NCAA MEN’S BASKETBALL FINAL : City, School Finally Hit the Jackpot

THE BIG YEAR IS HERE!

--Cover of UNLV basketball yearbook, published in October

Duke didn’t have the Vegas idea what was happening out there.

This one was the Gunfight at the Coach K corral. This one was the ambush by the guns from Glitter Gulch. This one was for every card shark, saloon gal, rustler, hustler and homesteader who has ever set foot inside the sandy city limits of Las Vegas, Nev., the little settlement where the Mormons built a fort in the 1850s to teach agriculture to the Indians.

What else has your average Las Vegan had to rejoice over that could have been any wilder or more wonderful than Monday night’s 103-73 destruction of Duke in college basketball’s national championship game? No Super Bowl, World Series, NBA, NHL or N-anything will ever come Nevada’s way aside from the NCAA, which has never been much of a friend to it.

“Was this sweet revenge?” it was asked of Jerry Tarkanian, UNLV’s embattled coach.

“It wasn’t revenge,” a smiling Tarkanian said, “but it was sweet.”

Oh, Tark the Shark has such teeth, babe, and he was showing them, pearly white. His team won the title game by 30 points. Nobody’s ever won the title game by 30 points. From Super Bowl Sunday on, Jerry’s kids won 21 of their last 22 games. They never lost to anybody who didn’t qualify for the NCAA tournament. How these guys nearly got knocked off by Ball State, we’ll never know.

They won this one for Valerie Pida, their “honorary coach,” the cheerleader from the 1987 Final Four team who still cheers them from courtside, having spent the past three years recovering from a bone marrow transplant. They won this one for Bryan Emerzian, the little walk-on from Waukegan, Ill., who only got to play 15 minutes all season, but will always treasure the “People’s Choice” award he was voted by UNLV’s fans--a bronzed gym shoe.

They won this one with a melting pot of ballplaying marvels from Pasadena (Stacey Augmon) to Brooklyn (Moses Scurry), from Detroit (Anderson Hunt) to Dallas (Larry Johnson), from Washington, D.C. (David Butler) to Oxnard (Stacey Cvijanovich), as apropos a roster as ever befit a city that thrives on tourism.

For hometown flavor there was Greg Anthony, the junior from Las Vegas who wants to grow up to become the junior U.S. senator from Nevada, and, in case anybody still wonders whether UNLV attracts any genuine student-athletes, that guy wearing uniform No. 13 and playing nine minutes Monday night was Travis Bice from Simi Valley, whose grade-point average is above 3.0.

Somehow, the Runnin’ Rebels knew well in advance that the Big Year Was Here. Maybe they had a premonition. Maybe they got their fortunes told. Or maybe they simply figured it was about time that something nice happened to Nevada Las Vegas, a school and a basketball team that developed a devoted following from Frank Sinatra and Wayne Newton and Telly Savalas, but couldn’t seem to convince numerous others that they were good for much of anything other than entertainment.

Tarkanian, the coach whose winning percentage now ranks second to no one, took considerable exception to the idea that UNLV did not offer quality education. “Everybody thinks our students major in Cocktail Waitressing 101,” he said.

It was Duke that got an education Monday. For as much trouble as these distinguished scholars gave them, the Runnin’ Rebels might as well have been playing the Dead Poets Society. You knew these dizzy Blue Devils were in for a long evening when sophomore Brian Davis tried to high-five classmate Christian Laettner after a basket and ended up poking him in the eye. Duke didn’t get much chance to practice giving five.

“That’s the best any team has played against us--ever,” Coach Mike Krzyzewski of the losers said. Poor old Coach K wasn’t around in 1964, when UCLA stuffed 98 points down Duke’s throats in the NCAA final, but now he knows how it feels to surrender more points than any team in title-game history. It feels like needing a seven or an 11 and rolling craps.

Nobody could get a bet down on UNLV in the old hometown, which saved the bookies a whole bunch of money. Out of loyalty alone, gamblers undoubtedly would have plopped a few thousand on the Rebels, not even suspecting that they would be wagering on one of the most dynamic college basketball teams ever to dunk a Rawlings.

The big year was here, all right, and next year might be bigger. Tarkanian has a recruit headed east from Oxnard name of Shon Tarver, who figures to be heard from, and another recruit from down-the-road Clark High in Las Vegas with the wonderfully memorable handle of H. Waldman, who no doubt will gain fame as “H. Bomb” or “H. Factor” or something equally graphic.

Asked what UNLV can do for an encore, Larry Johnson, only a junior, asked a question right back:

“Win it again?”

He was still in the locker room when most of his teammates were gone. Somebody told him to hurry up. “Hey!” Johnson said. “I just won a national championship, and you’re telling me to hurry up?”

“OK, walk back to the hotel, then,” he was told.

“OK, I’m turning pro, then,” Johnson said.

He might, he might not--but he could. Most of these guys could. The University of Nevada at Las Vegas basketball team of 1989-90 was a team so good, it belonged in a league that begins with an N.