THE OLYMPICS: WINTER GAMES AT ALBERTVILLE : Making Best of a Labor of Love : Hockey: Ubriaco, former coach of the Penguins, guides Italian team that will play the United States on Sunday.

He understands “un poco Italiano, “ a bit of Italian, and when he speaks the language, his accent rings of Milwaukee, Baltimore and a thousand other minor league hockey outposts. “My pronunciation is American. That’s my biggest problem,” Gene Ubriaco said. “I know what I want to say, but it doesn’t come out clearly.”

His love for hockey, though, surmounts any language barrier.

Born in Canada but a resident of Lutherville, Md., since his days as coach of the American Hockey League’s Baltimore Skipjacks, Ubriaco is guiding the Italian Olympic hockey program through its formative stages. It’s a rocky journey, one that requires him to be a teacher, a salesman and an ambassador all at once. But Ubriaco, whose long-cherished dream of coaching in the NHL went sour when the Pittsburgh Penguins fired him in 1989--24 games into his second season--is savoring the challenge.

That Italy will open the Olympic tournament Sunday against the United States in an internationally televised game makes this experience that much sweeter for Ubriaco, whose squad includes 15 Canadians and one American with Italian-born parents or grandparents. Ubriaco himself is the son of an immigrant from the Calabria region of Italy.

“It’s such a great opportunity for all these guys who have played in Italy for five, 10 years and their parents have never seen them play,” Ubriaco said Friday while scouting a U.S. practice session at the Olympic Arena. “It’s almost incredible that we play the U.S. in our first game. These guys probably go home and tell their friends, ‘I play in Italy,’ and their friends say, ‘So what?’ Now they can see how they’re doing.”

Hockey in Italy is doing better than ever, according to Ubriaco, who took over the national team 14 months ago. Still, the Olympic squad is no threat to the defending champion Soviets--now known as the Unified Team--or the Swedes. Merely a respectable debut against the Americans and creditable performances throughout the Games are Ubriaco’s goal.

“If they don’t play their best and we play our best, we have a chance,” Ubriaco said of Sunday’s opener. “You don’t come to the Olympics unless you want to win a medal, but really, I want to represent Italy the way it should be represented. Italy has a lot going for it.

“You always miss where you worked your life to get to, but this certainly is a great position at this time for me. It’s good hockey, with good skill, and I think it’s faster than the NHL because of the bigger rinks here. The only thing is there’s less body contact, but as more North Americans get involved, that should increase.

“The big thing is we have seven nationals (native-born Italians) on the team out of 9,000 players in the country. That’s a pretty good percentage. I want to get more by ’94. . . . The ones we have on our team are under 27, so they should be back, and there’s 3,000 kids 14 and under who are playing. That’s our future, what we’ve never had in Italy before.”

Ubriaco was approached about the Italian coaching position in November of 1990 while he was still under contract to Pittsburgh. The unexpected opportunity lessened the sting of his firing.

“I was there one year, and we made the playoffs for the first time in six years. I thought it was a good year, but I guess no one else thought so,” Ubriaco said. “Twenty-four games into the next year I was gone. What can you do? Craig Patrick (Pittsburgh’s general manager) deserves a tremendous amount of credit for hiring Bob Johnson, and he brought in Bryan Trottier, Joe Mullen and Ron Francis and changed the defense. We were on the right track, we felt, but we weren’t given the opportunity.”

It took little persuading for Ubriaco to accept the Italian hockey federation’s invitation to visit and check out the program. From there, it took even less persuading for him to accept the job. From the start, it has been an adventure: His squad was playing the Red Army team in Moscow when the Soviet Union dissolved--”We were walking through Red Square and we saw the Russian flags go up,” he recalled--and his team was competing in another tournament when civil war broke out in Yugoslavia.

But the adventure has been overwhelmingly pleasant. He lives in Bolzano, where he can look out of the hockey rink upon the Dolomites, and he has a team that has been praised by rival coaches.

“The biggest adjustment for myself was seeing how much hockey there was in Italy, how advanced it was and how good it was,” said Ubriaco, whose contract with the Italian federation runs through this year’s world championships in Prague. “I was into professional hockey since I was a little boy. I wanted to be in the NHL. I didn’t think there was any other hockey.”

Ubriaco’s starting goalie is David Delfino of Medford, Mass., who has become an Italian resident, and he counts heavily on defenseman Bob Manno, who spent eight seasons in the NHL with Vancouver, Toronto and Detroit. Injuries will deprive him of Pat Micheletti, who played for Minnesota during the 1987-88 season, and Gates Orlando, who spent three seasons with Buffalo.

“We just want to be the best we can be and force everybody else to play their best,” Ubriaco said. “That’s the only way we can be successful.”