The Titans’ Ambush of ’83

“Oh geez,” said the voice over the telephone from the hotel lobby in France. “Are they getting ready to play each other soon?”

In the background, Bryan Adams sang the song from “Robin Hood” over some faraway stereo system. People talked and the clink of silverware on plates confirmed that it was breakfast time.

Leon Wood, one of the finest basketball players to come out of Cal State Fullerton, and his teammates were a few hours away from a French professional league playoff game one morning this week.

And then suddenly, it was 1983, and Wood was spinning and weaving his way around Nevada Las Vegas defenders on one of the most magical evenings in Titan Gym. . . . “It was not like we had a chance for any title,” Wood said, voice rising. “And it’s a little bitty gym.

“You go into that gym when it’s empty, and it’s like this little gym--what could it do?

“But that night, we might have gotten in trouble had the fire marshal showed up.”

It was 10 years ago, Feb. 24, 1983, and it was the first time UNLV had been ranked No. 1 in the nation. The Rebels were 24-0 when they took the floor in front of a standing-room-only crowd in a steamy, sultry Titan Gym.

They were 24-1 when they left. Fullerton provided a night for the ages by winning, 86-78, in front of a school-record crowd of 5,015.

“It was one of those things where everything just fit together,” Wood said. “If we played them another five or six times, we probably never would have beaten them.”

When UNLV makes its annual visit to Fullerton at 8:30 this evening, there will be no No. 1 rankings, no undefeated teams and no SRO. The Rebel, barring a victory tonight coupled with a New Mexico State loss at UC Irvine, will finish second in the Big West. And Fullerton has lost six of its last nine.

But there are memories and, somewhere, an automobile parked at Fullerton on that night in 1983 is probably still stained with the grieving tears of a UNLV coach’s wife and one of her closest friends.

“I cried in the parking lot,” said Lois Tarkanian, Jerry’s wife. “I remember it well. Susan Molasky--a very strong booster--and I just cried.

“I just laid my head down on the hood of a car and she put her arms around me and we just sobbed.”

And to think, maybe the entire thing could have been avoided had her husband had that drink. . . .

Jerry Tarkanian suddenly became worried on the afternoon of the game when a thought struck him like a kick in the gut.

“That whole year, (the night) before every game, I would drink a glass of kir,” said Tarkanian, who has never been known to bypass an available superstition. “And we were undefeated.

“Before the Fullerton game, we stayed at a different hotel and I had all kinds of friends in from Pasadena. I forgot to drink my kir that night.

“That’s the truth.”

A couple of boosters had introduced Tarkanian to kir--a wine drink that rhymes with “beer”--before the season opener with Oklahoma that year. He drank; the Rebels won. So Tark incorporated it into his pregame ritual.

“If I had been out with my boosters, they wouldn’t have let me forget,” Tarkanian said. “I realized the afternoon of the game, but the deal was, we had to drink it the night before.

“One of my boosters, Don Iglinski, asked me, ‘Coach, you have your kir?’ And I said, ‘Aw, no.’ He said, ‘Oh no, Coach, we’re going to lose.’ ”

That was Fullerton’s thought during the entire week leading up to the game, and it had nothing to do with any silly superstitions. The Titans were still stung from a 76-71 loss at UNLV that season. Fullerton trailed at the half, 37-19, and Wood had been held scoreless. But Wood rebounded with 21 second-half points, and the Titans nearly came back to win.

They were determined to finish off the Rebels in Fullerton.

“I remember having the best practices of the year that week,” said Tony Neal, a forward who would have his best game at Fullerton against the Rebels, scoring 18 points and grabbing 13 rebounds. “Everything was clicking.

“Coach (George) McQuarn had a great strategy. All week, he kept saying, ‘Those guys are going to demolish you. You aren’t ready.’

“When game time came, we so much wanted to show him he was wrong.”

The rest of the strategy, as Neal recalls, was to stop UNLV’s fast break, block them out after missed shots, keep Rebel star Sidney Green off of the boards and, when possible after Fullerton made a basket, grab the ball or slow it up coming out of the basket to delay UNLV’s fast break.

Not only was McQuarn still establishing himself as a head coach, he had been Tarkanian’s top assistant for four seasons before accepting the Fullerton job three years earlier.

McQuarn had always said that when he put together a team capable of defeating UNLV, he would wear a tuxedo to the game in Las Vegas. Trouble was, in the game earlier that season, Fullerton guard Ricky Mixon was not at full strength because of an injury, so McQuarn scrapped the idea.

But by mere coincidence, McQuarn and Mel Franks, Fullerton’s sports information director, had attended an Orange County Sports Hall of Fame banquet the night before UNLV came to Fullerton, and their tuxedos were still hanging in the locker room the next day. A student started to return them, but Franks said to leave his hanging.

The student accidentally left McQuarn’s burgundy tuxedo behind instead, and Franks--who had issued 84 media credentials for the game--decided to wear it.

“The idea was that this was a big-time event so I figured I would dress that way,” Franks said. “I would have looked pretty silly had they beaten us by 20.”

But there was this feeling around Fullerton. This would be the night. For one thing, Danny Tarkanian, UNLV’s point guard, had a severe case of bronchitis and had been released from the hospital the previous day.

“My dad had wanted to hold me out and play me against West Virginia (on national television that Saturday),” Danny Tarkanian said. “But no way was I going to sit that one out. We were undefeated and No. 1 in the nation.

“I remember the place was nuts. The fans were crazy. I was always pumped to play Leon, and I warmed up really hard.

“I think I used most of my energy during warm-ups.”

Tarkanian missed all seven of his shots from the field that evening and was scoreless. He had six assists and two turnovers.

Still, Fullerton trailed at halftime, 46-41. The Titans made 50% of their first-half field goals, but UNLV shot 56%.

“UNLV had such a style back then,” Neal said. “As soon as the game started, you could be down 14 points. We started to contain them, and our defense was clicking. It was a fast-paced game. . . .

“We knew coming out of halftime that we were going to bust these guys.”

Sure enough, Fullerton went on a 17-6 run to open the second half and never again trailed. When Wood banked in a 27-foot three-pointer as the 30-second clock was expiring to boost Fullerton’s lead to 58-52 with 12:52 left, many in the building had one word in mind: Destiny.

The final free-throw count--Fullerton was 20 for 27, UNLV was seven for 16--sealed it. The fact that UNLV had 21 turnovers to Fullerton’s 12 also helped.

At one point during a timeout with 6:36 to play and Fullerton ahead, 71-60, Neal remembers McQuarn wild-eyed in the huddle.

“He said, ‘You guys are playing like a bunch of crazed dogs out there--I told you we could do it,’ ” Neal said.

Wood, who would play parts of six seasons in the NBA, finished with 21 points and 12 assists--boosting his season assist total to 260, tops in the nation.

“The greatest mystery to me was how Leon wasn’t an NBA all-star,” said Danny Tarkanian, who developed a friendship with Wood when the two attended Jerry Tarkanian’s basketball camp when they were in grade school. “I thought he was the best I ever played against in college.”

For one night, though, the future was something to be dealt with tomorrow. By the time Wood dribbled out the final nine seconds, there was bedlam.

Fans engulfed the floor as the final buzzer sounded, and the Titans celebrated into the night.

“I’ve never seen the display of wildness that I saw that night,” said Jerry Lloyd, Fullerton’s trainer at the time. “Especially with Leon. I was concerned someone might get hurt.

“It was a great win for the Titans.”

While Fullerton celebrated, a few others weren’t so happy. The West Virginia sports information director had called press row for score updates throughout the UNLV-Fullerton game and, when it was final, he congratulated Fullerton but the disappointment was evident in his voice.

It was nothing, though, compared to the Rebels. Lois Tarkanian wasn’t the only Las Vegas resident who felt like crying.

“After the game, I was really down,” Danny Tarkanian said. “In the hotel room, Sid (Green) comes up and says, ‘Don’t worry about it, Danny.’

“I said, ‘I really cost us the game.’ ”

“He said, ‘No, I cost us the game. I had four or five turnovers.’ ”

“And I said, ‘It was really eight, Sid, but who’s counting?’ ”

From a hotel room in Seattle, where he was staying with the Charlotte Hornets, Green laughed.

“I remember that very vividly,” Green said. “That was the worst. That was a game I will never, ever forget.”

How could he? Fullerton, for the first time, had set up 250 folding chairs along the baselines and stuffed another 633 people into the gym’s corners, standing tight against one another.

“I remember walking out onto the court and seeing all the fans wearing Coach Tarkanian masks,” Green said.

Fate, an often fickle point guard, certainly hasn’t dealt everyone involved in the game their share of assists. Jerry Tarkanian, after a year he could have easily done without, underwent an angioplasty Monday.

Gary Davis, a starting forward for Fullerton that evening, is on vacation this week. He is a policeman in Compton, and a former partner of Kevin Burrell, one of the Compton officers who was murdered during a traffic stop last week. On Monday, Davis was a pallbearer at Burrell’s funeral.

As for McQuarn, he abruptly resigned a few weeks before the start of the 1988-89 season, shortly after the school president embarrassed him in a staff meeting by asking about academics.

McQuarn, still bitter, refused this week to talk about the 1983 UNLV game--his biggest victory as a head coach.

“I don’t want to talk about something that happened 10 years ago,” said McQuarn, an assistant to Bill Frieder at Arizona State. “Cal State Fullerton is behind me.

“I’m just not interested in that at all.”

Perhaps part of the reason is that the UNLV game was Fullerton’s final highlight in what could have--and probably should have--been an even better year.

The Titans won their next two games that year, over Utah State and UC Santa Barbara, before losing three in a row--including the Pacific Coast Athletic Assn. tournament opener against Cal State Long Beach that sent Fullerton to the National Invitation Tournament.

There, Fullerton lost an opening-round game at Arizona State, 87-83. The Titans had finished 21-8, McQuarn’s best season, but had blown a chance at the NCAA tournament.

After playing the role of giant-killer, they couldn’t seem to get comfortable in any other role.

“(The season) went (along) with Coach McQuarn upset at us,” Neal said. “After we beat UNLV, we didn’t finish up too strong.

“We were like a Pepsi that went flat.”

Said Danny Tarkanian: “You know what I think happened? If a team beat Vegas, that was enough.

“Fullerton was good enough that it could have beaten a couple of teams in the NCAA tournament.”

UNLV, which lost the game that following Saturday at West Virginia, 87-78, ended up as one of North Carolina State’s victims on the Wolfpack’s run to the NCAA championship. North Carolina State defeated UNLV in the tournament, 71-70.

“Jim Valvano (former North Carolina State coach) still tells people that we were the best team they played all year,” Tarkanian said proudly.

Said Green: “That (season) was the start of all these great players and great UNLV teams. That’s when things started happening fantastically for UNLV, getting great players like Larry Johnson and Stacey Augmon.

“I would like to see the game film, whoever has it. Not the last minute or two, but the first 38 minutes.”

For that, he would need to call Davis.

“I have a tape of it,” Davis said. “I watch it once a year or so. It brings back a lot of good memories. It’s a good feeling.

“It’s a feeling I’ll never forget.”

Unforgettable? Wood has been through the NBA, he has played in Spain, Italy and Germany and, from a hotel lobby in France, he can still see the night in 1983 as if it were on the television in front of him.

“We never made the NCAA tournament,” Wood said. “Looking back, that’s one thing I can say--that we had the opportunity to beat the No. 1 team. That pretty much made not only our season, but it made my career.”

There was a pause, and then Wood asked a couple of questions about the 1993 edition of UNLV-Cal State Fullerton.

Then, he said, there was one more thing.

“Tell the Titans good luck,” Wood said. “Tell them to play hard.”