By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

Even without the palm trees and beaches, this would still be paradise for Herman R. Frazier.

For the man who would become the University of Hawai'i's next athletic director — and we're told it is his job if he wants it — UH is everything he's sought in the job. Everything he perhaps thought he was getting when he signed on at Alabama-Birmingham 20 months ago.

Manoa is the kind of place, challenging yet promising, where a bright, energetic man of ideas can make a difference. It is where a man who has George Steinbrenner on speed dial and a U. S. Olympic Committee resume should be able to make a mark putting into practice the accumulated beliefs and experience from two decades in athletic administration.

For most of Frazier's 46 years, the enduring dream was that his alma mater, Arizona State, would be that place. That, after starring there and climbing the administrative ladder he would get an opportunity to call the shots in the Valley of the Sun.

Nor was it his dream alone. When the AD's job came open in 2000 and Frazier didn't seem to get enough of a look, all but a couple of the school's 23 head coaches crowded into President Lattie Coor's reception room to endorse his candidacy.

Frazier has been good at turning dreams and hard work to precious metal, coming out of South Philadelphia to earn gold (4 x 400-meter relay) and bronze (400 meters) in the 1976 Olympics as well as lead ASU to the 1977 NCAA championship as team captain. But ASU, an across-the-board power with a $30 million budget, wanted an experienced, sitting AD for its position even if, by the view of one coach, "he damn near ran the place anyway," as senior associate AD.

So, too, apparently, did California, Oregon, Missouri and San Diego State. They were all places where Frazier, bidding to become one of the few black Division I ADs, interviewed.

ASU's significant loss, maintained those who threw Frazier a huge going-away bash in the fall of 2000, was surely UAB's considerable gain.

But sometimes bad situations find good people. And what slowly closed around Frazier became an AD's nightmare. The president who hired him, W. Ann Reynolds, became increasingly at odds with the Board of Trustees, which eventually forced her out last month. People familiar with the situation say Frazier got caught in the middle.

At a commuter school deep in the shadow of the state's two giants, Auburn and Alabama, Frazier inherited a 15-sport athletic program barely four years into Division I-A but living well beyond its means before he came aboard. The last accounting placed the athletic department $7.5 million in the hole, prompting the trustees to demand it be made self sufficient by 2004, or else.

If that was all — and Frazier maintained UAB was chipping away at the deficit — it would be one thing. But an ongoing Title IX lawsuit alleging UAB failed to provide an environment free from sexual harassment based upon a series of incidents that largely preceded Frazier's arrival cast a further cloud over the school.

Said a friend of Frazier's yesterday: "He'd have to be dumb not to grab the Hawai'i job. And if there is one thing he isn't, that's dumb."