Columnist Ron Kantowski: Treatment Parsons received is the pits

Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2005 | 9:56 a.m.

Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4088.

This could never happen at Darlington or Talladega or anywhere else where NASCAR is a religion instead of merely a sport.

Benny Parsons won the 1973 NASCAR Winston Cup championship, the 1975 Daytona 500 and was the first man to break the 200-mph barrier in a stock car during an official qualifying lap. More recently, he has become even more recognizable as a television broadcaster.

But the staff at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in charge of credentials for this week's NASCAR Preseason Thunder test session didn't know Benny Parsons from Alan Parsons, the singer and musician.

They were giving ol' Benny the run-around before they would issue him an offical wristband that would allow him access to the garage area Monday. They made him sign all the forms and waivers in triplicate when a flustered Parsons flashed his NASCAR "hard card," which is the racing world's equivalent of a backstage pass to a Van Halen concert.

He was told that would get him in, provided he wouldn't ask for any autographs in the garage area.

Finally, an onlooker who was familiar with Parsons' legacy came to his rescue.

"What if somebody asks for his autograph?" the onlooker said.

As suggested in this space last week, the UNLV men's basketball team tanked a two-game road trip to New Mexico and Air Force on Saturday and Monday and looked absolutely dreadful in doing it.

Even more alarming than Saturday's 62-58 loss to one-legged Danny Granger and the out-of-sync Lobos is that the Rebels couldn't even hang with Air Force's third string in a 64-48 loss that was more embarrassing than one of Farrah Fawcett's appearances on Letterman.

By the end of the game, Air Force was playing with three guys who appeared to still be going through puberty and two named Cleaver. Yet, those choir boys with the rosy cheeks still got behind the befuddled UNLV starters for easy back-door layup after easy back-door layup.

"I just feel sorry for our fans and anybody who ever wore a UNLV jersey," a disgusted Odartey Blankson said afterward, sounding an awfully lot like the guy who jumped off Charlie Spoonhour's ship last year at the first sign of choppy water.

Remember when Evel Knievel tried to jump over the Snake River Canyon in a rocket ship on Wide World of Sports? Well, multiply it by about six, and you might equal the latest publicity gimmick disaster of the semipro basketball league that shamelessly calls itself the ABA.

On Saturday night, Ashley McElhiney, billed as the first female coach of a men's pro basketball team, was fired by the female co-owner of the Nashville Rhythm after they got into a heated disagreement on the court.

Co-owner and CEO Sally Anthony apparently was unhappy that McElhiney was playing Matt Freije, the former Vanderbilt star. Anthony had instructed McElhiney to bench Freije, essentially because he was making too much money while the franchise, like just about every other one in the vagabond league, continues to fight for financial survival.

Like in a scene from a bad Walt Disney movie, Anthony had to be restrained by security guards and led away from the floor.

This story, like just about everything else about this latest incarnation of the ABA, would be totally laughable if not for a sad postscript. On the morning after the game, paramedics were dispatched to Anthony's apartment after a caller to 911 reported a possible drug overdose.

The caller said Anthony had taken Xanax, consumed alcohol and cut her wrists with a scissors.

While thinking out loud on the radio last week, I told local sports talk radio hosts John Hanson and Dave Cokin that I would hate to be the guy selling Las Vegas 51s season tickets this year, what with all this talk about major league baseball coming to town sometime within the next decade or whenever Conan O'Brien takes over as host of the Tonight Show, whichever comes first.

But 51s spokesman Jim Gemma said the major league wishful thinking (at least until a stadium is built or at least drawn up on a cocktail napkin, at which time I'll start believing it) actually has had the opposite effect on preseason sales. It seems to have sparked interest in the Triple-A 51s.

"After speaking to our front office last week, we are substantially ahead in sales (tickets and sponsorships) compared to last year," Gemma said as a couple of pigs sprouted wings and began hitting fungoes at Cashman Field.

On Saturday, those little piggies were spotted at the Orleans Arena, where they cried wee, wee, wee all the way home ... without Wranglers hockey tickets.

Las Vegas continued to prove its mettle as a minor league hockey town as more than 1,000 fans were turned away from the marble ticket counters as per the fire marshal's request.

In what was the first sellout in the Wranglers' two-year history, a crowd of 7,773 watched Las Vegas beat the Victoria Salmon Kings in a shootout.

On Monday, a crowd of 5,920 watched as the Wranglers skated past Victoria again.