Columnist Dean Juipe: Hectic week left Bayno shorthanded and blue

Dean Juipe

Saturday, Aug. 2, 1997 | 6:03 a.m.

THE SAGGING eyes, the dreary, somewhat spiritless appearance. It was the forlorn look of a man both tired and stressed.

Bill Bayno was a dead ringer for country music star Merle Haggard.

Merle Haggard?

Either that or just plain haggard.

That's how the exhausted Bayno came across this past week after not only losing his incoming star freshman, Lamar Odom, but after flying to Reno and flying to Washington, D.C., while also trying to run a kids' basketball camp in Las Vegas.

He didn't need the word "ugh" tattooed on his forehead to convey just how trying his schedule and the Odom addendum had become. Actions do speak louder than words and Bayno was acting as if the natural process of aging had accelerated tenfold.

He was 35 going on 70.

He was the former carefree bachelor about town reduced to bleary-eyed insomniac, running solely on fumes.

This was country-music-writin' stuff with Bayno as the weary centerpiece in a melodrama only partially of his own design.

His usual sources of energy -- interacting with kids, recruiting, rebuilding the UNLV basketball program -- were being squashed not only by the headaches of compacted air travel but by media demands and the pure anguish of seeing Odom slip away.

He was visibly invisible.

His attitude: "I've got to be careful and watch what I say," he said, enunciating each word as if it had been thoughtfully handpicked toward the greater goal of crafting a complete sentence. He didn't want to be too revealing, an air of secrecy still permeating the basketball office in the wake of Odom's departure, the continuing uncertain stature of assistant coach Greg Vetrone and a veiled threat via Odom's family of possible legal action yet to come.

This was one bump in the road Bayno wasn't about to shrug off. There was a toll to pay and he spent the week living the down payment.

The Odom Incident stands as his first real setback as the Rebels' head coach. Worse, it wasn't over in one day and it couldn't be washed away or dismissed with the "oh well" attitude that occasionally suffices in these less-than-Orwellian times.

In one never-to-be-forgotten month, Bayno went from landing this prized recruit to seeing the momentum build toward the kid's inevitable departure. Bayno, his program and the school went from nibbling at the beef tips to being part of the skewered filet.

Odom isn't O-dumb, it's just that his college entrance exam test scores had come under scrutiny after Sports Illustrated splashed his meteoric improvements across its pages. On the surface, he made an improbable leap.

Rather than confront his accusers and perhaps retake the test in a show of good faith, Odom withdrew from UNLV and skipped town. He didn't win any points for forthrightness, issuing a statement that was straight from the Mike Tyson school of prefab addresses.

Pitifully, some of those around Odom laid his departure on the doorstep of the media. "He just doesn't understand why anyone would go out of their way to try and hurt him," family friend Sonny Vaccaro told the SUN's Steve Carp, digging deep into his reservoir of chutzpah to find some slippery justification for what had gone wrong.

In truth, aside from merely publishing the facts, the media -- especially the local media -- played no role whatsoever in Odom's failure to become a college student and accept a basketball scholarship from UNLV. Certainly no one went out of their way to hurt a young man whose arrival in Las Vegas was initially heralded as the second coming of 1990 national championship ringleader Larry Johnson.

Caught in the middle, Bayno retreated as much as possible. If it weren't for the commitment of his youth camp and the demands of recruiting during the open evaluation period that ended Friday, it's likely he would have gone underground and used some vacation time.

Instead, he kept to a dizzying pace, shouldering the weight of Odom's about-face with a quiet resolve while hoping his pal Vetrone -- who was linked to some test-score aberrations by SI -- could distance himself from the firing range. Any chance for a tranquil moment was further interrupted by a lesser problem, the academic status of star transfer Kevin Simmons.

Hair askew in the caught-in-a-windstorm style that appeals to some fashion-conscious men, Bayno presented an interesting caricature last week when he was seen in newspaper photos or on TV. But he hadn't just left his stylist.

He was reeling from a visit to Heartbreak Hotel.