NCAA MEN’S BASKETBALL FINAL : NOTEBOOK : UNLV’s Pregame Talk Is Short and Sweet

Retired pro football star Walter Payton put in a phone call to Coach Jerry Tarkanian on Monday, asking if he could address the Nevada Las Vegas basketball team before Monday night’s NCAA championship game against Duke.

Tarkanian wondered why.

“I’d never met Walter Payton,” he said.

Turns out Payton has become a big fan of the UNLV team. “I watch every game they play on my satellite dish,” Payton said.

Tarkanian occasionally asks some sort of celebrity to speak to his players before a big game. At the West Regional in Oakland, he invited Steve Wynn, who runs the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, to do just that.

“Payton just came out of the blue,” Tarkanian said. “He said he’d adopted us. The kids were just thrilled. They had no idea a big star like Walter even knew they existed. It got us excited before we even stepped on the floor.”

An announcement by a local radio talk show host, offering tickets to Monday night’s championship game, lured about 500 unsuspecting fans to a non-existent ticket office in downtown Denver late Saturday night.

It was an April Fools’ joke.

George Weber of radio station KOA announced that “a major corporation” had obtained “several hundred tickets to a major sporting event in town and would be making them available at midnight” from a ticket office on the west side of the capitol.

The tickets, Weber said, would be sold at face value.

“There were two or three people who were irate,” Weber told the Rocky Mountain News. “But most of them played along.”

Weber has pulled similar pranks.

On the eve of April Fools’ Day last year, he announced that government workers were stripping the gold from the capitol dome and handing it out to bystanders. About 300 showed up.

Weber also told listeners where the Cleveland Browns were staying the night before they played the Broncos in the AFC championship game. Police were called out to quell the crowd that gathered outside the Browns’ hotel.

Weber was suspended briefly by the station as a result of that stunt.

Mike Toney, a close friend of Tarkanian, was ejected from the McNichols Arena for using a press credential issued to an engineer for the radio station which broadcasts UNLV games.

After being spotted in the media room, Toney was ejected when NCAA officials discovered that the credential he was wearing had been issued to Mitch Halpern, an engineer for KDWN, the Rocky Mountain News reported.

Halpern said he didn’t know how his credential got to Toney.

Three players from NCAA champion Nevada Las Vegas made the all-tournament team for the Final Four.

Anderson Hunt, also chosen the most valuable player, was joined by teammates Larry Johnson and Stacey Augmon.

Duke’s Phil Henderson also made the squad, as did Dennis Scott of Georgia Tech, which was beaten by UNLV in the semifinals.

The previous largest winning margins in NCAA championship game history belonged to UCLA. The Bruins won by 23 points (78-55) over North Carolina in 1968, and by 21 over Memphis State (87-66) in 1973.

Seven of the eight previous NCAA championship games were decided by four points or fewer--five by either two points or one.

UNLV’s 35 victories were the second-most by an NCAA championship team. The 1948 Kentucky squad had a record of 36-3.

The Rebels’ losses were to Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico State, LSU and UC Santa Barbara.

Duke’s Blue Devil mascot, notorious for his insulting headbands and placards, had one regarding Nevada Las Vegas’ alleged inferior academic prowess.

His sign read: “Welcome, Fellow Scholars.”

Backup guard Stacey Cvijanovich, the only remaining player from UNLV’s 1987 Final Four team, feels as if he has been around forever.

“Fans and players sometimes come up to me and ask: ‘How long have you been here?’ I tell them I was Reggie Theus’ roommate.”

Theus left UNLV in 1978.

Moses Scurry, UNLV senior forward, pretty much summed up the whole experience for Duke.

“We got to running on them, and it looked like they all just said, ‘Forget it.’ ”

Next year’s Final Four will be played at the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis. In 1992, it will be at the Metrodome in Minneapolis.

Times staff writers Chris Baker and Jerry Crowe contributed to this story.