COLLEGE BASKETBALL / NCAA MEN’S FINAL FOUR : Harrick in a Zone With His Coaching : UCLA: After paying his dues all those years, he’s finally getting off the hook--but the reality hasn’t hit him yet.

There were his young, unemployed days when he and his wife drove out from West Virginia to see if he could break into coaching.

There were all those years at the high school level before he got his first college assistantship at 35. . . .

Oops, hold the celebration.

Jim Harrick needs one more victory before he can start ticking off all the stops in his career. He may have been embattled until recently, he may be happy today, but first and foremost, he’s a basketball coach, so when he was asked his reaction to Saturday’s 74-61 victory over Oklahoma State, he couldn’t think of one.

“You know,” Harrick said, “as a basketball coach, I’ll go home now and we’ll stay up most of the night watching tape. And it really doesn’t, it really doesn’t . . . I don’t have a reaction.

“Sometime this summer, it’ll hit me that we’re playing for the championship. It’s a goal and dream and aspiration of every coach that’s ever come on the floor--to bring your team to this game and hopefully win it.

“It’s a great, great feeling for me, from where I’ve come from to where I am now. It’s a great feeling.”

Few coaches have paid as many different kinds of dues as Harrick, of Inglewood’s Morningside High, Utah State (as an assistant, at a cut in pay), Pepperdine (finally a college coach at 41) and UCLA.

Nor has it been easy on him in Westwood, where losses like the one to Tulsa in the first round of the 1994 tournament were memorialized. If Harrick’s players don’t need extra incentive to win a title, they have some anyway.

“Oh, there’s no question,” Cameron Dollar said. “I love to see him glow the way he’s glowing right now. I think Monday night will be the climax for him, silencing all his critics who’ve been stigmatizing him as not being a motivational coach. I think it’ll be great for us as a team to see him on Monday night if we win this thing to just see him glow. That would be a great feeling for me, I know. . . .

“I thought that as a team we let him down because we didn’t give our all in that Tulsa game. I think we weren’t prepared to come out and play ball, and Tulsa came out like a house on fire and we couldn’t understand what they were doing.

“I think I felt bad throughout this whole season. I’ve always kept in my mind that I would never let him down like I did. I think continually about that all the time.”

Saturday started uneventfully, with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer giving Oklahoma State’s wise, old Eddie Sutton the check mark over Harrick in its comparison of the Cowboys and the Bruins.

The game turned into a chess match between Harrick and Sutton. In the first half, Harrick tried a zone defense that tangled up Oklahoma State, but took it off a few minutes before intermission after the Cowboys scored on three possessions in a row.

“We wanted to look at the zone in the first half and see how they reacted,” Harrick said.

In the second half, with 9:13 left, UCLA ahead, 50-49, and George Zidek and J.R. Henderson picking up fouls by the bunch trying to deal with Bryant Reeves, Harrick went back to the zone.

The Cowboys scored 12 points the rest of the game. At the other end, Tyus Edney took over, and Harrick was in the final.

Of course, second-guessing is child’s play, so if something had gone wrong, if Edney had made one fewer big play and the Bruins had lost, the talk shows might be tuning up again.

“I’m not getting (Harrick) off the hook,” Ed O’Bannon said. “I think he is. The players he recruited are here, and he’s doing a good job with what he has. He’s a very positive coach, so I think he actually got himself off the hook.

“There’ve been times when we’ve won games by 10 points and got booed in our own place because we didn’t beat them by 30 or 40 points. It’s been crazy, but I’m happy that he’s in the championship game.”

Charles O’Bannon said: “I don’t think we’re getting him off the hook, but I think we’re quieting his doubters. The years he’s coached, he hasn’t had the type of team that can win it all. This year, we have all those qualities.”

An elated Harrick--OK, so he forgot to act like a basketball coach--said he was just happy the country got to see Edney in action. He said the statisticians had cheated Charles O’Bannon out of a blocked shot. When the moderator said there’d be two more questions, Harrick corrected him.

“One more,” he said.

He had to go scout the opponent in the game he’s been waiting for all his life. So what if the Post-Intelligencer gives the check mark to Arkansas’ Nolan Richardson in Monday’s paper? They’re not insulting some rookie when they insult Jim Harrick.

It’s a tough way to live, but then he’s a basketball coach.