Columnist Steve Carp: McNichols brings back memories

Steve Carp

Thursday, March 11, 1999 | 10:54 a.m.

Steve Carp covers college basketball for the Las Vegas Sun. This column is one in a series on the road to the Final Four.

DENVER -- Where has the time gone?

Has it really been almost 10 years since UNLV celebrated its one and only college basketball national championship here on the floor of McNichols Arena?

Fact is, next year will mark the 10th anniversary of the most lopsided verdict in the history of the NCAA championship game: UNLV 103, Duke 73. To this day, it still boggles the mind how dominant Jerry Tarkanian's team was that chilly early April night here in the Mile High City.

Anderson Hunt was hitting jumpers. Stacey Augmon was blowing by everyone. Larry Johnson was dominating inside. David Butler and Moses Scurry owned the boards. Greg Anthony was taking a sickly Bobby Hurley to school.

It all happened here, at the place the locals affectionately call "Big Mac." But a year from now, when UNLV celebrates its 10th anniversary of the championship (the school is going to do something to commemorate the event, isn't it?), the building in which the school's defining athletic moment occurred will be empty, probably leveled to dust.

They're building a state-of-the-art arena across I-25 to replace Big Mac. The Pepsi Center will seat nearly 20,000 and will make a lot of history once it opens its doors in October. But an NCAA championship game won't be among the memories. Those magical moments are now reserved for the spacious domed stadiums in Atlanta, Indianapolis and, later this month, St. Petersburg, Fla.

The NCAA no longer showcases its glamor game in arenas. That's another thing that makes the memories of 1990 here so special. Tickets were so scarce, you either had to have tremendous clout or be one of the lucky few students who won the campus lottery to get into McNichols.

The memories remain vivid of that weekend. Some were funny. Some were serious. Some were downright ludicrous. But that's what happens at the Final Four. Regardless of where you stage it, it becomes one big blur that tends to touch all the bases.

Just getting to Denver and seeing Tarkanian wearing a cowboy hat, which the welcoming committee gave all the coaches, was hilarious. Tark is not a big hat guy. In fact, the only time that he looked even more ridiculous was in Detroit the following year when the Rebels played Michigan State. It was so cold, Tark wore a beanie to cover his bald dome on the way to practice at Oakland College.

Jerry could laugh then. He didn't have to play Georgia Tech until two days later. Of course, the national media was already playing up the virtue angle -- Duke, the good guys, vs. the bad guys from Vegas. And the semis still hadn't been played.

Even though UNLV struggled against Tech, the Rebels got it together in the second half and won 90-81. People sometimes forget how tough that game was. They also forget that UNLV's 1989 season ended here at the hands of Andrew Gaze and Seton Hall, as the Rebels were defeated in the West Regional final, 84-61. A win would have meant three straight trips to the Final Four and four in five years, though nobody knew that at the time.

But after UNLV had secured its spot in the '90 title game, things really started getting crazy. The team's hotel was a zoo, packed with red-clad fans chanting "Rebels! Rebels!" until the wee hours. The following day at the press conference, all anyone was talking about was the great morality play, how Duke's good guys would be rewarded and how Vegas was, well, Vegas.

That didn't sit well with Tark or his players.

As game time approached Monday, things were really getting frenzied. The Las Vegas TV stations sent their anchors to McNichols. People were scrounging the grounds looking for tickets that had been marked up, close to 10 times their face value.

Inside, it was just as wild. I remember Mike Toney, Tark's aide de camp, running through the press area being chased by NCAA personnel. Toney apparently was in a restricted area and he had borrowed Mitch Halpern's pass to gain access.

When the NCAA asked Halpern how his pass wound up with Toney, Halpern, who was engineering the radio broadcasts on KDWN, had to fess up and he was tossed from the building. It took some fast talking to get him back inside in time to do his job and get the game on the air.

I was the backup writer for the team then. And I'm sitting with Paul Arnett, who was covering the basketball beat for the Sun. We're talking and all of a sudden, we hear, "Hey Paul! Hey Paulie! Your guys are going to do it tonight. You're Lock City. UNLV's goin' all the way, baby!"

It was Dick Vitale. We looked at each other and shook our heads.

Meanwhile, in the locker room, word had leaked out that former Chicago Bears star Walter Payton was going to give the team a pregame pep talk. Payton had become a big fan of Tark and the team and Tark liked having different people come in and address the team. He thought it was good to have the players hear from someone other than himself, though truth be told, the players didn't care to hear anyone, save for assistant Tim Grgurich, who always knew which buttons to push to get the players fired up.

As for the game itself, it was shocking to look at the running score I always keep and see the lead grow from six to eight to 12 to 13 to 15 to 17 to 20. I said to myself, "This can't be happening."

But indeed it was. The biggest blowout in championship history.

A poignant moment always come to mind. One was seeing Jim Delany, then the chairman of the men's basketball committee and no fan of Tarkanian's, forced to stand on the stage and hand Tark the championship trophy. It was like the time Pete Rozelle had to give Al Davis the trophy after the Raiders won Super Bowl XV.

You know Tark reveled in that moment. He had stuck it to the NCAA in the best way he could -- winning its ultimate prize in its showcase event.