If we were a normal team, all this would bother us. But we`re not normal. Cleve (for Cleveland) Edwards, a Nevada-Las Vegas assistant, said that back in January, when the Rebs` peculiar Litany of All This was far from conclusion. It would become an even more peculiar litany, a litany as varied as the lines heard in a crowded bar, a litany that all began last summer with the loss of forward George Ackles to a broken wrist.
That should have been perceived as an omen, for then-in an unrelenting wave-came this:
Starting center David Butler and backup forward Moses Scurry academically ineligible for the season`s first six games. Backup guard Stacey Cvijanovich hobbled by a sprained right knee, and starting guard Anderson Hunt suspended
(by the NCAA) for a game when-due to a university error-he fell two months behind in repaying a student loan.
Scurry, now eligible, out two games with a sprained wrist, and then two different players suspended (again by the NCAA) in each of four consecutive games for failing to immediately repay hotel incidentals incurred the season previous. Now a brawl following its game with Utah State that leads to a one- game sus-pension for Scurry and a three-game suspension for backup forward Chris Jeter, and then backup guard Travis Bice out with-of all things-chicken pox.
Next a broken jaw for starting point guard Greg Anthony, who doesn`t miss a game, and a separated shoulder for Cvijanovich, who plays with it for 22 minutes before resting it for 10 days. Now finally, at the West Regional, a post-game scuffle with Ball State, and then onto the Final Four with a victory over Loyola Marymount and a gracious display of compassion for the grief-wracked Lions.
”I think they played through more adversity, more injuries, than any team I`ve known,” Reb coach Jerry Tarkanian says now. ”I believe 99 of 100 teams would have folded their tent, but they didn`t. It`s the type of team I like being associated with.”
”That stuff doesn`t distract our team,” says Butler. ”Weak guys surrender. Strong guys put it aside.”
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Lois Tarkanian, the coach`s wife, talks often of the strength her husband derives from his Armenian heritage. His grandparents were beheaded during the Turkish invasion of their homeland in 1917-18, and his mother escaped death only by fleeing on horseback and with gold coins sewed into her slip. That country, she points out, has been occupied for nearly all of 3,000 years, and then she asks, ”How do they survive a situation like that? They do it with dogged determination, persistence. So how does Jerry hold up? He`s Armenian.” His Armenian traits have served her husband well, served him well not only during this Season of All This, but throughout his whole life as well. He was one of those classic hard-scrabble kids whose father died young, and when he went off to attend Pasadena City (Junior) College, all around him predicted he would not graduate. He did, even though he was more prone to party than to attend class, and then he moved onto Fresno State, where his attitude remained the same until he met his future wife.
She was on her way to a doctorate in human behavior, and under her influence he settled down and earned both an undergraduate degree at Fresno and a master`s at Redlands University. Now came coaching stops at Riverside City (Junior) College, at Pasadena and Long Beach, and then in 1973 he signed on at Vegas and began building a program that would win more games in the `80s (271) than any other except North Carolina.
He is now on a first-name basis with all those luminaries who so frequently mottle his city`s Strip, but his past, his past is still very much part of his present. He has not forgotten his own tenuous start, nor his cavalier attitude as a raffish undergraduate, and that has led him to recruit prospects other coaches avoid, to give chances to prospects other coaches consider lost causes.
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So to some he is now a latter-day Father Flanagan, and his campus another Boys` Town that shelters unfortunates who just happen to jump to the sky. But to others, to others he is rogue, renegade and rule breaker, and as evidence they hold up his long-running and well-publicized feud with the NCAA. It is 19 years old now, 19 years old and counting, yet still Tarkanian survives and lands here now with a team that is hardly, well, normal.
Its star is forward Larry Johnson, a sequoia, an imposing figure with arms like anvils and a chest fit for skateboarding. Yet his nickname is
”Ambassador,” and he is so amiable, so accommodating, that he was the Rebs` designated interviewee when most of them were boycotting the media earlier this season.
Anthony, tough enough to play with a broken jaw, is ”Senator” in the lockerroom, for he aspires to move on from there to Capitol Hill as Nevada`s first black U.S. senator. Butler-who on occasion wears black, special-order Nikes he calls his ”war shoes”-is a refugee from those mean-and-crack-strewn streets of D.C., but Bice-a vertical hyphen who started as a walk-on-is a pre- med student from comfy Simi Valley in California.
”Nice” is what Hunt is called, but when the Soviet national team stopped in Vegas for a game after winning gold in Seoul, he unapologetically knocked Sarunas Marciulionis into the seats to keep the current Warrior from finishing a breakaway. ”If that boy wants to play in the NBA,” he would say later, ”he has to learn to play by our rules.”
Forward Stacey Augmon, a splendid defender and offensive rebounder, was on the U.S. team in Seoul, but he was so disgusted with its third-place finish there that he left his bronze medal behind on his Olympic Village bed.
Then there is Scurry, who is out of Brooklyn and enjoys shooting his forefingers in celebration. Though ineligible when the Rebs traveled to New York for the preseason NIT, he was promised a trip home if he passed a particular exam. After he finished it, he was asked if he did indeed pass.
”Is Reagan president?” he replied. (No. He didn`t pass the exam either.)
”I didn`t know he was the coach,” he would plead later in the year after cold-cocking Utah State coach Kohn Smith in their post-game melee. ”He was wearing a sweater, and coaches wear coats.”
So, yes. These Rebs, like their coach, are indeed a human kaleidoscope, and their image, like his, can change with a mere twist of the tube. But no matter the pattern the public might see, both he and they persist, and much like Tarkanian`s ancestral home, they together endure no matter what.
He, the singular Tark, is obsessed by his game, so obsessed that he once said, ”My wife got me to some plays and ballet, trying to get me into culture. I went to the ballet, and everybody`s standing up and clapping. I wondered who scored.”
They, his Final Four Rebs, are similarly focused, so focused that Butler can now say, ”We didn`t have any problems this season. We played through them, so the way I look at it is, we didn`t have any problems.”