Columnist Dean Juipe: These guys don’t merit fancy cars

Dean Juipe

Monday, March 22, 1999 | 10:15 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

Ask any young man about his all-important status and he'll say it's judged by the looks of his girlfriend and the make of his car.

Transparent as they can be, girls and cars nonetheless are indicators of prestige. If you have a couple of attractive ones, your peers believe you're sitting pretty.

After all, image is everything.

And while girls and cars have a tendency to come and go, they're staples in a young man's life. He wants the best he can get or feels he's entitled to.

All kinds of problems develop because of these infatuations. Among them: College athletes with marketable -- and maybe negotiable -- abilities often skirt the NCAA rules and test their school's willingness to provide them with transportation.

At UNLV earlier this decade, reporters used every clandestine means available to see what the high-riding Rebels were driving away from the Thomas & Mack Center. It has got to be a game.

UNLV had a couple of great basketball teams and a few of its players were traveling in style. As coincidences go, it qualified as a suspicious one.

And the NCAA was just as curious as the media or the fans. So it came to town and attempted to trace the paper trail.

NCAA investigators were back in town last week for a surprisingly short stay, given the hullabaloo on TV and in the papers about who's paying what for whose car. There are accusations of improprieties.

Either the NCAA was satisfied with the explanations, or its investigators didn't ask the right questions. Or, this first group of investigators was merely doing a little leg work for a second wave of tougher, no-nonsense flatfoots that have yet to arrive.

Cars and money top the list of subjects the NCAA tossed at UNLV. Ex-Rebel Tyrone Nesby found himself immersed in the controversy, while rumors of a cash payment to at least one player are swirling about and might have caught the NCAA's attention.

Another player, star forward Shawn Marion, may not even have been discussed and apparently he wasn't interviewed. Yet he has been seen stylin' in a new pickup and until recently was driving a new Jeep Cherokee.

Likewise, his mother supposedly also has a new vehicle, said to be a Ford Windstar van. Eyebrows have been raised.

These amenities, of course, can come from the family's savings. Or from a friend. Or from a friend of a friend who maybe does or does not expect to be reimbursed some day.

The university is responsible only to do its best to police the situation, and, obviously, to not be a behind-the-scenes benefactor to any of its athletes.

In UNLV's case, given the mediocre season its men's basketball team just had, lavishing fancy autos on its players would seem to be out of the question. OK, Marion's looking good for whatever reason, but the school's deep-pocketed boosters might draw the line right there.

Or they might refer a Kas Kambala or a Mark Dickel or a Donovan Stewart to Sunday's classified section, where dozens of dandy automobiles were available at affordable rates.

Picture any or all of them in a '77 Datsun 280Z, priced at a student-friendly $1,500.

You get what you pay for and these Rebels, unlike their sweet-shooting predecessors of the early 1990s, should be driving rim-rattling clunkers.

If they're not, it isn't just the NCAA that will be outraged.