Quietly, the most infamous anniversary in University of Hawai'i sports history passed this week with little notice.

Considering that May 7, 1977 marked the most debilitating chapter in UH athletics and how long it took the program to crawl out from under its fallout, that is a good thing. A remarkable testament, really.

It has been 30 years since the NCAA slapped UH with a two-year probation for 68 violations in its athletic program, a penalty that, in reality, stretched into a crippling 12-year sentence and led to a widespread housecleaning.

NCAA Case No. 560, as it was known, involved players, coaches, regents and government officials and touched on excesses in the form of cash, cars and rent-free apartments. It began with a controversial car commercial involving then-head basketball coach Bruce O'Neil and a handful of players and grew into a firestorm that engulfed the whole university.

Before the NCAA showed up on UH's doorstep, basketball had been the centerpiece of a burgeoning athletic program, a point of pride for a place less than 20 years into statehood that was just beginning to rally around its only major college athletic program. The Rainbows regularly played before live television and sellout crowds at the then-Honolulu International Center (later the Blaisdell) and appeared in the postseason three times in six years, including a trip to the 24-team NCAA Tournament.

UH was held up as an example of a program on the move. Then, it was made an example of as a program that came too fast and where too many corners got cut.

Immediately after the sanctions, UH went 1-26 and hardly needed to open the upstairs portion of the arena. Two head coaches, one of whom was fired and the other who walked away in frustration, tried to bring the 'Bows back. Not until 1988-89, Riley Wallace's second season as head coach, did UH make another postseason appearance with a National Invitation Tournament berth. Over the 11-year absence, UH basketball went 109-195.

"Maybe the reason the fans were so loud (in the 1990 NIT at Blaisdell) was more than a decade of pent-up emotion," sportscaster Jim Leahey observed.

Current coach Bob Nash, a member of the legendary "Fabulous Five," was playing in the pros when the NCAA leveled its blow and came back in 1981 as a graduate assistant to help pick up the pieces. "It (probation) set the program back, obviously, and it took quite a while to dig us out of the hole," Nash said.

As the Nash head coaching era begins, he said it is difficult to imagine something like that happening again. "I think we have the (safeguards) and the people in place now to control the situation and prevent those kind of things from happening again."

That is the hope, anyway. Making sure that the hard-learned lessons of May 7, 1977 are never totally forgotten can only help.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.