Saturday, March 3, 2007 | 7:09 a.m.
Ken Johann was so moved by the support students have shown for UNLV's basketball team lately, he's returning the gesture.
For the Rebels' first game in the Mountain West Conference tournament, which will be played at the Thomas & Mack Center, Johann is supplying 100 UNLV students with upper-level tickets at a cost of $1,200.
Should UNLV win two and play for the title, Johann, 82, will dole out 100 more tickets to students for the championship game. They've been chanting Rebbbb-elllllls! and starting the wave. Johann has been listening and watching.
"You can look back a few years, and you could count the students with two hands," he says. "But the way it is today ... that's why I'm doing what I'm doing. They excite the rest of the audience with their chants and enthusiasm. It's great."
Many at UNLV say the same about Johann (pronounced JOE-han), one of the athletic department's prominent benefactors who has been attending basketball games for more than 35 years.
When the Rebels won their only NCAA championship in Denver in 1990, Johann, who stayed on the same hotel floor as the players, presented Larry Johnson and Moses Scurry with magnums of champagne he had on ice in his tub.
He says "Indianapolis" with disdain, because that's where UNLV lost a national semifinal game to Duke the next year. Both his secretary and girlfriend give him plenty of space during the 24 hours after the Rebels lose a basketball game.
The soccer programs have received abundant support from Johann.
When his son, Peter, died in a hang-gliding accident in 1974, Johann arranged for an annual scholarship to be awarded in Peter's memory to a local recruit on the men's soccer team. In addition, the field was renamed Peter Johann Memorial Field.
Peter did not play soccer and the sport had never played a role in Ken Johann's life, but he wanted to make a difference in a minor UNLV program.
"Soccer was something unknown at the time," Johann says. "I wanted to do something different, rather than give to football or basketball."
Johann's influence and endowment were instrumental in the overhaul and upgrading of the soccer field last summer, and he has revived a 2002 effor t to build stadium seating for up to 5,000 fans, build new locker rooms and refurbish the press box with about $1.5 million.
Those blueprints are now on the desk of senior associate athletic director Jerry Koloskie, who has worked in the UNLV athletic department for 23 years.
"He's crafty," Koloskie says of Johann. "Ken's a passionate guy, and I appreciate that. He keeps giving me these projects, and you can't slow the guy down. He keeps us moving in the right direction."
Johann says he's been hustling since he was 12, when he began shining shoes on the subway from his home in the Bronx to Grand Central Station. On the corner of 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue, he polished wingtips for a nickel in the late 1930s.
After a stint in the Navy, where his group was one of the first to guide unmanned drone bomber planes in the Pacific, Johann came to Las Vegas in 1948. He and his wife, Alice, were married for 55 years, until her death in 2003.
He has been working in real estate since May 1954, the date on his license. Johann challenges anyone to produce an older license in the city.
He looks out a restaurant window at Tropicana Avenue and remembers when it was called Bond Road.
He arranged a deal that enabled the late Ernie Lied, whose foundation has funded many philanthropic ventures in Las Vegas and throughout the West, to buy his first piece of Strip property, where the Paris Las Vegas is now.
For $250,000, Lied acquired almost 7 acres.
"I'd hate to tell you what that's worth today," Johann says.
He mentions other Strip deals and current real estate business in Sandy Valley, beams about seeing the soccer field being aerated the other day and vows to see that field become a stadium.
"I want to see it before I die," Johann says. "What I'm doing with the tickets, that makes me feel good. Same with the soccer field. I'm just a shoeshine boy from the Bronx. I never thought I'd be doing deals like I've done.
"But I'm still hustling."
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