Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Columnist Ron Kantowski: The past haunts UNLV

Ron Kantowski's column appears Thursday. Reach him at [email protected] or 259-4088.

Back in 1995, my wife and I were hanging out at a gigantic block party in downtown Indianapolis the night before the Indy 500, debating how the rest of the nation viewed UNLV. In that you could see the main entrance of the Hoosier Dome (site of the invincible Rebels' stunning Final Four defeat to Duke four years earlier) from where we were standing, it seemed the ideal place to discuss the merits -- or lack thereof -- of that bastion of higher learning on Maryland Parkway.

And we decided to include the huge cross-section of America that was dancing in the street in our conversation.

To make a long anecdote short, nobody that participated in the world's largest man on the street interview mentioned UNLV's hotel-management school. Everybody -- with the exception of two drunk frat boys from Bloomington who offered us $10 each for our beers -- mentioned UNLV's basketball team.

And nearly every person who did used one of two adjectives -- "good" or "cheating" -- to describe it.

Mind you, this was three years since Jerry Tarkanian had resigned as coach and, not so coincidentally, three years since the Rebels had been accused of bending the rules -- or of being good in hoops.

That was the point I was trying to make. That no matter how many times U.S. News and World Report trumpets it as an up-and-coming academic institution, the rest of the world still views UNLV as little more than a basketball factory that walks a crooked assembly line.

It's still that way today. Or at least it was yesterday. Following is the lead paragraph of Dan Raley's preview of the UNLV-Washington game that appeared in Wednesday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

The University of Nevada-Las Vegas basketball team visits Hec Edmundson Pavilion for the first time tonight, with yet another new coach, its usual high-wire athletes and no outstanding warrants.

Will it ever stop?

Now the Rebels know what an ex-con must encounter when he applies for a job sacking groceries.

Of course, UNLV brought much of the bad press upon itself by hiring Bill Bayno, John Calipari's chief recruiter at UMass, as head coach. Nearly a decade ago, the Minutemen went from rags to riches with the arrival of Marcus Camby to Amherst. Bayno had recruited Camby, and that transaction -- er, process -- created a lot of suspicion, at least among Bayno's recruiting rivals.

One of them, a longtime friend, called the day after UNLV hired Bayno. He told me that I had better get reacquainted with the NCAA gumshoes.

In retrospect, Bayno wasn't exactly Bluebeard. But he ran his ship just loose enough to be stripped of two scholarships and receive four years' probation, as well as a one-year postseason ban, for recruiting violations. He's now coaching minor league basketball in Phoenix as a result, leaving behind a major league public relations headache for Charlie Spoonhour.

Spoonhour is as straight as any arrow in the NCAA's coaching quiver. But there's probably only one way he can totally cleanse UNLV's tawdry reputation, and that's to guide the Rebels to another NCAA title, fairly and squarely.

So until Spoonhour can recruit some of those "high-wire athletes" that out-of-town media mistakenly believe still grow on our palm trees, he might have to settle for cleaning up the program.

Which wouldn't be half bad.

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