UNLV Rolls Dice With Spoonhour

Apparently, Charlie Spoonhour has a more kissable face than Max Good and a bigger jock strap than Bill Bayno.

How else do you explain Spoonhour, 61, being coaxed out of a two-year retirement to fill the Nevada Las Vegas coaching vacancy by school President Carol Harter, who has made a habit of giving coaches pregame busses on the cheek and once said that Rick Pitino couldn’t carry Bayno’s jock?

Actually, Harter and Athletic Director Charlie Cavagnaro think they’ve found the basketball equivalent of John Robinson, who took the football Rebels from a winless season to a bowl win in two years. The problem is, the UNLV football team was a moribund program that had never experienced sustained success while the Runnin’ Rebels have been to four Final Fours, won a national title in 1990 and have an insatiable and somewhat unrealistic fan base.

The folksy Spoonhour, though, insists he’s up to the challenge of guiding UNLV through three years of NCAA probation. Besides, he enjoys Las Vegas and kicked around the idea of moving there when he retired as the coach at St. Louis University in 1999.

Spoonhour, who has a 16-year Division-I record of 319-171, has agreed to a three-year deal worth $400,000 annually.

“The NCAA situation doesn’t bother me at all,” Spoonhour said Thursday at a news conference announcing his hiring. “That part of the past is something I need to learn from . . . It’s pretty simple, there’s certain things you know you can’t do, you can’t break rules. You knowingly break rules, it’s history for the basketball program. I think that’s evident to all of us, isn’t it? I mean seriously. I’m here for basketball. I’m not here to say good night.”

Bayno said good night when Harter fired him on Dec. 12 after the NCAA slapped UNLV with sanctions for improprieties in the recruiting of Lamar Odom in 1996-97.

Good went 13-9 under the specter of UNLV openly wooing Pitino. But after either Cavagnaro and Harter dropped the ball in negotiations or Pitino played UNLV, a groundswell of support for Good as coach began.

But Good, 59, who was a second-year assistant under Bayno, never really had a chance at the job because of the loyalty he showed to Bayno, inviting the fired coach to the team’s final game of the season.