Shark Bites Vegas : Culture: The fight between UNLV’s president and basketball coach is pushing glitz city to an identity crisis.

From the roof of the humanities building at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, you can look out over the desert and envision two cities: the seedy, glitzy old Vegas of Bugsy Siegel’s days, and the proud, important new Las Vegas that city boosters say is already taking shape.

This seven-story building, which houses the administration offices, is also the epicenter of a rumble that some citizens--with typical Vegas hype--think might shake this city of 700,000 back into desert dust.

UNLV President Robert Maxson is painfully aware of the shock waves as he looks out over his campus, a rolling landscape embellished with olive and palm trees and elegant sculptures. In keeping with that vision of a new Las Vegas, Maxson points out the modernistic health sciences building that President Bush so admired when they jogged together recently. He waxes eloquent about the Computing Center for Energy and Environment that houses the school’s coveted $10-million Cray supercomputer.

But Maxson seems to ignore the most prominent building on campus, a dazzling $30-million edifice financed with slot machine taxes and launched in 1984 with a groovy gala featuring Vegas royalty: Frank and Dean and Diana.

Ten hours later, 18,944 fanatical followers of the Runnin’ Rebels basketball team will flood into that circular building--the Thomas and Mack Center--decked out in every imaginable combination of UNLV red and gray. But many also will wear T-shirts and carry signs and shout chants that offer variations on another theme: “Keep Tark--Fire Maxson.”

To anyone in Las Vegas, that slogan has become shorthand for a convoluted confrontation that began, for all practical purposes, 19 years ago when Jerry (“Tark the Shark”) Tarkanian came here to coach. In a city built by games, the Runnin’ Rebels were--and still are--the only real game in town. As Tarkanian’s teams began winning championships, a city long lacking in self-esteem responded with overwhelming appreciation. When the arena opened in 1984, fans dubbed it the Shark Tank, and booted the old Rebel mascot for a dancing shark.

But with success, Tarkanian also brought controversy, including ceaseless squabbles with the NCAA that resulted in a suspension from tournament play. Detractors asserted that the winningest coach in college basketball won, in part, by exploiting inner-city African Americans--a charge that gained credibility when recruit Lloyd Daniels was busted in 1987 for buying crack before he played his first game for UNLV.

Most recently, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported a federal investigation into possible point shaving, and published a photo of three players in a hot tub with a man known for “fixing” sporting events.

Criticism of Tark and his team came with such consistency that Sports Illustrated recently hinted that he might also be charged with “invading Kuwait, prolonging the S&L; crisis, squeezing the toothpaste from the wrong end, and being responsible for Vanilla Ice.”

Last June, Tarkanian agreed to resign two years before his contract expired. Last Tuesday was supposed to be his final game, to his detractors’ relief. But, three weeks ago, Tarkanian rescinded his resignation and accused the UNLV administration and its supporters of attempting a coup of sorts, complete with the surreptitious videotaping of an allegedly illegal practice with a camera mounted in heating ducts--”CamScam” in the local parlance.

And the accusations, rumors, petition drives, rallies, lawsuits and dueling press conferences intensified.

Headlines and sound bites present the affair in prize-fighting terms as a slugfest between Tarkanian, who arrived in 1973 and injected the city with a sense of pride, and Maxson, the aggressive academic who arrived nine years later to say that a city’s pride should be based on more than just basketball.

What the Tark-Maxson affair really reflects is a complex case of a city struggling with a multiple personality disorder, wrestling awkwardly with the opposing qualities that define it, attempting to agree upon an image.

“I think it would take a lot more than Tarkanian to hurt the image of this town,” snorts Hank Groschadl, one of about 200 people sitting at the Stardust Casino’s sports book, where bettors watch three dozen TVs broadcasting perhaps a dozen games that the casino takes bets on.

“What’s hurting this town is you’ve got a guy who’s well liked who’s being crucified,” he says. “Tark put UNLV on the map. I don’t believe I’ve heard about the guy who just cured cancer, or the guy who did the first bypass operation on a pig coming from UNLV. It’s known for basketball.”

Such an observation makes Elaine Wynn sigh.

As a trustee and former chair of the private UNLV Foundation and director of Mirage Resorts, Wynn embodies the city’s complex identity crisis. Wynn’s suite in the executive offices of the Mirage Hotel is decorated in understated corporate chic, but outside swarms of people crank away on chattering slot machines, dolphins frolic in a man-made lake, Siberian tigers snooze in a glass cage and a 54-foot volcano fire flames 40 feet into the air in front of the hotel.

“It’s really becoming a morality play,” she says of the Tarkanian-Maxson showdown, adding that the underlying issue is basic: “What are we really all about?”

The Las Vegas of today is “multilayered,” she says. “The people who live here don’t have to be limited by what we offer our guests. Just because we have shows that are popularly oriented doesn’t mean my waitresses don’t want to take their kids to see the Dance Theatre of Harlem.”

And the Dance Theatre of Harlem did indeed just perform on the campus of UNLV, about half a mile or so from where Siegfried and Roy do their shtick at the Mirage.

“The university has become the source of most of the cultural activities in the community,” Wynn says, running down a list of achievements: a ballet company, the Nevada dance theater, the Las Vegas symphony, the opera and a lecture series that has brought such notables as Henry Kissinger to town.

“Enlightened” or “progressive” people in the community have been working on this parallel cultural revolution for years, she says. Bringing Maxson to the campus from the University of Houston was part of the plan. And for a while, the plan was “rolling merrily along . . . For the first time (UNLV) wasn’t Tumbleweed Tech anymore. We were proud of ourselves.”

Even the national media began taking Las Vegas more seriously. But there was a rub.

“Every positive story had a negative footnote and it always focused on the basketball program,” Wynn says. Even when the allegations against the program couldn’t be proved, “there was a public perception of truth.”

Says Maxson: “I’ve never been anywhere where the citizens so desperately wanted their city to be a great city, and there’s not a great city in America that doesn’t have a great university . . . I get a little bit worried that there are some people who see the University only recreationally, as a form of entertainment, (as if) basketball is the greatest asset that we have to offer. I think that’s unhealthy.”

This kind of talk triggers a scatological synonym for “nonsense!” from Tarkanian: “There’s not one single thing they’ve ever proposed in the area of academics we didn’t thoroughly support.”

The real issue, for many Tark supporters is that Maxson never came out of his ivory tower to mix with the real Vegas.

“There’s a sense that Maxson is an outsider, that he only courted a handful of politically active supporters,” says Jackie McCall, organizer of Citizens for Academic Freedom, a group organized to investigate “the abuse of power” by the administration. “He never wanted to know this community.”

Tarkanian and Vegas, on the other hand, were a perfect match.

“Las Vegas was and is a melting pot. It attracts people from all over. Tark single-handedly drew the communities together,” she says. “He’s an integral part of the community, not just a great basketball coach.”

Tarkanian supporters point to his aggressive recruitment of inner-city kids not as a criticism, but as an indication of how he has brought Las Vegas’ black and white communities together.

A poll of UNLV students by the Rebel Yell student paper last week showed 66% of the students supported Tark’s staying as coach and 42% favored keeping Maxson.

Maxson is “deeply embarrassed” by the cat fighting.

Tarkanian seems to relish the way his resignation has shaped up as a mano-a-mano contest. But that’s always been his style.

In the Runnin’ Rebels, he says, Las Vegas found a symbol of unity and loyalty.

“Fans love to see people play hard. The degree of intensity our kids play with is really unbelievable . . . I think Las Vegas likes winners because of the nature of the industry here--if you lose all the time you can’t survive.”

On the day of what the university’s administration said would be Tarkanian’s last game, however, Little Caesars Sports Book on the Strip was jokingly listing the odds at 3-1 against Tark’s staying.

The final game at Thomas and Mack wasn’t much different than the standard Runnin’ Rebels show. Roman candles and skyrockets exploded into the rafters and the shark mascot somersaulted around the floor. Electronic billboards displayed snapping sharks and the band blared the “Jaws” theme while the full house did its trademark shark clap, a blood-thirsty, from-the-shoulders gesture that makes the “tomahawk chop” look sensible.

Of course, the Rebels beat Utah State, giving them a record of 26-2. Then the crowd joined in an emotional tribute to the 61-year-old coach. Finally, 9,000 or so of Tarkanian’s closest friends reconvened at the Sands Hotel and Casino for a party.

Pushing through the casino, they came in throngs: young men in hip-hop fashion, middle-aged couples in slick suits and gowns, old men and women wearing UNLV jackets and pins and sweaters and caps, all assuming an intimacy with the bald, slouching man who sat behind a red velvet VIP rope.

Most took time to sign an enormous wall banner: “Thanks for all you’ve done to make this city great.” Many added their names to petitions circulated by attorney Pat Clary of the Committee to Save Tarkanian, pushing the total to 55,000.

Tarkanian says he’s really just trying to “get out the truth” about the administration’s treatment of him. Clary says his committee is determined to keep Tarkanian coaching the Rebels: “We want him to stay, we want the Board of Regents to do the courageous thing and exercise their option (to reinstate him).”

The process, he figures, will go on for months. “I disagree that this is tearing the city apart,” Clary says. “I think it’s a good lesson in participatory democracy.”

Len Banker, a well-known professional gambler, has a Vegas kind of idea for settling the whole thing quickly.

“I think they should take the whole thing to Judge Wapner’s court,” he says. “Do it pay-per-view.”

But Alan Feldman, vice president of public relations for the Mirage, offers a more sobering image of the fallout from the Tarkanian-Maxson tiff:

“I’m afraid it will be like waking up with a bad hangover, and finding the damage you did to the living room.”