Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Columnist Ron Kantowski: Students party at Sam Boyd

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

Did you feel it?

As the San Diego State offense strolled to the line of scrimmage for the first snap of the game against UNLV last week, a din began to build at the closed end of Sam Boyd Stadium.

Taking its cue from the jammed-pack student section, which had begun chanting R-E-E-E-BELS in the parking lots surrounding the stadium a couple of hours earlier (coinciding with the tapping of the ceremonial first keg), the crowd in the cheap seats began to get fired up, too. Somebody even brought in one of those air horns, the kind they blow in Formula One whenever the Ferraris are running out front, which only added to the cacophony and made it difficult for Aztecs quarterback Adam Hall to call signals.

I looked down at my arm. There were goosebumps, and it was 85 degrees. And I swear I saw the hair on the back of the neck of the guy sitting in front of me begin to stir.

There was electricity in the air.

Maybe not enough to light up Henderson on a 115-degree day in August when the air conditioning generators blow. But enough that if you closed your eyes, for a brief moment you might have sworn you were in Lincoln, Neb., or Ann Arbor, Mich., or Tuscaloosa, Ala., or a dozen other locales where college football is king.

Much of the credit for this surge of enthusiasm can, of course, be attributed to third-year coach John Robinson and his players. The Rebels still haven't totally turned the proverbial corner, but at least when they lose these days, it's to quality opponents. And when the Rebels do step up against these traditional programs, they've been good enough -- with the exception of Arizona -- to make it interesting.

For the first time in the 15 years I've been going to Rebel football games, the student body seems to have noticed the marked improvement. It arrives early and stays late -- and actually goes to the game in between.

Granted, with the possible exception of an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of town or an Animal House fraternity, the stadium parking lots may be the ideal place to party. Skeptics claim were it not for the free-flowing suds and co-eds in midriff tops, the football games would be no more an attraction to the college kids than a beatnik reciting poetry at an off-campus coffee house.

Maybe so. But they had beer when I was in college and they had it at UNLV three years ago, before Robinson was named coach. Getting a buzz at Sam Boyd Stadium before watching the Rebels get buzzed by San Jose State just wasn't very high on a hotel management undergrad's list of things to do.

So here's another theory why the students are coming to the football games in record numbers. Maybe it's because they feel welcome.

Unlike at the Thomas & Mack Center, where most of the good seats are reserved for resort magnates and scholarship donors, the frat boys get to sit down close for football, around the 25-yard line on the home side of the field. When they stand up and act silly, nobody wearing a leather jacket and tasseled loafers tells them to sit down and shut up so his trophy wife can socialize with other trophy wives.

The one thing UNLV's basketball and football fans do have in common is that they both paint their faces. Only at the stadium they do it with the school colors.

archive