"Me personally, I don't like earrings. But last week, my wife told me my son's got an earring," he said. "Granted, I'm in Denver; he's at a prep school in New Hampshire. But if he had been home, that would have never happened.

"When I heard about it, you better believe I lit into him. I said, 'Hey, you want to look for a job, you wear an earring, you won't get the job. That's the bottom line.' That's what I told him."

By the same token, Dantley has come to realize that surviving as a coach in today's NBA involves trying to understand the players in what he calls "a players league."

Which brings us back to his Utah days, and a Jazz team coached then by Frank Layden.

"I always tease guys . . . 'You're lucky you don't have Frank Layden.' I say, 'Hey, I averaged 30 points a game (29.6 for the Jazz), made All-Star — and he got on me all the time.' He always motivated me. I was always ready to play.

"Today, if you get on an athlete — as they always say — the guy goes in the tank. With me, it was the opposite. I always felt I had to prove something to him."

By now, the story of Dantley's fallout with Layden is Utah legend: Dantley was a contract holdout in 1984. Layden fined him a symbolic 30 pieces of silver for Judas-like behavior. Dantley eventually resumed playing for the Jazz, but after Karl Malone's arrival, he was traded in the summer of '86.

"Frank," Dantley said, "has apologized, said he shouldn't have done it."

It's true. He has.

Dantley, too, has made amends with Layden: "I'll see him and say, 'I'm sorry I did that.' "

Still, between the stormy relationship with Layden and a perception by some within the Jazz organization that the Notre Dame product played selfishly in his quests to be the NBA's season scoring leader — he was twice — Jazz owner Larry H. Miller has refused to raise Dantley's No. 4 jersey to the Delta Center rafters.

There, it would hang beside those honoring Layden, Pete Maravich, Darrell Griffith, Mark Eaton, Jeff Hornacek and John Stockton, with Malone's soon to come.

"That's a personal thing more than what I accomplished," said Dantley, who doesn't always openly discuss the issue. "You know, they try to make me out to (have) a reputation to be a bad guy.

"The bottom line is I got along with all the players there. I got along with the coaches there. The only thing I did was I held out one year, when Frank Layden was the GM and the coach. And he took it overboard. Karl Malone — he held out for four or five times. No problem there."

Like earrings and the Hall, the Jazz snub perplexes Dantley.

"At one time," he said, "they said that I didn't play enough years there."

Yet Dantley's total is virtually the same as Hornacek's.

"So, who knows?" Dantley asks.