Ron Kantowski laments a sad and tragic week for Las Vegas’ sports community

Monday, Aug. 6, 2007 | 7:10 a.m.

Yes I am a pirate

Two hundred years too late

The cannons don't thunder, there's nothin' to plunder

I'm an over-forty victim of fate

Arriving too late

Arriving too late

- "A Pirate Looks at 40"

by Jimmy Buffett

Actually, Cheryl Kosewicz wasn't a pirate. She only played one on TV.

And she wasn't yet 40 when she died last week, apparently at her own hand. She was 35.

Arriving too late?

I think not.

Leaving too soon is more like it.

Th e death of the former UNLV Lady Rebel, and those of a couple of Bills - Robinson and Ireland - turned what had been a bad month for sports on the national scene (Tim Donaghy, Michael Vick, Tour de France) into a sad one here at home.

Kosewicz played for the Lady Rebels from 1990 to 1992 and served as a broadcast analyst for the team before becoming a deputy district attorney in Reno. In what many would consider the chance of a lifetime, she appeared on the CBS reality show "Pirate Master" this summer, at least before it was canceled with five episodes to run.

She was preceded in death by her boyfriend, Ryan O'Neil - not Ryan O'Neal, but a 26-year-old heavy equipment operator, who committed suicide in June.

"Truthfully, I've lost the strong Cheryl and I'm just floating around lost," she wrote June 28 on the MySpace account of fellow "Pirate Master" contestant Nessa Nemir.

"And this frik'n show doesn't help because it was such a contention between Ryan and I. Plus, it's not getting good reviews."

Maybe she's proof that Andy Warhol was right: Everybody does have 15 minutes of fame.

And, sadly, that sometimes you might be better off without it.

I didn't know Bill Robinson, the former Yankees and Pirates outfielder, who was found dead in his Las Vegas hotel room a few hours after coaching first base at Cashman Field.

But I felt like I did. This might have been because every third Topps baseball card I collected during the summer of 1968 seemed to have his picture on it.

Robinson's page on Baseballreference.com says he compared to Candy Maldonado, Mel Hall, Sixto Lezcano, Jim Northrup and Jim Hickman, at least statistically.

But you can't judge what's inside a man from the numbers on the back of his bubble-gum card. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who declared a cease-fire on President Bush and Bill O'Reilly to eulogize Robinson, said a .262 batting average over 16 major league seasons does not do justice in describing the gentle slugger who would become his pal.

"He was an analyst at ESPN and a minor league manager who once invited a friend, me, to sit alongside him as a coach during a minor league game," Olbermann said during his "Countdown" show. "He then got his entire team and the home plate umpire to pull a classic practical joke by getting me ejected from my only game in uniform.

"Bill Robinson saw me off that night with a big hug goodbye - just as he did every time he saw me."

When they found Robinson in his Paris Las Vegas hotel room, he was wearing pajamas and reading the Bible. He was 64.

He was UNLV's first football coach and won a lot of games, but Bill Ireland, who was 80 when he died in Reno on Tuesday, will be remembered more for two bright ideas he had:

The Fremont Cannon and Jerry Tarkanian.

When the Summer of Love gave way to the Fall of Budding Football Rivalries in 1969, Ireland talked the Kennecott Copper Corp. into building a replica of John C. Fremont's howitzer to stimulate interest in what he hoped would become an intense but friendly battle between the Silver State's two football-playing institutions of higher learning.

That would be UNLV and UNR.

He succeeded. Well, at least about the "intense" part.

A couple of years later, Ireland was the Rebels' athletic director in charge when UNLV turned to a droopy-eyed coaching hotshot from Long Beach State to guide its basketball program.

That would be Tark.

I was going to suggest that next year when the Rebels and Wolf Pack get together to play football and call each other names, they declare a moratorium on the latter, out of respect and tribute to Ireland.

But if that's not doable, firing off a cannon load or two just before kickoff would seem like the proper thing to do to commemorate the life of a man who meant so much to so many.