Race Isn’t Always to the Swiftest

Rollie Massimino’s Las Vegas, as opposed to Jerry Tarkanian’s Las Vegas, is a one-stoplight town. And we all know what that one stoplight says, right?

Walk, Don’t Run

Right?

Massimino, nine days into practice as the new basketball coach at Nevada Las Vegas, is already weary of the variations on the theme. You know: He’s the square peg trying to fit the round hole, he’s the Walkin’ Wildcat in the land of the Runnin’ Rebel, he’s going to take the air out of the basketball, put lead in his players’ shoes, milk 44 seconds off the 45-second clock and slip a Mickey to the exploding Thomas and Mack scoreboard.

“It’s all perception, not the reality,” Massimino grumbles after yet another reporter raises the issue.

A tad edgy, he attempts to turn the question on the questioner.

“You think Georgetown runs?” Massimino asks. “Would you say they’re a running team?”

“Sometimes,” reporter says.

“Would you say Syracuse runs?” Massimino asks.

Reporter shrugs.

Massimino is clanking high-percentage shots. Exasperation is rapidly setting in.

“No?” he retorts. “You say nobody in the Big East runs?

“Well, I think Georgetown’s a running team--and we scored more points than Georgetown last year.

“You know that in that Georgetown-Villanova championship game, the game that we supposedly held the ball, we scored more points than in the Georgetown-North Carolina game three years before.

“That’s a great trivia question.”

Rollie has his facts in order. 1985 NCAA Final: Villanova 66, Georgetown 64. 1982 NCAA Final: North Carolina 63, Georgetown 62. Three more points for the ’85 winners, two more points for the losers.

But what is it supposed to prove?

“It’s all perception,” Massimino repeats. “I mean, we’re doing the same kind of drills that we did at Villanova--basically running drills, and we really made them run-- today. If we want to run, we gotta run.

“It’s all perception. We’re going to try to run, but we have to win. And if we’re running, we’re really in a Catch-22 situation, because we’re not big and we’re not deep, so we can’t go get people and run 90 feet of the floor all the time, which I really want to do, if we’re going to run and create havoc. Because we don’t have a lot of players. We’re six, maybe seven--maybe--deep.”

All this talk of running makes a person tired, and Rollie’s Rebels don’t officially debut for three weeks. Perhaps intentionally, he has scheduled his opener at Loyola Marymount, the anti-Villanova. Loyola will run, UNLV will run, Rollie will show it to you.

Massimino had to know what was in store the moment he dotted the i’s on the dotted line. From Villanova to supernova. From Big East bog to the fast break that never sleeps. UNLV wasn’t just changing coaches when it hired Massimino to replace Tarkanian, it was tilting the universe.

UC Irvine Coach Rod Baker claims he drove his car off the road the instant he heard the news.

You coach basketball at UNLV, you belly up to some serious expectations. The first three commandments read:

Thou shalt win no fewer than 25 games per season.

Thou shalt win by scores of 114-86.

Thou shalt win while getting to know NCAA investigators on a first-name basis.

Massimino is hoping to bat no higher than .667.

“Dr. (Robert) Maxson said one thing that really hit me,” Massimino says, referring to the UNLV president. “He said, ‘Rollie, when you come on this campus, you will make us a better institution.’ That stayed with me. It made me feel like I was something special.”

Or at least something different. Massimino’s teams at Villanova may have been boring, but they were always clean (no sanctions in 19 years) and the always graduated (57 scholarship players, 57 college degrees). Throw in that NCAA title in 1985 and Maxson had all the credentials he wanted to see.

“I don’t really get into what was done here before,” says Massimino, back into walk-and-walk-carefully mode. “I talked to Chuck Daly after he took the Nets’ job and we agreed--’Let’s just take the high road.’ I’m not looking back. I don’t know the situation, and I don’t want to know the situation.”

So rather than ask questions, Massimino sits back and fields/dodges them.

On life in Las Vegas: “You know what they say--every day you get up, it’s another beautiful day in the desert.”

On learning to be “a Vegas guy”: “What’s ‘a Vegas guy’? There’s more to Las Vegas than a 24-hour town. There’s more to Las Vegas than The Strip. It’s like any other town I go to. Just find me the Italian restaurants, and I’m fine.”

On replacing such a popular coach as Tarkanian: “I think I’m a people’s guy. Right away, I gave all my players the option of staying or deciding to go somewhere else. They all chose to stay except for one. I thought that spoke for itself.”

On moving from the Big East to the Big West: “They’re both big. One of my fetishes over the years is trying to pick the 64-team field that will wind up in the NCAA tournament, and I’ve always included one, two, three Big West teams as potential candidates . . . I haven’t been here long enough to see what the difference is. I’ve got to go around the league once first. But I know the Big West is on ESPN’s ‘Big Monday’ telecasts, and I think that’s significant.”

Rollie, you haven’t lived until you’ve brought a team into Cal State Long Beach’s University Gym, with its standing-and-screaming-room-only capacity of 2,200.

“Rollie’s going from the Carrier Dome to ‘The Gold Mine,’ ” chortles Long Beach Coach Seth Greenberg, already counting down the days.

On all fronts, it figures to be a shock to the system. But until Dec. 5, all Massimino can do is answer the questions until the clock on the wall says there is no more time for questions.

With that, Massimino bids another cluster of writers goodby.

Gotta go.

Gotta run.