Ron Kantowski catches up with Fred Dallimore, who coached the Rebels for 23 years before retiring to the river

Friday, Jan. 26, 2007 | 8:46 a.m.

After spending 23 years as UNLV baseball coach and one more as pitching coach for the Rochester Red Wings, then a triple-A affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles, Fred Dallimore says he's more than happy to sit back and watch the river flow.

Literally watch the river flow.

Dallimore retired to his native Northern Nevada in 1997, where he lives in a home on the Truckee River. It's so close to the great outdoors that he can almost hunt and fish off his back deck. Which is good, because he doesn't get around quite as well as he used to, thanks to the surgical hardware that has left his lower extremities looking like Aisle 3 at The Home Depot.

Dallimore can still swing a mean fungo, as he showed before Saturday's UNLV baseball alumni game, spraying infield grounders and cans o' corn to every nook and cranny of Wilson Stadium that had an old Rebel standing in one. But three major knee surgeries have pretty much limited the UNLV Hall of Famer's physical activity to, as he puts it, "loving on the grandkids."

"I've got a home right on the river, and I've got a second home up in California that's got five golf courses around it, rivers and about 30 lakes within five miles," Dallimore said, describing his American Sportsman-like existence.

"I haven't worked a day since I left the Orioles. Life is good."

I had rolled out of bed early on a day off without the express written consent of Major League Baseball - or even Jim Weaver, Dallimore's former athletic director - just to say hello to the man, whose blunt, tell-it-like-it-was style endeared him to sportswriters and UNLV fans, if not UNLV athletic administrators.

His teams won 794 games and went to the NCAA tournament seven times, which wasn't always easy to do, not when the road to Omaha went through Tempe, Ariz. And not with all those detours in the Los Angeles suburbs, where the guys Southern Cal couldn't stash in a corner of the dugout wound up hitting the cutoff man at places such as Cal State Fullerton and Fresno State and Long Beach State.

That explains why, despite giving his bosses an Earl Weaver-dose of what for, the bosses tacked his No. 13 jersey onto the outfield wall at Wilson Stadium alongside the No. 15 belonging to Matt Williams, his former shortstop who went on to hit 378 big league home runs.

Theirs are the only two baseball numbers retired at UNLV.

When I brought up talkin' baseball in his former "office" - actually, a tool shed just beyond the right-field foul pole - Dallimore said we could still be doing it if one of the bosses (Jim Weaver) didn't think the shed was an eyesore that would ruin the sightlines to the Lied Athletic Complex.

That tool shed was to Dallimore what the men's room at Arnold's was to Arthur Fonzarelli. So I asked if it were still there, and college baseball made him commissioner, and the refrigerator in that shed were full of cold beer, what changes would he effect to make college baseball a better game?

Actually, he said college baseball is a pretty good game the way it is.

Then he filled up my lineup card with ways to make it better.

Starting with those damn aluminum bats.

"They wonder why games take forever," Dallimore said. "Kids today are so impressed by the long ball that the little things in the game don't mean much anymore - the ability to bunt, hit behind the runner move guys along (the bases).

"The way you get that selfish part out of there is to put a wood bat in a guy's hand, where he really has to learn how to hit and what the sweet spot is."

Then Dallimore got on a roll that would have done Arizona State proud when Bobby Winkles was coach. He said he would:

Dallimore was working his way to the top of the Hot Stove League when he noticed one of the old Rebels stationed by first base and asked if he wanted to see him hit it with a batted ball.

His knees creaking like the Tin Woodman after it rains, he whipped the fungo through the crisp January air and cracked a worm burner toward first. He missed.

By about six inches.

The ball skittered onto the outfield grass, in the general direction of the tool shed that is no longer there, where Fred Dallimore used to talk baseball on spring days we thought would never end.