Another Desert Storm

This place invites mischief. Read the travel brochures.

The NCAA investigates any hint of mischief. Read the rule book.

Inevitably, the watchdog turns its attention to the team in the town of temptation.

Read the help-wanted ads.

Bill Bayno was fired last week as basketball coach at Nevada Las Vegas amid mischief aplenty, joining Jerry Tarkanian and Rollie Massimino as Sin City casualties. In five-plus years, Bayno apparently deteriorated from a button-down prodigy as a Massachusetts assistant to a Vegas-type with a wandering eye for strippers and a blind eye toward a booster who Lamar Odom says provided “hundred-dollar handshakes.”

David Chapman, a Las Vegas dentist and Bayno’s friend, admitted to giving Odom about $5,600 in 1996-97, the primary violation that prompted the NCAA to ban the Rebels from postseason play this season and impose a four-year probation.

Bayno, 38, was fired hours after the sanctions were announced.

The NCAA did not specifically implicate the coach, and he might have kept his job had the team been winning. But the penalties were heaped on a 3-4 start that included a loss to Nevada--the Reno school that inherited the Tumbleweed Tech label UNLV outgrew long ago.

Nevertheless, players didn’t see it coming.

“I was shocked because I never, never, never thought Coach was going to get fired,” guard Trevor Diggs told reporters the day Bayno was let go.

Bayno is lying low, leaving his attorneys to hash out a settlement on the last two years of his contract, although he surfaced to attend senior center Kaspars Kambala’s 22nd birthday party.

“I think it’s unfair to Coach and us, him being fired like this in the middle of the season,” Kambala said. “This is the last thing I thought would happen. As far as I’m concerned, I’m just going to go out there and play for my own pride and try to dedicate a few wins for Coach Bayno.”

UNLV’s quick trigger had a purpose. Administrators used Bayno’s bullet to demonstrate their resolve to clean up the program, and they plan to ask the NCAA to strike the ban on postseason play.

“We believe the postseason ban is unduly harsh to our current student-athletes, who have nothing to do with this,” UNLV President Carol Harter said.

“We’re not trying to whine about the penalty. But we’re under a level of scrutiny that I dare say is extraordinarily difficult for an institution to survive.”

Consider the request a longshot: Louisville won a similar appeal in 1999, but that case stands alone.

Meanwhile, a plain-speaking 59-year-old former assistant named Max Good is charged--for the interim--with making the Rebels great again.

Good was an exceptional high school coach at Maine Central Institute in Pittsfield, Maine, from 1989-99, posting a 275-30 record and sending 87 players to Division I schools. But his Division I head coaching experience is limited to a 96-129 record at Eastern Kentucky from 1981-89.

He provided a glimpse of his take-no-prisoners approach moments after UNLV squandered an early 11-point lead and was crushed by Cincinnati, 90-72, in his first game at the helm.

“We’ve got some guys who had better step up and start showing some intestinal fortitude,” Good thundered as he waved a score sheet in his left hand and repeatedly pounded a table with his right.

“I can go over to the dorm and get 12 guys who can come out and lose by 20. [Cincinnati] isn’t that much better than we are. They are just a heck of a lot tougher.”

The Rebels responded with a 101-71 blowout of Alaska Anchorage on Monday. Not that it conjured memories of Tarkanian’s 1990 NCAA championship team, but rehabilitation is all about one day at a time.

“Kids are no different than ever; what has changed is the way people treat them,” Good said. “Anybody worth a damn wants discipline and regimentation. Kids are like water. They will take the shape of their container.”

The same can be said of UNLV coaches--they become misshapen. However, Good is so hardened, he might break the mold.

“Trust me, [Las Vegas] will not bring me down,” he said. “I don’t dance to anybody’s tune. I’m old and stubborn and don’t apologize for the way I am. The only thing the NCAA could get me on is child abuse because I will work these kids. I will never let kids hold me hostage.

“I want this job, but I don’t need it. I can get work. Having said that, I would like to continue here. I’ll be very disappointed if I don’t get the job because people are responding to what we are doing.”

The idea that Good’s approach might be what UNLV needs is spreading. His name lacks the currency of others already being tossed around like casino chips, names such as Rick Pitino and Bob Knight. But Good has a shot at keeping the job because by all accounts he is clean. And to cease being a program the NCAA takes delight in dinging, UNLV must work up a convincing lather.

Especially with Bayno’s extracurricular activities brought to light in a racketeering case against Steve Kaplan, the owner of an Atlanta strip club.

According to a published report, federal court documents allege that strippers were enlisted to have sex with Bayno at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas in 1998. Bayno, who is single, didn’t exactly issue a categorical denial.

“I’m not saying I haven’t had sex with girls at the Mirage,” he said, “but if it was arranged by Steve Kaplan, it was unbeknownst to me.”

One of Bayno’s attorneys, Steve Owens, responded in writing Thursday: “Any personal attacks or innuendo directed against Coach Bayno will not, in any way, affect his position that he deserves fair compensation for the $1.8 million remaining on his contract.”

Several days ago, another attorney, John Moran Jr., sent a four-page letter to the UNLV board of regents threatening legal action if an emergency session is not called to reinstate the coach. Moran pointed out that the NCAA found the university--not the coach--guilty of failing to monitor the program.

University counsel fired back a letter saying that Bayno’s dismissal was a personnel matter and not within the regents’ purview. That didn’t stop regents’ Chairwoman Thalia Dondero from publicly chastising fellow regent Mark Alden, who had been critical of Bayno’s firing and spoke to reporters about the details of a potential settlement. Alden, as it happens, is Bayno’s accountant.

“This shouldn’t be out for discussion in front of everybody in the world,” Dondero said.

In other words, it’s another embarrassing mess for UNLV.

And it all might have been avoided had Bayno not recruited Odom, whose tale is similar to that of Lloyd Daniels in the 1980s. Like Odom, Daniels never played for UNLV. Daniels’ recruitment led to the NCAA’s putting UNLV on probation in 1993 and the controversy contributed to Tarkanian’s forced resignation.

Mischief. It keeps Las Vegas and the NCAA in business.

TONIGHT

Pepperdine at UNLV

7:30