By IAN O'CONNOR
The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News

Charles Tarulli is not turning in his "BONNIES" license plates, not after waiting three decades to land them. How could he? Tarulli had been calling motor vehicles since the '60s in the event some anonymous driver had surrendered the tags. And in 1994, the computer finally made him whole, spitting out his ticket to ride toward a golden-years bliss defined by God, country, family and St. Bonaventure basketball.

Yes, Tarulli is keeping those plates. He's keeping the Class of '62 ring on his finger and the Class of '62 diploma on his den wall. He's keeping the Bonnies lamps, clocks and posters that have turned his New City home into a shrine for the 13th century saint whose preserved, postmortem head would be stolen during a French war, and whose 21st century university lost its head during an uprising that had nothing to do with religious or social reform.

Tarulli is keeping everything but his innocence, his belief that nothing could be more pure than a small, Catholic school rising out of the upstate snow belt and reaching for the starry night.

"Now I just hope they let us stay in Division I," Tarulli said.

Now he just hopes the Atlantic 10 Conference doesn't grab his dreams by the collar and throw them out onto the curb, like a bouncer running a drunk from the bar. And St. Bonaventure sure got drunk. High on the possibilities of power ratings, high on the madness of March.

This is no college basketball scandal out of central casting, nothing like the messes brought to you by the likes of Jerry Tarkanian and Jim Harrick. On some level, this is worse. This is a case of a blinded-by-the-lights college president overruling his compliance director and admitting a junior college ballplayer whose academic credentials - he had a certificate in welding - would scare off most street agents.

This is a warning for every Iona and Manhattan out there, for every little guy fixing to play big. If nothing stirs the alumni like a chance to score a first-round upset in the NCAA Tournament, nothing devalues a degree quite like the moral sacrifices often made along the way.

Ambitious mid-major programs can break your heart as easily as they bust your bracket.

"What's happened at St. Bonaventure is devastating to all of us," Tarulli said. "They've robbed the alumni of our passion. There we were on ESPN with the Bonnies' insignia in the background, and we're being called cheaters and quitters. It hurts me so much to see what a couple of individuals can do to our school."

Robert J. Wickenheiser, a president who screams at the refs. Jan van Breda Kolff, a coach who hired the president's son, Kort, as his assistant. The president and the coach decided they needed Jamil Terrell, a shot-blocker out of a place called Coastal Georgia Community College. They needed Terrell so much, they treated his welding certificate as if it were a 1,500 score on the SAT.

The truth surfaced, Terrell was ruled ineligible, the Bonnies forfeited victories, and the conference banned the team from its tournament. One great disgrace was trumped by another. When the players chose to boycott their final two games, neither the president nor the coach bothered to stop them. A sobering dearth of ethics was punctuated by an amazing lack of leadership, leaving St. Bonaventure as a coast-to-coast joke.

"Now I'll probably never see the program come back in my lifetime," said Tarulli, a retired schoolteacher. "Our president is a fanatic himself; he doesn't act like other presidents at games. He wanted to get to the next level and it got out of control. It's such a shame because the basketball program means so much to that school.

"It just tears at your heart. Now the sooner the board of trustees gets rid of (Wickenheiser and van Breda Kolff), the better off we'll be."

The president and the coach will be gone soon enough, but Tarulli knows their stains won't be so easily removed. This is a man who volunteered to hand out St. Bonaventure brochures during recruiting bazaars at the Westchester County Center, where he'd set up shop next to a St. John's rep who never fielded the questions Tarulli faced. Bonaventure? Where's that again?

"You have to go there to understand the spirit at that place," Tarulli said. "That spirit will live on beyond these people who brought disgrace to the university. This scandal is not what Bonaventure's about, but now I've got friends in New Rochelle looking at me and asking, 'What's going on at your school?' I mean, nobody's ever heard of a team refusing to play its games."

All for recruiting a kid who was averaging 6.9 points and 4.8 rebounds per night. Tarulli has a friend, a season-ticket holder, who plans on taking his Reilly Center seat at 2 p.m. Saturday and staying in it for the two hours the Bonnies were scheduled to spend playing Dayton.

That empty arena will stand a million miles removed from the double-overtime loss to Kentucky in the tournament three years back. That empty arena will dishonor the legacy of Bob Lanier and a 1970 season that was charmed until a Villanova guard named Chris Ford wrecked Lanier's knee in the regional final.

"We were going to win the national championship that year," Tarulli said, "because UCLA was between Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton. We lost to Jacksonville in the Final Four, but everybody knew we wouldn't have been stopped with a healthy Lanier.

"Now look where we are. All you can say is, 'Jesus, how did this happen?' But I refuse to believe that St. Bonaventure isn't a great place. I'm not going to let guys like van Breda Kolff and Wickenheiser ruin that."

So Tarulli will keep wearing his Bonaventure watch, keep driving with his Bonaventure plates. He'll keep taking his grandkids to games, and he'll keep telling people that Lanier would've crushed a John Wooden team with Steve Patterson in the paint.

But he won't keep pretending that his university's innocence isn't lost for good. Every Iona and Manhattan out there should study this cautionary tale and understand that a school's credibility can be stolen as suddenly as a saint's preserved head.