To Harrick, Don’t Call It Redemption
Jim Harrick looked like he was gloating. He didn’t sound like he was gloating, and he made sure not to say anything that could be construed as gloating.
But the look didn’t lie. Legs stretched out, arms behind his head, grin on his face, soaking up the fact that he is now the undisputed star of this year’s NCAA Tournament Midwest Region. Two seasons ago, UCLA athletic director Pete Dalis canned him from the job of a lifetime in a messy situation that left Harrick bitter and miserable. Today, Harrick is prepping for a regional final. And the UCLA team is back in Westwood, licking the wounds inflicted by a Kentucky team that clocked them in a regional semifinal Friday night.
“Clocked,” actually was the word a reporter used when asking Harrick Saturday how he felt about the outcome of Friday’s tournament games, which left Harrick’s Rhode Island Rams with a shot at their first Final Four and UCLA on the outside. Harrick laughed at the word, said “don’t sugarcoat it, now,” with a smile, and then simply let it go.
“I wouldn’t have anything to say to UCLA today,” said Harrick, who did make a point of talking about how much he still loves the kids he recruited there, the school itself and the program’s history.
Harrick got a platform to talk about a lot of things Saturday, about how his dream is to get an NBA coaching job, about how he still feels about his firing at UCLA (“it was one guy out to get me”), about his feelings toward ex-assistant and current UCLA head coach Steve Lavin (“maybe the word is, I feel he’s unappreciative”). The one word that kept coming up, though, was “redemption.” And that was the one word Harrick really disliked.
“People use that word, and I say that to your family and your friends - to the people that count - there was nothing to redeem,” Harrick said. “I don’t like that word.”
He doesn’t like it because the word “redemption” implies that there is some sin he has committed, a sin for which he has atoned and from which he has risen back to the top. And Harrick doesn’t like to talk about the sin. He doesn’t like to talk about the mistake that made it possible for Pete Dalis to run him out of town.
These are the simple facts of the Harrick-UCLA situation: Harrick violated an NCAA rule by taking two too many of the players on his team to a dinner for recruits Baron Davis and twins Jarron and Jason Collins in September 1996. To cover himself, he lied on his expense report, claiming the 12th and 13th people at the dinner were not players, but his wife and the wife of one of his assistant coaches. He got caught, the players were forced to make restitution for their portion of the meal, and Harrick got fired. The Pacific-10 Conference investigated the UCLA program and found no reason to sanction it. The situation was dropped. UCLA moved on. For a long time, Harrick didn’t.
Harrick supporters - most vocal of which is his son, Jim Jr., an assistant coach for Valparaiso - feel that the punishment did not fit the crime, and they do have a point. Would your average big-time NCAA program can a coach for a violation so tiny that the NCAA did not feel compelled to act upon it? Not likely. Was Dalis looking for an excuse - any excuse - to can a guy he didn’t like? Probably. (It’s worth noting that, at the time, Dalis was still fuming over the controversy raised when the Los Angeles Times revealed that Davis was driving a used car his sister had conveniently purchased from Glen Harrick, another of Harrick’s sons, an incident that was not an NCAA violation but clearly stunk to high heaven and embarrassed the school).
Harrick was a lost soul, of sorts, after his firing from the position Jim Jr. has described as “the job he always wanted, the job he wanted to retire from.”
In an industry where coaches such as Eddie Sutton and Jerry Tarkanian are allowed to reinvent themselves, it’s hard to get worked up about Harrick having a shot to go back to the Final Four in his first year back in coaching. He did an incredible job with the Rams this season. Let him enjoy it. Hey, let him gloat.
And Harrick fans can find all the poetic justice they want in what happened in the NCAA Tournament this weekend. If it’s poetic justice they are seeking, though, perhaps they’d better stop and think of this:
When the Rams take the court against Stanford today, the best player off the bench for the Cardinal just might be Jarron Collins, the freshman who was a key element in his team’s victory over Purdue. Collins, remember, was sitting at that fateful recruiting dinner two Septembers ago, all but ready to sign a letter-ofintent with UCLA. Then the scandal hit, and he and his twin brother (who is redshirting) took their considerable basketball talents to Stanford. That dinner came back to bite Harrick once. Who knows when it might come back to bite him again?
xxxx MOST FINAL FOURS Through Saturday’s games 14 - North Carolina, UCLA 12 - Kentucky 11 - Duke 10 - Kansas 8 - Ohio State 7 - Indiana, Louisville 6 - Arkansas, Cincinnati, Michigan