Spare the outrage over UNLV team junkets

By Ron Kantowski (contact)

Monday, Aug. 18, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Every time Poor Farm U. — that would be UNLV, if you’re scoring at home — spends money on something related to sports, I invariably receive an anonymous e-mail from somebody inquiring where the money is coming from.

The guess is that my Microsoft Outlook pal has a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows hanging in his closet, because it’s too hot to wear it in the ivy-challenged halls here. And that he may smoke a pipe.

Or it could be Jeff Horton, still upset that he ran the football program out of a Payless shoe box when he was here while they gave the guys who followed him a Rockport store in the outlet mall.

Anyway, Norman E. Mailer wanted to know how UNLV can justify sending its basketball team on holiday to Australia and its football team to summer camp when it doesn’t have two nickels to rub together. Or to drop in a slot machine with the hope of lining up 7s so it can hire a new softball coach.

Actually, it’s not a bad question. So I made a few phone calls, one of which even was returned. It cost roughly $200,000 to send the Rebel basketball team Down Under for a little snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef and a few exhibition games against Mick Dundee State and the remaining members of INXS.

But all the money came from car washes and bake sales.

Actually, it wasn’t car washes and bake sales. But the trip was financed through auxiliary basketball fundraising efforts — and not by taxpayer money funneled through Carson City. Coach Lon Kruger’s golf tournament alone raised $72,000 for the Australia junket.

On the other hand, the athletic department is paying to send the Rebels to camp in Ely, which is either named for Smith Ely, a Vermont native who bankrolled one of the first mining operations in the Northern Nevada town, or Ron Ely, TV’s Tarzan.

In addition to serving as the preseason home of the UNLV football team, Ely also is the birthplace of Pat Nixon. But I suppose if you could put only one of those facts on a billboard welcoming you to town, the chamber of commerce up there would probably go with the former first lady, at least until the Rebels can win more than two games in a season.

I know what you are thinking because I was thinking it, too. Wouldn’t UNLV, in a current economic downturn that would make Mike Tyson’s investment strategy look useful by comparison, save money by having the football team practice at home instead of sending it to Camp Grenada, or whatever Mike Sanford calls his 10-day summer getaway for big guys in shoulder pads?

Well, not really. One of the helpful UNLV bean counters explained that because the dorms aren’t yet open, the school would have to feed and lodge the players anyway. So basically all UNLV is out is a couple of tanks of diesel fuel for the bus. And when you consider that a ham sandwich is cheaper up in the White Pines than it is down here, UNLV might even be saving a little on training camp.

I suppose you could make the argument that football training camp and two-a-day practices are a waste of time, regardless of how much they cost, because UNLV does these things every year, and every year it goes 2-10.

Might as well show up for orientation with the rest of the student body, let Tank Summers run up the middle twice, throw an incomplete pass on third down and hope Utah State muffs the punt, which, come to think of it, is sort of how the Rebels beat the Aggies up at their place last year.

You can debate until you’re blue in the facemask about how much good training camp does when practicing at 8 a.m. here is a suitable workaround. Maybe you could even argue that players would become accustomed to the heat by staying home, giving them an edge against Iowa State in the fourth quarter in late September.

But the bottom line is that on the bottom line, training camp didn’t cost UNLV an arm and a leg, just a couple of pulled hamstrings in the thin air up there.