Sure, there was a good crowd here the other night on the campus of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Isn`t there always?
Aren`t Jerry Tarkanian`s Runnin` Rebels one of the top-ranked basketball teams in the country? Isn`t Tark a local hero, maybe the most popular man in Nevada, with streets and stores named after him?
So here were students, professors and townfolks filling the seats, applauding the players when they appeared, appreciating their superb play and cheering when they walked off in triumph. What else would you expect?
Except this wasn`t a basketball game. This was a concert. Not Billy Idol or the New Kids on the Block, either. This was the English String Orchestra, conducted by none other than Yehudi Menuhin, playing some Bach, some Richard Strauss, some Benjamin Britten and being very, very well received.
Which would come as no surprise to Robert Maxson, UNLV`s president, who is not nearly as well-known as Tarkanian, but who very definitely runs the campus, including the athletic department. ”This,” said Maxson, ”is the cultural center of the state of Nevada.”
The what center?
Yes, there is culture amid the desert fleshpots. Contrary to popular belief, Las Vegas is not just a collection of garish casinos, though casinos there are, and garish they surely are. It`s a fast-growing, ebullient community of some 600,000 people, many of whom never pull the lever of a slot machine, some who prefer Bach to basketball, and a few who even like both.
Nor is UNLV only a basketball team with a coach who`s always chewing on a towel and getting in trouble with the NCAA, which is currently investigating the UNLV program for alleged rules violations. Accompanying the basketball team, and now, finally, dominating it, is a real institution of higher learning, with students studying engineering and English literature, hotel management and political science, nursing and theater arts.
And by most accounts, including Jerry Tarkanian`s, all this is being done rather well, with the quality of learning going up almost as fast as the enrollment, which may be the fastest-growing in the country. In its latest survey of American higher education, U.S. News & World Report put UNLV in its list of 32 ”up and coming” colleges.
Still, even the university`s senior academics acknowledge that to most of the outside world their school is their basketball team. ”I was visiting friends in the East,” said John Unrue, the senior vice president for academic affairs, ”and we`re driving through Philadelphia and there`s a kid with a UNLV cap. There`s no doubt about it. It`s how we`re known. And we have benefited from the name recognition.”
Sometimes. And sometimes, as when UNLV players started punching Utah State players a few weeks ago, the school gets embarrassed. ”That diminished us,” Unrue said. ”People take us less seriously.”
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Benefit or embarrassment, UNLV and its basketball team share a relationship that may be unique in the often-troubled history of American higher education and its athletic subsidiaries. Never before has a university been almost exclusively known for one of its teams. Even Notre Dame, before it became a great university, was known as a good school, or at least as a Catholic school, as well as a football team.
But when Notre Dame first became famous, there was no UNLV. The school is only 32 years old, and until recently it was both small and undistinguished, spurned even by most young Nevadans. UNLV ”was looked on as a nice little institution for local kids who couldn`t go to school anyplace else,” said Elaine Wynn, the chairman of the school`s private fundraising foundation.
And perhaps never before has a state university team acquired an image so uniquely connected to that of its state, though the image distorts the reality of both the school and the state. To outsiders, at least, it all fits so well. The ”renegade basketball team,” as Wynn put it, coached by a man suspected of breaking all the recruiting and academic rules, beloved of the citizens of the state that itself has long been known for breaking the rules.
So when Tarkanian complains that many of his problems are ”blown up by the media,” he may be engaging in more than the common paranoia. Had basketball players at Notre Dame or Michigan skipped out on some motel phone and room service charges, would it have been a big story? No, but at UNLV it seemed to be part of a pattern. As did Lloyd Daniels, the troubled young man from the Bronx whom no one but Tarkanian would recruit and who was arrested for allegedly trying to buy cocaine shortly after getting to town.
”We took a chance on a few kids,” Tarkanian said. ”That one backfired. But no one ever writes that Lloyd Daniels never had a scholarship, never played in a game, never even went to a practice.”
For all the controversy, no one doubts that the team`s success and fame have been a boon to the university. ”It`s been advertising we couldn`t possibly have bought,” said Les Raschko, the university spokesman.
Certainly, a winning team playing on national television in big arenas in New York and Los Angeles did UNLV no harm in Carson City, Nevada`s capital, where state legislators were impressed. ”The state of Nevada has been very generous,” said President Maxson, acknowledging that Tarkanian and his winning teams helped that generosity.
But things have changed in Nevada, and especially in fast-growing Las Vegas. Most of the casinos are now owned by publicly traded corporations, not mobsters. Whether publicly traded corporations are morally superior to mobsters is one of the enduring mysteries of our time, but they are surely more law-abiding and more respectable.
And while Jerry Tarkanian may still be the most popular man in Nevada, he is no longer the most powerful man at UNLV. Maxson is.
”Maxson outflanked Tark,” said one well-informed Nevadan. ”He`s got all the high rollers in town, including the casino operators, hooked on this thing about having a quality university. It`s become as important to some of them as having a winning team.”
Or in the words of Wynn, who helps her husband run the Mirage, the gambling strip`s newest and glitziest casino, ”President Maxson was the turning point, and he`s an excellent politician.”
In his five years as president, Maxson has enhanced the school`s image and its appeal by convincing some of the state`s brightest students to come to UNLV (every Nevada valedictorian who enters gets a $10,000 scholarship) and by making the campus the ”cultural center” that the state lacked.
”This is the most aggressive, competitive business environment I`ve ever lived in,” Maxson said of hard-driving Las Vegas. ”The one neutral territory is this garden,” as he calls his campus.
Yes, there were far more people at the Thomas and Mack Center the next night to see the Runnin` Rebels beat up on Pacific than there were at the Artemus Ham Concert Hall to see the English String Orchestra. And they were louder, too. Basketball remains a major passion for many Nevadans, and Tarkanian remains a hero.
Furthermore, the coach says he`s happy with UNLV`s new look. ”He`s improved the university tremendously,” Tarkanian said of Maxson. ”He`s done a great job. Our kids have to stay eligible, and some of them have a difficult time.” Two players are ineligible right now, and five starters have been kept off the court over the last five years because of poor grades.
But the Feb. 1 brawl against Utah State hurt both the team`s image and the coach`s, displeasing not only Maxson and the faculty but many rank-and-file Nevadans. ”I heard from a lot of people outside the university,”
said Nancy Master, the head of the faculty senate. ”People were outraged. They said, `Why don`t you fire this coach?` ”
So Tarkanian is no longer above criticism in the state where he has coached, become a hero and become rich over the last 17 years. For the first time, there is talk that he may leave UNLV.
It wouldn`t have become what it is without him. It may not be able to become what it wants to be with him. Tarkanian may not like that, but a good basketball coach (and that he surely is) should be able to recognize irony when he sees it.