BAD BLOOD : Harrick Lost Buffers Between Him and Dalis and Things Finally Reached Firing Point

Beyond the innuendoes, preachy platitudes, official charges and denials, last week’s tumultuous events at UCLA were about two men who could barely tolerate each other long enough to play a round of golf.

Forget the ethical finger-wagging by the UCLA administration. Forget the venting by Jim Harrick that he was betrayed. That’s all for public consumption, and not for real.

If this is about ethics, how come Athletic Director Peter T. Dalis offered to hire Larry Brown eight years ago, when Brown’s previous UCLA tenure ended in probation? How can this be about betrayal if Harrick had only a superficial relationship with Dalis in the first place?

This wasn’t about a recruiting violation or Baron Davis or any alleged personal problems. This, say a handful of sources who have followed the situation, was about Harrick and Dalis, and a wary eight-year relationship that was never bound by a sense of trust or friendship.

This was about a UCLA administration that had grown weary of Harrick’s rough edges, and a coach who wasn’t savvy enough to realize the line he had crossed.

After Harrick had lost several men who served as buffers between him and Dalis over the years, this is what pushed it to the explosion: Already furious at Harrick for not telling him earlier about the car Harrick’s son had sold to Davis’ sister, Dalis could not believe that days later Harrick would turn in a false expense report, lie about it to Dalis’ face, then try to get assistant coach Steve Lavin to lie about it too.

Chancellor Charles E. Young, who apparently also was concerned about Harrick’s involvement in a personal episode last year that was investigated by the university but cleared, took Dalis’ advice to fire Harrick.

If Harrick and Dalis were closer, this never would have happened, say the sources. They could have sat down from the outset, and figured a way to cool things down.

Former assistant coach Lorenzo Romar, who used to communicate things from Dalis to Harrick and vice versa, was gone, and so was former assistant Mark Gottfried, Harrick’s closest ally, and several others out of the public spotlight who could keep things calm.

But, it was only Harrick and Dalis. The buffers were gone. Soon enough, so was Harrick.

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Harrick thought that as long as he won, he would stay in Westwood. How can you get rid of a winning coach, even if the administration always thought of him as a second-tier selection?

But, even after winning the national championship in 1995, UCLA, especially Dalis and those around him, remained sensitive to Harrick’s foibles.

“UCLA and Dalis never embraced my dad,” said Jim Harrick Jr., “and we really don’t know why.”

It’s a complicated issue, flippantly described by one source as: “Pete considers himself a button-down guy, and he always thought Harrick was uncouth.”

Dalis, hardly a gregarious man, concedes he had a different kind of relationship over the years with longtime football Coach Terry Donahue, saying that Donahue most of the time instigated social get-togethers.

With Harrick, a bouncy product of West Virginia, there were almost no social activities.

A small point that illustrates the large problem: Both men were impassioned golfers, but during the whole time Harrick was his employee, Dalis and Harrick played together only once, and not at Dalis’ home course, the Bel-Air Country Club.

“Let’s put it this way, Pete was a member at Bel-Air, and Jim would’ve loved to play there,” said one person close to Harrick. “And Pete never invited him, not once.”

Said another source: “It was understood that Pete didn’t invite Jim, and Jim didn’t invite Pete.”

Several years ago, during a round of golf at the Los Angeles Country Club, where Harrick had never been secret about his desire to be given a membership, Harrick grabbed a back brace on the first tee, dropped his pants and put the brace on, in full view of the clubhouse, startling those around him.

“That,” said one person who was there with several prominent UCLA boosters who were L.A. Country Club members, “is why Harrick will never be a member here.”

And that, multiplied by a thousand tiny moments and tense media exchanges, was why he was never a member of the UCLA inner circle.

“I think it’s a fair assessment to say that we never felt that UCLA truly wanted Jim in the first place,” said Gottfried, now the coach at Murray State. “That’s not a secret.

“I’ve always felt that Jim there has had to climb out of a hole, and it was a much deeper hole than most people would have had to experience.”

With a bitter aside, Gottfried touched on the salient part of this incident between Harrick and the UCLA officials who fired him: “I don’t think they’ve ever been completely in love with one another, but from what I saw them say, it was 100% because of this incident, right? They fired him for lying, so I’m sure they’re not lying. Aren’t you?”

Late last week, Dalis, who acknowledged that he had heard from several UCLA alumni upset about the firing--especially the timing--denied that he had it in for Harrick.

“I’ve tried to create the right environment for Jim for success,” Dalis said.

“I gave him the opportunity to do a basketball camp on campus here, which we had never done before, I incentivized Lorenzo Romar’s contract and gave him a multiyear contract to get him to stay, which had not been done for assistant coaches before. . . . When there was a firestorm about his position [after] the Tulsa loss [in the first round of the 1994 NCAA tournament], I supported him, and following the NCAA championship, I gave him a long-term contract with more favorable terms than existed in his previous contract.

“When you say I didn’t embrace Jim, you’d have to define embrace. We gave him, I believe, the resources to win. I don’t know what embrace means.”

But Dalis concedes the firing was over a lack of trust. When he speaks to angry alumni, Dalis says he explains to them that, despite the timing, Harrick lied to the administration and tried to get Lavin to lie about the recruiting dinner. So he had to go.

“I have told them that there are consequences to everyone’s actions and decisions, and this was one we could not overlook,” Dalis said. “We had to take action on this thing. It was important for us to have a climate and a culture in this basketball program where there was trust.”

Harrick’s misleading statements to the administration came almost days after the Baron Davis car situation was being resolved--UCLA was cleared.

The mistrust was evident in Dalis’ handling of Harrick immediately after the Davis story broke. If Harrick had nothing to hide, why didn’t Dalis let Harrick explain his actions? Because Dalis was concerned that Harrick would only get the school in more trouble with his off-the-cuff responses, sources say.

Harrick, who was ready to be interviewed by The Times the night the story broke only to be overruled at the last moment by Dalis, has told people Dalis hung him out to dry during the Davis incident.

Then came the $1,000-plus expense report, and the lies.

“The misrepresentations of important information was taking place right at the time when we were trying to conclude the car purchase thing,” Dalis said. “It would seem to me that people needed to be extremely forthright. That’s how you build trust.”

A source said that, before the Davis car sale, Harrick had never had one expense report probed for false entries. So, once the administration knew Harrick had shown misjudgment in the Davis situation, were there members of the department out to find a reason to fire him?

“I do not think that’s accurate,” Dalis said.

But UCLA is continuing investigations into past Harrick expense reports and recruiting activities, Dalis said, and soon will be joined by Pacific 10 Conference investigators.

This is not over.

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Why did Harrick lie to Dalis about the recruiting dinner violation?

If UCLA was interested in finding a way for him to be gone, he gave it to them in a matter of days.

The answer, say those close to the situation, is layered. Worried that his stature at UCLA was under siege, Harrick did not want to get caught and acted out of natural desperation--he thought his only enemies were in the athletic department finance office, with whom he had clashed often during the years.

He also wanted to protect the eligibility of Cameron Dollar and Charles O’Bannon, the two players whose attendance at the dinner violated NCAA rules.

Deepest of all, Harrick never imagined UCLA would fire him, not so soon after the national title, not with a team that could contend again.

In a career of wild highs and stumbling lows, at a program that appreciated him only as far as he could stay out of trouble, with an athletic director who has always considered this job worthy of a more charismatic man, that was Harrick’s last, and lasting, misjudgment.

Once he at last realized that the die was cast, Harrick appealed to Young and Dalis to let him finish out the season, then walk away.

“But it was conditioned, that no mention would be made about why he was leaving,” Dalis said. “That was not acceptable. We felt compelled that if we had cause that we had to make that public.”

Even at the end, Harrick and Dalis could not choreograph a comfortable termination to their uneasy tenure together.

Unknowingly and unhappily, Jim Harrick walked into his own firing.