Ron Kantowski remembers small-time basketball like it was yesterday, from the cheap seats of a van

Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2007 | 7:08 a.m.

1.) Look at the stars through a telescope at Lowell Observatory on Mars Hill. Pluto was discovered there, so you'd be Goofy not to check it out.

2.) Visit the Meteor Crater. It's a 35-mile drive but this isn't just another hole in the ground. It's 4,000 feet across and 550 feet deep.

3.) Have a Bramble Berry Brew or two at Beaver Street Brewery. And don't forget to check out the San Francisco Peaks from the outdoor beer garden.

4.) Dance on the bar at the San Felipe Cantina on LeRoux Street in the historic downtown. But don't try to Drink the Wall (101 shots of different tequilas) in one sitting.

5.) Order baby back ribs from a dancing waitress at Black Bart's Steakhouse, General Store and RV Park. The rustic saloon and dining hall features 6,000 square feet of antiques and collectibles. You can almost smell the gun smoke from Marshal Dillon's six-shooter.

Have you ever heard the expression "You can't get there from here"? Well, it is possible to get from Flagstaff to a Big Sky road game at Montana State in Bozeman.

But it isn't easy.

First, says Mike Adras, the Northern Arizona coach, you've got to drive two hours to Phoenix to catch a plane, because the landing strip at the Flagstaff airport is shorter than his bench. And you need to be there at least an hour and a half early, in case there's a line at security, and then you had better hope the plane is on time, because Bozeman ain't exactly the Big Apple, and it's hard to make connections to get there.

Then when you get to Seattle or Denver or Salt Lake it's another three or four hours on a bus, depending on the weather.

"Bozeman, that's the worst one," Adras said. "It's 12 hours just to get where you are going."

"So what's Bozeman like?" I asked, picturing guys who look like "Hoss" Cartwright sitting in the stands wearing 10-gallon hats.

"I dunno. White," Adras says. "It's snowed every time we've been there."

Northern Arizona's penchant for knocking down 3-point jump shots from the south rim South Rim of the Grand Canyon has given the big-time programs some big-time fits.

In addition to last-second losses to Cincinnati and St. John's in the NCAA tournament, Mike Adras' Lumberjacks have beaten UNLV in Las Vegas, Arizona State in Tempe and UCLA at Pauley Pavilion, in what would be Steve Lavin's last season as coach. The next year, the Bruins hired Ben Howland, Adras' former boss and longtime friend.

Adras jokes that UCLA's search for a new coach began the day it lost to little Northern Arizona.

"That was my payback for all that Ben had done for me," said Adras, who has known Howland since 1983, when Howland was an assistant coach at UC Santa Barbara and used to sleep on Adras' coach couch during recruiting trips to Las Vegas.

Discounting its Big Sky Conference opponents and Arizona, Arizona State and New Mexico, there's no opponent that Northern Arizona has beaten more often than Western New Mexico University.

The Mighty Mustangs from Silver City, N.M.

My alma mater.

Whereas NAU has a losing record against the Wildcats (25-91), the Sun Devils (60-76) and the Lobos (40-42), it stands 27-16 against my Mustangs.

But during my six or seven years in college, the Lumberjacks never played us. I'd like to think they were afraid, but the truth is, Northern Arizona was to us what Kansas is to them.

We thought they were the Big Time. Or at least a lot bigger than we were. We actually looked forward to spending the night in Flagstaff after playing Westminster up in Salt Lake City or Southern Utah in Cedar City. They had a multiplex theater in Flagstaff. That was huge.

Today, Western New Mexico is a card-carrying member of NCAA Division II. Back then, we were NAIA - the National Association of Interscholastic Athletics. The real Small Time. The last stop before Division IV, if there had been a Division IV.

I never scored a basket for Western New Mexico. I filmed them from the bleachers. And kept stats. I filmed the games and kept stats because my uncle was the coach, and he didn't have a budget for a video guy and a stat man.

In the NAIA, you barely have a budget for a postgame hamburger. Hotels were out of the question when you were within driving distance of home. In the NAIA, that meant eight hours or 500 miles, whichever came first. In the NAIA, one inch on a map equaled another hour and a half in a Chevy van with a broken heater.

I remember one night, after a game at Mesa College in Grand Junction, Colo., when I heard Tim Reese, our shooting guard, moaning as he lay on a makeshift cot of equipment bags in the space between the last seat and the frozen windshield in the back of the van.

He had been elbowed in the game and he was in serious pain. Deer and antelopes are in abundant supply on Wolf Creek Pass. Emergency rooms are not.

We stopped at a convenience store and our driver - er, assistant coach - brought some aspirin and a Dean Martin-sized bottle of Jack Daniels.

Or as we called it, the NAIA medicine kit.

He told Tim to "suck on these for a while."

The next day, they wired Tim's jaw shut and fed him dinner through a straw.

Welcome to the Small Time.

Ron Kantowski can be reached at 259-4088 or at ron@lasvegassun. com.