Friday, May 16, 2003 | 9:18 a.m.
If the UNLV athletic department isn't careful, it's going to make Inspector Clouseau look like a super sleuth.
I speak, of course, of "Phonegate," or whatever you want to call the ongoing investigation of UNLV athletes and students making unauthorized phone calls with a PIN obtained from assistant football coach John Jackson.
Once again, the brainiacs on Maryland Parkway have managed to turn what should have been a molehill into a king-sized mountain that continues to grow.
Call Al Hirt. The Bumbling Bee has taken flight again.
The missteps began with the way the story got out. One of the athletes who apparently let her fingers do the walking on the company dime decided to alert the local media. With a phone call, of course.
The story hit the papers Sunday. If you think these Rebels ETs (Extra Toll calls) who phoned home were only identified on Saturday, I've got 40 acres north of Baghdad I'd like to show you.
Although it has been speculated that athletic department officials may have known about the problem since before the holidays, they conceded the official investigation into the matter began April 28.
That was the day UNLV should have called a news conference. And before the athletic department advised the local media, it should have first notified its own Board of Regents. That way, it wouldn't have had to apologize for keeping the board in the dark -- in writing -- a couple of weeks later.
But judging from this story's shelf life, the lights still haven't come on. Every day this week there's been new information attributed to "sources" within the athletic department, because the ones who are qualified to speak on the record are either too uniformed or afraid to do so.
UNLV, of course, keeps falling back on vague student privacy privileges as the reason it hasn't been more forthright in discussing the issue. But why is it every time a football player screws up at Florida State, his name still winds up in an Associated Press story?
Others in the athletic department have refused comment, with the half-baked logic that it might jeopardize the investigation. It's a good thing they don't operate that way in New York, or the Son of Sam might still be taking instructions from a Labrador retriever.
I was stunned to learn that a Sun reporter following up on UNLV softball coach Shan McDonald's ouster was stonewalled by her former players, who said they were under a gag order because of Phonegate.
The other day, somebody asked who I thought was really running the athletic department, figuring that John Robinson was too busy drawing up football plays to keep an eye on the day-to-day grind. I told him it was probably Jerry Koloskie, who in 20 years on campus has absorbed more than a Bounty paper towel in skillfully working his way up the sports administration ladder.
Koloskie started his UNLV career as a trainer. Lisa Kelleher, the third member of the Rebels' A.D. triumvirate, also began her career as a trainer.
Sure, there probably are CEOs who began by sweeping the floor in the mailroom or maybe even wrapping hamstrings. But perhaps part of UNLV's problem is that when it comes to prickly little issues like this phone call scam, it doesn't have a lot of people on board with experience in dealing with them.
To me, and provided the PIN number was pilfered and not proffered, these unauthorized phone calls are a nuisance, not a federal offense. I liken it to a sandlot baseball game where a window gets broken. The parents of the kid who hit the screaming liner make restitution and life goes on.
That's the way Andy Taylor would have handled it. But for some reason, UNLV insists on acting like Barney Fife whenever it finds itself in a pickle.
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