On The Mend

The day Bill Bayno decided he needed to stop drinking, nobody advised him to seek help.

Not his boss, family, friends or others who might have suspected his erratic behavior was the result of his problems handling alcohol.

It was Dec. 19, 1999, and Bayno, as coach of the Nevada Las Vegas basketball team, had just suffered a gut-wrenching loss to Oklahoma State.

Up next were four days off for a Christmas break, and Bayno committed himself to laying off the liquor that had haunted him his entire life.

The self-imposed timeout didn't last long. After some holiday shopping, he had a few beers with some friends, leading to yet another all-night binge.

"Sure enough, I couldn't control it," says Bayno, 46, who was recently hired to take over Loyola Marymount's program. "For me, that was just an awakening that I didn't have control of my life.

"I went to a friend's house and broke down. I called my mom and said, 'I've got to stop. I've got to change.' "

There were a couple of stops and starts over the next couple of years, but Bayno says he hasn't had alcohol since May 25, 2002.

And that's one big reason he's confident that his second job as a college head coach will turn out better than the first.

Nevada Las Vegas fired Bayno in December 2000, seven games into his sixth season, under a cloud of allegations that he had improperly recruited Lamar Odom. Though the NCAA eventually cleared Bayno of wrongdoing, he believes his reputation for being a partyer greatly contributed to his demise.

"I didn't commit any violations, but I think the perception was that they had just had enough," Bayno says. "My lifestyle, I think, was an issue."

Bayno was hot property when he came to UNLV after seven seasons as an assistant for John Calipari at Massachusetts, where Bayno also played.

At 32, he was the youngest head coach at the NCAA Division I level. He was also single, attractive, already addicted to alcohol and entering an especially risky environment for someone with a debilitating vice.

Bayno says he had alcoholic parents and his own drinking problems started early in life, but he managed to live with the disease because he was a functioning, "happy drunk."

On the surface, he performed well at UNLV, where his teams were 94-64, won two conference regular-season championships, two conference tournament titles, made two NCAA tournament appearances and two trips to the National Invitation Tournament.