worked out.

“The NBA’s not necessarily my long-term goal, as most people (dream of) in this league.”

The D-League isn’t quite as glamorous as the the league it supplies players for, the NBA.

“We’re in the middle of this ridiculously long road trip,” he explained. “Basically, we have two home games in the whole month of January … we’re on the road for about 25 days in this month.”

The Vipers share Dodge Arena in Hidalgo with the Rio Grande Valley Killer Bees, one of the New Mexico Scorpions’ opponents in the Central Hockey League.

Here’s how Walsh described his strengths and skills on an online resume: “Managing day-to-day operations; daily practice preparation; implementing offensive and defensive game plans for season; gameday preparation; evaluating players; individual player workouts; scouting teams and players; opponent game preparation; game adjustments; planning and implmenting team travel schedule, recruiting; video scouting and scout tape preparation; linear and non-linear video editing; extensive computer experience .”

Yeah, it sounds like a lot of work, but not a lifestyle he seems ready to give up.

“It’s something that I grew to understand pretty quickly and I’m really not smart enough to do anything else. That’s true, that’s honest — I really can’t do much else,” he said. “The game’s a small, simple, basic thing and the relationships are the complexity of coaching, and that’s what I enjoy — the relationship with the players and how to get more out of them as people.”

Also on his resume: “I characterize myself as a modern disciplinarian. I push players very hard but I do it in a very energetic and very positive way. If a player needs to be scolded or broken down I have absolutely no problem what so ever doing that.”

Lucky to be alive; lucky to be in basketball. That’s Walsh.

He has some advice for prep players: “There are so many places around the country, great schools at all the levels, Division III up and down the line: “Places that have scholarships, partial scholarships, coaches that are looking for players.

“What you do — and I would have never known it — if the parents and the kids do their research and want to play as part of the his experience at college, if you do research and look at these schools, there’s millions of places you can play.

“So any kid that’s an above-average player in Albuquerque can go and find someplace to play. … Don’t set your sights unrealistically.”

That comes from a guy that once wanted to be a steelworker.