On a wall above his desk in the University of Hawai'i athletic department, where no one entering his office could miss it, athletic director Stan Sheriff hung a watercolor painting of the University of Northern Iowa's UNI-Dome.

The facility was built during his tenure at UNI, but, more importantly, the painting's presence served as a pointed daily reminder to himself and others of the need for an on-campus arena at UH.

From his first day on the job in 1983 until he died in 1993, the facility topped Sheriff's visionary to-do list, if not his thoughts.

These days the 10,300-seat Stan Sheriff Center that rises above Manoa's lower campus is testament to the realization of that dream and the sacrifices he made to help it get there. Yet it is hardly his only contribution to UH, a list of which in the nine years before his death might wrap around the arena.

"He was someone with a vision for what Hawai'i needed," said Rick Blangiardi, vice president and general manager of KGMB TV. "He came along at a critical time. Stan was one of those guys who was in the right place at the right time with the right stuff."

Born in Honolulu, where he lived until age 10, Sheriff was a calabash nephew of Theodore "Pump" Searle, a star on the UH football "Wonder" teams of the mid-1920s and charter inductee into the school's athletic Circle of Honor. Sheriff was a small college All-American at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo and had NFL stints with the Rams and 49ers.

He replaced the well-regarded Ray Nagel in 1983 after Nagel had taken a front office job with the then-Los Angeles Rams. Nagel presided over UH's entrance into the Western Athletic Conference. Sheriff, after enduring a 10-week search process, lethargic even by UH standards, was charged with growing the department and making it more competitive.

He did it with a hands-on, diesel-driven approach that broke ground in several areas: TV contract, pay-per-view, corporate sponsorships, the arena, a league for Rainbow Wahine sports, drug testing, the Los Angeles Lakers training camp here, special provisional admittances for athletes ... you name it and a lot of what UH has now was either envisioned, started, refined or put into place by Sheriff.

"I feel like he is up there still watching over us," said Jim Donovan, the current AD. "And, I think he's laughing when he sees what we go through, sometimes, too."

Several things that UH now wrestles with, including more favorable terms at Aloha Stadium along the lines of the NFL Pro Bowl deal, are issues Sheriff had on the table when he died of a heart attack on Jan. 16, 1993, at Honolulu International Airport upon returning from the NCAA convention, less than three weeks after the seminal Holiday Bowl victory.

He also fought some of the biggest battles to preserve the so-called Hawai'i Exemption that provides UH — and the teams that travel here — an extra game in the major sports. It was developed by the late Hank Vasconcellos in the 1950s to help encourage teams to travel here and Sheriff had to go to the wall to keep the NCAA from legislating it into extinction, even getting the membership to reverse an earlier action.

The local TV contract that is currently worth $3 million in cash annually and untold visibility to UH had its beginnings in 1984 with conversations between Sheriff and Blangiardi, who was then at KIKU (KHNL). The first UH pay-per-view ventures, which consisted of selected road games, began in 1985.

Along the way Sheriff brought, among others, Michigan (1986), Wisconsin ('87), Iowa ('88 and '91), Oregon ('88), Oregon State ('89), Notre Dame ('91 and '97), California ('93 and '94), Pittsburgh ('92) and Missouri ('94) to the football schedule.

At one point 74 percent of UH's scholarship athletes graduated within a six-year period, best in the WAC. He ran the department finances at a surplus, with a reported $1.1 million in a special reserve account.

Upon Dick Tomey's departure for Arizona, Sheriff elevated assistant coach Bob Wagner to head football coach, opening up the offense and the path for the school's first two NCAA bowl appearances. His hiring of Frank Arnold as men's basketball coach didn't work out as well. But Sheriff rebounded with the hiring of Riley Wallace, who guided UH to three WAC Tournament titles. And Vince Goo was brought on board to lift the women's basketball program to 10 postseason appearances.

"Stan was the first (AD) to run the department like an 'ohana," Donovan said. Sheriff said he thought of it as a team and tried to run it the same way. "The same principles apply," Sheriff used to say. "You get the best people you can and coach them. You can't win if you aren't a team."

Few on that team — or elsewhere — doubted where they stood with Sheriff, a no-nonsense former football coach. He once slammed the NCAA men's basketball selection committee "a bunch of jerks" for not picking UH. And, he added with the wink of an eye, "I will tell them that every time I see them."

Upset that some looked at UH's breakthrough football victory over BYU in 1989 as a "fluke," Sheriff told the BYU athletic director, "We'll beat you by five TDs (next time)." He was wrong. UH won by four TDs.

His plain-spokeness sometimes rubbed people, politicians especially, the wrong way. Told that loud opposition to reducing the seating capacity of the arena could kill its passage altogether, Sheriff chose to uncharacteristically bite his tongue. It was a sign of just how important the arena was to his master plan.

For more than 30 years a succession of UH athletic directors sought to get a large on-campus arena to replace leaky, creaky Klum Gym, also known as "Slum Gym," where volleyball fans sweated and brushed away insects. Examples of everything from 4,000 seats to 18,000 were committed to blueprints and campaigned for. Sheriff, who was a driving force behind the UNI Dome, knew what a facility could do not only for the school's finances but its teams and made its passage a pillar of his administration.

If the bronze bust of Sheriff that greets arrivals in the foyer of the arena could speak, you get the feeling it would express opposition to having his name placed upon the facility, however posthumously.

"It is a piece of the whole," as he was wont to say, about what would be both his largest achievement and, you suspect, a contributor to his death of a heart attack a year and a half before its opening.

"I'm sure it (the fight over the arena) didn't help," said his son, Rich, who manages the arena. "I know (the building of) it was something that was extremely important to him and something he wasn't going to walk away from. I'm sure (the process) didn't help his level of stress or his health."