He Won’t Ride Off Into Sunset

And so, we give you the upset of the college basketball season.

Jim Harrick survived.

They hit him with their best shots. They came after him with a viciousness the likes of which I haven’t seen since the last time I saw the New York Knicks. They evaluated him, undermined him, submarined him, second-guessed him, third-guessed him, back-stabbed him, back-doored him and suggested his successor before he ever needed succeeding.

But Jim Harrick is the basketball coach at UCLA--still.

He won the big one.

I don’t know if Harrick will ever coach UCLA to a national championship, but I am quite sure that he never will have more trouble winning anything than he had in winning the contract extension through 1997 that UCLA granted him Tuesday.

Nor do I know if the anti-Harrick faction will ever forgive him for whatever they view as his trespasses, but at least now they can call off the death watch.

The Clint Eastwood movie, “Unforgiven,” is currently playing at the Mann Westwood.

I know a Westwood man, currently playing, who has been every bit as unforgiven as Eastwood.

One game, more than any other, seems to stick in the craws of those who would usher Harrick out the Pauley Pavilion door, that being the loss to Indiana in last season’s NCAA West Regional at Albuquerque, N.M. The final game for team leaders Don MacLean, Gerald Madkins and Tracy Murray, it was over in little more than a minute, Indiana running off with it at the first crack of Bob Knight’s whip.

Somehow it no longer mattered thereafter that Harrick had coached the Bruins into the nation’s elite eight. Those who opposed him found three things unforgettable and unforgivable--that the game was not even close, that UCLA already had vanquished Indiana earlier in the season and that Harrick himself had alluded to that success against Knight as Exhibit A in his case for a fatter contract.

Had UCLA won that one game, Harrick’s contract extension would not have become a controversy, it would have become a formality.

One game.

Instead, he was barbecued over hot verbal coals, often on call-in radio shows by anonymous snipers who represented themselves as Bruin boosters when, in truth, they could as easily have been Bruin bashers. When Harrick later said that he remembered a time when there “weren’t any of these radio shows or letters to the editor,” he must have been fantasizing or remembering some bygone age when coaches were confronted with far less public contempt.

Playing in a conference wherein opponents who previously rolled over and played dead have since armed themselves with the likes of Sean Elliott, Adam Keefe, Gary Payton, Harold Miner and more, UCLA has not fallen so much on hard times as on equal terms. And the UCLA faithful keep waiting for one of their coaches to deliver a Patrick Ewing or a Shaquille O’Neal to follow in the sneaker prints of Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton, as though snapping one’s fingers would make this possible.

Has Harrick done so badly in this department? His relationship of long standing with MacLean might have kept that player on campus long enough to become the conference’s all-time scoring leader. He persuaded Murray to attend UCLA after that shooter had shattered California’s scholastic scoring records. Ed O’Bannon and Shon Tarver understandably chose to play for UNLV’s national champions, but when they changed their minds, they came to Jim Harrick.

And even after his three best players left the pantry bare, Harrick was able to find a strapping starting center in Richard Petruska, who might easily have stayed put at Loyola Marymount.

The last time I spoke with Jim Harrick, he had traveled more than a few miles to recruit another player. Even with a game against USC staring him in the face, he flew off to Alaska to scout a prospect and to tout him on southern exposure. This is how hard a coach works beyond the public eye. This is how far he is prepared to go to improve his team.

The man lost two NBA first-round draft choices (MacLean and Murray), lost his best defender (Madkins), had his best blue-chip recruit (O’Bannon) convalescing from serious surgery and still kept UCLA among the West Coast’s top college teams.

And people wanted him fired.

I would have extended his contract to 2097.