LOS ANGELES -- It's about 11:47 LDW Time, massive gloom and doom settling in on the Left Coast, and the ticking clock sounds like a chorus of bass drums. Take a meeting? Do a midnight? Nah, let's do the Lavin Death Watch. Which started very early this season -- the only question being precisely when?

Was it as UCLA was falling to San Diego in that overtime home opener in November, or as the Bruins collapsed against Southern Idaho or Central Dakota or Middle Eastern Azuza or somebody at home in December? It was Northern Arizona? Oh, OK. As they say across the Valley, what…EVER!

Will Our Boy Steverino rally the troops, get into the NCAA Tournament, win a couple of games and survive again -- the way he always has? As the rapidly retreating fan base at Pauley Pavilion seems to be indicating, the major problem for Lavin may not be how awful the Bruins are, but that nobody cares anymore.

	"	I've been fired so many times, I lose track. I'm always in front of the firing squad. Always smoking my last cigarette. ... What can you do? How GONE am I?"
		— Steve Lavin, UCLA head coach

The embarrassment-of-the-month club convened again last week when, wouldn't you know it, bitter rival USC -- which hadn't defeated UCLA at Pauley in 10 years -- slapped an 80-75 sticker on the chagrined faces of the once proud homeboys after which Lavin sauntered away surrounded by security cops as a small section of Trojan fans in one corner out-shouted the entire building, chanting "Just … Like … Football."

Now we're talkin' cold.

"They had more heart," said UCLA forward Dijon Thompson.

"We played scared and timid," said UCLA's Ray Young, who did not look very scared in the effective yet spare six minutes he played in the second half. "It's not my decision (who plays). You have to take the time you get."

The time Lavin gets may have been reduced even more on Saturday when a typically mediocre St John's team humiliated UCLA at Pauley, 80-65 -- heavy booing was the music of the moment this time, at least as heavy as it could get from the shockingly sparse student crowd. "I talked to my friends, but nobody would come with me," Lucas Danna, a UCLA junior from Palo Alto sitting by himself amid an ocean of empty blue, told The Los Angeles Times. "The team is no good and nobody cares."

Nobody except the Fourth Estate, which chased new UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero all the way outside into the sunshine to research his thoughts on the dark happenings inside Pauley Pavilion. "I've never advocated changing coaches in the middle of the year," he said. "I've been consistent on letting coaches do their job. Then I evaluate at the end of the season."

"If (Lavin) is here next year, he's here. If he's not, he's not," said Dijon Thompson, who hasn't exactly cut the mustard himself. "It's the team we play for. We'd play in an empty gym."

None of this could have lifted the spirits of Lavin, the slick-haired, unmarried 39-year-old who's in his seventh year as the head coach in Westwood, his 12th on the coaching staff or -- as he likes to say, inaccurately -- "a third of my life."

What is accurate is that Lavin-bashing in Westwood seems to have thrived at least that long. "Fire Lavin!" one man yelled from the Pauley seats after the USC debacle. "You've got no plays," shouted another. Anti-Lavinistas also dominate letters to The Times. "Can anyone check to see if Lavin ever voted for Strom Thurmond?" one epistle inquired. "It's not that we long for the return of John Wooden. Heck, at this point we'd settle for Walt Hazzard," another lamented. Then there's always the severely life-impaired geniuses who populate talk radio, one of whom suggested the other day that there were at least "85 coaches in the LA basin, all the levels," who could handle the team better than Lavin. Said another caller to the Bruins' post-game show on KXTA last Wednesday night: "Steve Lavin is turning McDonald's All-Americans into McDonald's employees."

"I hear enough on the grapevine, I don't have to listen to that stuff," the man himself chuckles. "I like to turn on the radio, catch a little Bossa Nova, a little Bobby Darin …"

	Steve Lavin is still coaching UCLA, but are his Bruins listening?

Bobby Darin? Bobby…..FREAKIN!…. Darin?

Either Lavin is joking about the great and exceptionally late hip crooner/swinger (who did after all marry Sandra Dee but who died at 37 -- when Lavin was 9 years old). Or he is fully aware Darin's body was donated to the UCLA medical center. Or he himself possesses a wilder death wish than Saddam Hussein. Darin's fondest hits were Splish Splash, which is exactly the noise emanating from the locker room these days as the Bruins keep diving into the nearest tank and, of course, Mac The Knife, surely the instrument of choice when Guerrero reviews this season.

Guerrero played baseball at UCLA during John Wooden's heyday -- so all he remembers are NCAA championships -- and he already mac-the-knifed Boppin' Bob Toledo out of the UCLA football head coaching job in favor of somebody named Karl Dorrell. But if the baseball guy thinks he can get away with a mere somebody in basketball …

"Hey, the same thing happens around here every year," says Lavin. "Who's getting my job now? I hear Ben Howland (Pitt)? Rick Majerus (Utah)? Mike Riley? Yeah, he didn't get the football job, did he? He'd be good." (Actually everybody from Paul Westphal at Pepperdine to Mark Gottfried at Alabama to former Bruin player Brad Holland at San Diego to -- hold onto your Viagra, isn't this where we came in? -- Larry Brown of the 76ers also has been mentioned.)

"I've been fired so many times, I lose track," Lavin laughs. "I'm always in front of the firing squad. Always smoking my last cigarette. I see you guys come around," -- he nods to Dick (Hoops) Weiss of The New York Daily News and the ESPN.com Guy -- "and I know I'm being fired again. You guys are like black clouds, El Ninos."

That's the thing about Lavin. (And -- aside from getting UCLA into the Sweet 16 in five of the last six seasons -- another of the obvious reasons he's still working the campus in Westwood.) He's such a terrific guy, likeable, accessible, charming, honest, sincere, with a still almost novice assistant's point of view and attitude. Remembering that he was a party to that long-ago class action lawsuit over coaches' restricted earnings until his boss, Jim Harrick, got fired, he was elevated and suddenly got very rich, it is logical to imagine that Lavin still considers himself awesomely lucky to be where he is and awakes every morning laughing at the world which envies everything from his neat job to his fabulous looks.

Not the media, now. The media doesn't really care if a guy can coach. But can he talk, joke, crack, tell it like it is at least part of the day … and take it? The media can't stop itself from rooting for Lavin because he is, bottom line, one of the best of all time at all of this. In the words of The Times' Robyn Norwood, "the man is grudgeless."

Does there exist another coach who would merely stand grinning while everybody from veteran scribes to student newspaper teens bombard him with painful queries, including the immortal: "How gone are you?" Lavin could have quit right then -- as the Georgia State coach did recently. He could have imploded into strangle mode -- as the Texas Tech coach is wont to have done. Or he could have gone to his car for a handgun -- as the Tennessee State, uh, former coach did.

But no. He just smiled. "What can you do? How GONE am I? I read the paper the next day and the guy wrote I was not only gone, I was going-going-gone," chuckled Lavin. "I called him up and told him thanks, that he made me laugh before I'd even had my coffee, and that's very hard to do."

So who cares about this friendly charmer's dark holes penetrating the résumé?: