Sirius goes south, UCSB and The Specialist

Jerry Tarkanian

Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2009 | 1:56 p.m.

How bad is the economy? I won’t be doing my show, “Shark Tank,” on Sirius Satellite Radio this season. We would do that every Friday, through the tournament.

Financially, though, they’re going into the toilet. Really hurting. They said they couldn’t do it this year. I hope we can next season because I had a lot of fun with that.

At least I have the show in Fresno. Roy Williams, John Calipari and Jim Calhoun have been on in recent weeks.

I’ve also been meeting with people at the Venetian and Harrah’s to do something for March Madness.

The Super Bowl? His arm wasn’t going forward. Enough said.

Someone saw what I wrote recently about that game against West Virginia in Morgantown, W.V., in 1983. I guess he was there at that Holiday Inn in Morgantown.

That WAS crazy. Our team and fans were in one wing, and all of their fans and boosters kept yelling “Let’s go Mountaineers!” all night. That’s all you heard. “Let’s go Mountaineers!”

At 3 a.m., I asked the manager, Would you please quiet those guys down. My guys can’t sleep. He said, Coach, that’s the plan. They come to every game and do that.

They had wild fans. Their coach, Gale Catlett, is a good guy. Brad Rothermel, who hired me at UNLV, was at West Virginia at that time.

But that hotel situation was the worst.

The noisiest place, for sure, was Santa Barbara. The Thunderdome. Danny says that one game at Cal State Fullerton, right before we went to West Virginia in 1983, was the noisiest.

But plenty of players say Santa Barbara. I think so, too. They had all college students there. No big boosters. You couldn’t even hear in there. They’d sleep outside overnight and were half-loaded by the time the game started.

All students. Almost no older people. They were crazy. We played there 10 times and they only beat us twice.

They beat us the season we won the national championship. I remember how everyone stormed the court. They were going nuts.

We were 24-4 and had won 10 consecutive games. Then the Gauchos beat us, 78-70.

The only other time they beat us on their own court was in 1988. We lost, 71-66. We were 20-1 before that game.

As far as some of our star players, many people will always remember Larry Johnson, Stacey Augmon, Anderon Hunt, Greg Anthony, Sidney Green, Freddie Banks, Armon Gilliam and Reggie Theus.

Larry Anderson might not roll off the tongue so easily, but he was so important. Wink Adams could catch Anderson, who is seventh on the school’s scoring chart.

Someone wanted to know more about Larry. He went to high school in Pittsburgh, and we had good ties there. The Principal of Schenley High, Larry’s school, was a good friend of mine, Jim Robinson.

So Larry wasn’t hard to get. We saw him play in the Dapper Dan Classic. He was a great, great shooter. He didn’t have the star stuff until his senior year.

And he had a great, great season for us. That’s when Danny came in and played the point, and he got the ball to Larry and Sid.

Larry still is a great person. He’s one of the nicest kids I ever coached. A quiet kid, he would psyche himself out and miss shots, then look at the rim. Maybe the rim was too high or too low?

He was a good shooter. Pure. His senior season was the one we decided to play a specialist. He was the specialist, the shooter. I said, Whenver you’re open, shoot the ball. Don’t think about it. Boy, he had a helluva year.

He’s one of my favorite people. He’s working at the Venetian.

That’s what so great about Vegas. Most of the guys who played here live here.

Why not? No better place to live, in my opinion.