The comeback kid

On the NBA • Blazer assistant overcame addiction, revived his career

By kerry eggers

The Portland Tribune, Mar 7, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (4 Reader comments)

Blazer assistant coach Bill Bayno, wearing arm pads, defends forward Martell Webster in pregame warm-ups Tuesday at the Rose Garden.

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It’s two hours until game time at the Rose Garden, and Joel Przybilla is getting pummeled by a man wearing arm pads more befitting a battling sumo wrestler.

Assistant coach Bill Bayno is working Przybilla over as the Trail Blazer center makes move after move to the basket.

Przybilla is smiling.

Bayno is sweating.

“It’s fun coming to work every day,” Bayno says.

Bayno, 45, didn’t know if he would get such an opportunity in the NBA. In December 2000, after 5 1/2 seasons as coach at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, Bayno was fired — in part due to improprieties administered to recruit Lamar Odom, in part to a problem with alcohol.

Slowly, though, Bayno has earned his reputation back.

“If you get yourself right, you’re going to have opportunities,” he says. “I knew it would take some time. But what I cared more about was getting myself right.”

Billy Bayno was a gym rat — more appropriately, a playground denizen — growing up in Goshen, N.Y., an hour from New York City. But his youth basketball education came in nearby Newburgh.

“Newburgh was the rough inner city,” Bayno says. “Even my black friends from Goshen wouldn’t go in there. But there were guys who looked out for me. And for me to get good … by the time I was 8 or 9, I pretty much lived on the courts at Newburgh.”

His father, Joe Bayno, was his coach at Burke Catholic High, where Bill was a 6-3 all-county point guard. He played two years at the University of Massachusetts, then finished up as a standout at Division II Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn.

After college, he realized that coaching was his thing, and he caught on as a graduate assistant for P.J. Carlesimo at Seton Hall in 1985-86, then with Larry Brown at Kansas the following season.

“To work for those two guys at a young age, it was like a dream,” Bayno says.

After graduating from Sacred Heart, Bayno had written 100 form letters to coaches throughout the country, asking for a chance to work as a grad assistant. Carlesimo — who had met Bayno working summer basketball camps — was the only one who responded with an offer.

“Billy wasn’t much different than he is now,” says Carlesimo, now coach of the Seattle SuperSonics. “Tons of enthusiasm, way above average knowledge of the game. He was very young, but coaching was something he always wanted to do, and you knew he’d be good.

“He had a good work ethic even then, and a lot of a confidence, which is a good thing, too. He understood the whole thing in those days — the college part, the relationship with the players.”

In two years at Kansas, Brown had Bayno, John Calipari, Bill Self and R.C. Buford as grad assistants, working with All-America forward Danny Manning and a savvy guard named Kevin Pritchard.

“All those kids had a passion to coach,” says the Hall of Fame-bound Brown, now executive vice president of the Philadelphia 76ers. “I just loved being around them all.”

Bayno spent a year as an assistant at Charleston Southern, then joined Calipari as his No. 1 assistant when Calipari took over a floundering Massachusetts program. In seven years, “we took one of the nation’s 10 worst programs to one of the top 10,” Bayno says. “I was a recruiter, and John could really coach.”

In 1995, Bayno was hired as coach of a UNLV program that had fallen light-years since Jerry Tarkanian’s national championship club of 1990. The Rebels were on NCAA suspension due to violations during Tark’s tenure. Billy Tubbs, Rick Majerus, Jerry Green and Herb Sendek were among the coaches who turned the job down.

Mark Warkentien — who had worked 11 years under Tarkanian and still had close ties to the UNLV administration — backed Bayno, who got the job at age 32.

“I pushed hard for him,” says Warkentien, now vice president of basketball operations with the Denver Nuggets, then director of scouting for the Blazers. “The job Cal and Billy did at UMass was absolutely incredible. UMass had never been anything, and there was no rhyme nor reason for them to have turned it into a national program. Billy was Cal’s right-hand man. There was a time when I was a pretty fair recruiter, but Billy was a recruiter’s recruiter.”

Bayno says he knew it would be “hard coaching (under the shadow of) Tark, and the NCAA was always going to be looking over your shoulder. But I was a novice, and I had nothing to lose.”

But Bayno did lose something — control of his life, and very nearly his career.

Highs and lows in Vegas

The youngest D-I coach in the land, Bayno was earning $600,000 a season, and riding high. He recruited Shawn Marion, Keon Clark and Tyrone Nesby, among others. His teams went 94-65, won four conference championships, made the postseason four times and reached the NCAA Tournament in 1998 and 2000.

“He did a good job raising the talent level, though he wasn’t quite at Tarkanian’s level,” says Steve Carp, who covered the Bayno era for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “And Billy made good progress as a coach during his time there. He was maturing, getting better.”

Trouble was, Bayno fit comfortably into the Vegas scene — a little too much so.

“He spent quite a bit of time in clubs,” Carp says. “He didn’t handle that part of his life as well. Once he was away from basketball, then he became just a regular, good-looking, single guy in Vegas with money. It was a toxic environment that can be dangerous if you can’t handle it.”

Bayno says he was in no position to handle it.

“I come from a family of alcoholics, and I was one, too,” he says. “My parents are alcoholics. Everyone in my family (he has three sisters) is. There are different levels of the disease. My youngest sister, Katie, has had it the worst. She has battled heroin addiction. It’s hard. We all live and learn.

“Nobody worked harder than me, but in the offseason, nobody partied like I did. The disease got the best of me.”

In 2000, the Rebels were handed NCAA sanctions for recruiting violations in regard to Odom, who was determined to have received $5,600 in cash and improper benefits from a Las Vegas dentist and Rebel booster named David Chapman. Odom, now with the L.A. Lakers, received the benefits while enrolled in a summer class, awaiting admission to UNLV. He ultimately was denied admission and never played for the Rebels.

Hours after the NCAA barred UNLV from the 2000-01 postseason and levied a four-year sanction on a program already on probation from the Tarkanian violations, Bayno was fired.

“The school president (Carol Harter) had no choice,” Carp says. “As a repeat violator within the five-year window, the program was subject to some harsher penalties if (the Rebel administration) wasn’t proactive.”

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