Columnist Steve Addy: Spoonhour quietly going about work

Steve Addy

Thursday, Sept. 6, 2001 | 11:12 a.m.

Steve Addy covers college basketball for the Las Vegas Sun. Reach him at 259-4087 or by e-mail at addy@lasvegassun.com. Regular Thursday columnist Ron Kantowski is on vacation.

Had Rick Pitino become UNLV's basketball coach five months ago, the parade would still be snaking through town.

Pitino sightings, real or imagined, would be all over the gossip columns and Rebel websites, whether he was spotted leaning over the MGM Grand dice pit, identifying with the sharks at Mandalay Bay or enjoying the $100 steak-and-quail-eggs special at Picasso.

It would be all Pitino, all the time, all you could stand.

Meanwhile, at the Thomas & Mack Center, the man who actually got the job March 29, white-haired ex-retiree Charlie Spoonhour, goes about rebuilding the Rebels without his own PR guy, without a personal stylist, without reservations and without fanfare.

This is a good thing. After a season full of headache headlines -- Bill Bayno fired, probation, two months of footsie with Pitino before he said no -- UNLV basketball needed to get out of the spotlight for a while. Might as well let Jason Thomas have the billboards to himself.

But Spoonhour isn't sitting around with his feet on his desk. The desk was piled high when he got the job and one arm was already tied behind his back from NCAA sanctions, but he has pressed steadily forward.

"I knew the situation when I started," he said. "No sense getting upset about it."

Because he was hired so late and inherited so many loose ends, Spoonhour barely had time for proper introductions before getting busy. Within two weeks, he had hired a staff, convinced a few antsy Rebels to stay and obtained fresh commitments from two solid Bayno signees.

Pitino couldn't have done it better.

Then came the opportunistic signing of guard Demetrius Hunter, who decided to transfer from Georgetown last month. Spoonhour and his staff made a speedy, convincing pitch to the former Cheyenne High standout. Another feather in the coach's cap.

Now the recruiting season has begun anew. The Rebels have two scholarships to dole out in November, and they will begin hosting prospects this weekend, though NCAA penalties have left them two visits shy of the usual 12.

Spoonhour can't talk about it, but it's known that UNLV will host 6-8 forward James Peters from Butler County (Kan.) CC on Friday. His coach, Dennis Helms, once sent a fairly decent player to UNLV -- a guy named Larry Johnson, whom he coached at Odessa (Tex.) College.

Another likely visitor could be shooting guard Antwain Barbour, the top Juco prospect in the country. He played for Rebels assistant Jay Spoonhour last year and just returned from the World University Games in China. Cincinnati and Kentucky are also after him.

"We're in on some good players," Spoonhour said. "You can't afford to come in second on a lot of guys, but hopefully we'll fill up with a really good class."

There are other matters over which the coach has no control. UNLV is awaiting word from the NCAA on an eligibility waiver for freshman Ernest Turner, and the Rebels don't know if Jermaine Lewis' surgically repaired knee will be ready before January.

Frankly, if not for those question marks, it would have been a perfect debut summer for Charlie Spoonhour, a guy who prefers a turtleneck to Armani on game nights and really doesn't mind the early-bird special at Sizzler.