ISLAND EXILE

Jim Harrick isn’t under a microscope at the University of Rhode Island.

Instead, he’s behind a huge plate-glass window, the interior of his modest office in plain view of anyone who climbs the stairs of the field house to watch the numerous pickup games in progress on the courts below.

The scrutiny and pressure are on Steve Lavin now, and Harrick is comfortable in his exile, though the cords to UCLA--phone lines and DirecTV--still crackle with news.

The day after the Bruins’ 97-81 loss to Oregon a couple of weeks ago, Harrick let out a long, low whistle.

“To get beat by 16,” he said, fixating on Jelani McCoy’s minutes played, and asking why, even when he knew the story.

“I’m concerned about those guys,” Harrick said of McCoy--who finally left the team last week in the fallout over what sources said were positive drug tests--and Kris Johnson, who recovered from his early-season suspension. “They never had problems before.”

One minute Harrick will say he doesn’t want to talk about UCLA at all, and the next, he privately indulges his fixations on Lavin and Athletic Director Peter T. Dalis.

Here is his one zinger, his all-purpose shot that says they should be sorry, can’t you see Lavin isn’t ready, and maybe, just maybe, we’d have won it all again.

“Let me say this: I felt we would have the five best starters in America this year at UCLA. And after Kansas got beat last year, I thought maybe we could have done it last year too.”

All that is past--”It’s over,” Harrick said--and despite his occasional veers onto the topic of UCLA, he is fairly content for a coach who was fired one season removed from a national championship for filing a false expense report and lying about it to UCLA administrators.

And why shouldn’t he be?

Rhode Island is a fringe top-25 team capable of both bursts of brilliance and regular lapses. The Rams recently beat No. 24 George Washington and are coming off a double-overtime upset of No. 18 Massachusetts, a team that had beaten Rhode Island in 18 of the last 19 meetings.

“Rams Beat UMass!” blared the school’s press release. “World to End?”

The Rams fell only a last-second shot shy of being the first team to beat undefeated Stanford back in December, and beat California, 72-63, two weeks ago at the Providence Civic Center.

Afterward, a wide smile spread on Harrick’s face when he was asked how Rhode Island would fare in UCLA’s conference.

“We’d be in the upper half of the Pac-10, I think. I think we would,” he said. “But those are three pretty good teams at the top.”

Rhode Island--a team hinged on the quickness and playmaking of 5-foot-10 senior guard Tyson Wheeler, the shooting of three-point threat Cuttino Mobley, another senior, and an athletic inside trio--can get its 20th victory tonight at Dayton.

The Rams, a veteran team that made the NCAA tournament last season, have a 19-6 record that will impress the NCAA selection committee. The losses are to No. 7 Connecticut, No. 10 Stanford, No. 17 Cincinnati, a one-point defeat at the hands of a solid Temple team, and a loss at St. Bonaventure, a notoriously difficult place to play. The committee has its own sense of humor, though, and an eye for a good story. Might the Bruins and Rams end up in the same bracket? Or could Rhode Island get shipped west, so Harrick would go to the West Regional in Anaheim if the Rams win two games?

“Nah, nah,” Harrick said. “I think the committee takes the four best teams and puts them in each region, then the second four, then the third four, then the fourth four. . . .”

Uh, no he doesn’t.

But with UCLA likely to be seeded around No. 4 and Rhode Island in the No. 6 or No. 7 range, it’s not likely the teams will meet--certainly not in the first round. A No. 4 and a No. 5 can meet in the second round, though, so maybe if Rhode Island were to win the Atlantic 10 tournament. . . .

Harrick says payback can wait.

“I don’t want to play them this year,” he said. “They’re too good. I know what they’ve got. Three seniors from a national championship team.”

Pepperdine Minus the View

Kingston, R.I., is thousands of miles from Westwood, and feels it. For one thing, there doesn’t appear to be any place in town you could run up a $1,000-plus tab at a recruiting dinner, no matter how many players attend.

The wooded, two-lane road that leads from the Interstate 95 exit to Kingston, an hour and a half or so south of Boston, is lined with gray-shingled homes, wooden churches and produce stands shuttered for the winter.

And Harrick, perhaps more than many other coaches used to the glare and glamour of the elite college basketball programs, is comfortable here.

Sure, 3,385-seat Keaney Gym is no Pauley Pavilion, but what is?

Rhode Island amounts to sort of a Pepperdine without the view, and Harrick spent nine seasons of his career there, an additional four as an assistant at Utah State.

So what if his base salary is only $125,000--$350,000 less than Lavin’s new deal. It goes far enough in Kingston and is bolstered by an agreement under which Harrick earns bonuses of up to $25,000 a game in ticket revenue when the Rams play at the Providence Civic Center, for a total Athletic Director Ron Petro said will exceed $100,000 this season.

The conference is another difference between Rhode Island and other places Harrick might have landed. The Atlantic 10 probably will get five teams into the NCAA tournament. The Pac-10? Probably four.

“The league really has great players in it,” Harrick said. “The elite teams, you have UMass, Temple, Xavier, George Washington--they’re a good team, they beat Maryland.

“I like my team. They’re great guys, good athletes. It’s not a great team. Top 25? We’re around there somewhere.”

After so many years on the West Coast, Harrick is in a new world.

“The fun part is playing against different coaches. There’s not one guy I’d ever coached against in my life,” he said. “That’s kind of fun.”

What’s not? Having to learn that everything people said about how hard it is to play at St. Bonaventure in Olean, N.Y., is true.

“I tried to tell him, but he had to see for himself,” Petro said, and Harrick learned from the wrong end of an 86-81 score.

“Seventy miles west of Buffalo, and it makes Pullman, Wash., look like the Taj Mahal,” Harrick said. “It’s desolate. A long ways from anything. Buffalo is a long ways from anything, and then you go to Olean.”

For controversy, Harrick has the continuing saga of Lamar Odom, who was one of the top high school players in the country and has been making an on-again, off-again attempt to qualify academically at Rhode Island since leaving Nevada Las Vegas after the NCAA questioned his admissions test score last fall.

Odom was finally ruled out for this season, but Harrick said it isn’t over.

“I call it minute by minute. At this minute, he’ll be on our team next year. He’s in school, passing his classes, enrolled for the second semester.”

Harrick and Petro insist Odom “fell on our doorstep,” which is hard to believe, especially when assistant coach Jerry DeGregorio has ties to Odom from one of the high schools Odom attended.

“I never recruited Lamar Odom to Rhode Island,” Harrick said. “I tell everyone. We never spent 10 cents recruiting him.

“But he’s the kind of package we’ve never had at Rhode Island before. You usually wouldn’t get a guy like that here. Once you get one, you might get two, three or four more.”

Lately, there’s been nothing more controversial than the Great Mascot Incident. Rhode Island’s Ram got into it with the St. Joseph’s Hawk, a mascot known for flapping his wings continuously throughout games, his duty so serious the student who plays him receives a scholarship.

“At St. Joe’s, the Hawk always flaps his wings,” Harrick said. “Our guy put an inner tube over his head so he couldn’t flap them. It was a big stink. Big headlines.

“It was OK until the hawk tried to take the inner tube off, and his head comes off. That’s against the sacred code of ethics of mascots--he’s never to reveal his face. It’s hilarious. It’s college.”

Memories of a Mentor

UCLA is still entrenched in Harrick. In his office, there is a framed drawing of UCLA scenes, dominated by John Wooden. There is the picture of the 1995 NCAA championship, another of Harrick with President Clinton.

There is the national championship ring he wears.

“Lots of guys never win the national championship,” Harrick said.

Beside him on the Rhode Island bench is another reminder. Larry Farmer, who became the Bruin coach in 1981 at age 30 and left three seasons later partly because of the pressure, is one of Harrick’s assistants. From 1977-79, they were assistants together at UCLA under Gary Cunningham.

Farmer said the two don’t obsess on the old days but, yes, it has come up.

“As an alumnus, I was embarrassed at the way it was handled,” Farmer said. “The firing, to this day, I’m still not clear on all the reasons. Just the ones that surfaced, to me, did not warrant that. Some other discipline maybe.

“That program, and what it means, is special, and that made it ordinary. I love the school, and I was sorry things had to happen that way.”

With UCLA and the opportunities it held behind, Harrick, at 59, has reached the stage of his career where his legacy will be determined partly by the coaches he has mentored.

He cites a long list that includes Lorenzo Romar at Pepperdine, Mark Gottfried at Murray State, Tom Asbury at Kansas State, Greg White at Marshall, Brad Holland at San Diego and Tony Fuller, formerly at San Diego State. He even mentions assistants such as Tom Lewis at Long Beach State, and his son, Jimmy Harrick, an assistant at Valparaiso.

Lavin doesn’t come up. The two no longer talk.

“I talk to the O’Bannons, [Tyus] Edney, [George] Zidek, all the time,” Harrick said. “Romar and Gottfried, we talk all the time. Those are great memories. Winning the national championship, that was the defining moment of my career.”

If he can help it, being fired at UCLA will not be.

“This came along,” said Harrick, who once feared he wouldn’t get a second chance.

Now Rhode Island people wait to see how long it lasts.

“That’s been kind of the rumor, that Harrick won’t stay,” he said. “But we bought a lovely home on an acre and a half of land and did some remodeling. The area is devoid of traffic. You should go over to Newport.

“But you never know what the future holds.”

Not for a minute.