Back in 1991, the UNLV Rebel basketball team was at the top of its game.
They had just won the NCAA Championship the year before in Denver, and everyone was sure that it would happen again at the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis.
Everyone in Las Vegas seemed to have a Tark’s Towel, though they likely didn't chew on it quite like he did. In that stadium that day in Indiana, there was a sea of Rebel red.
But as the history books were being written, that Larry Johnson-led team was stoppable – Duke took revenge for the year before by beating the Rebels in the semi-final. It was a crushing blow to the Rebels and their fans.
When Jerry Tarkanian came to town, he brought with him a pride of the superfan. The Rebels were Las Vegas' sports team, and if you talk to people who were there in the 70s and early 80s, they will tell you about their favorite game at the convention center. Or, where they were when the Rebels won the national championship in 1990.
When Jerry Tarkanian died in February 2014, the entire city remembered the legend and the story he created.
Greg Miller, writer and former editor of Vegas Seven, who currently directs Olympian Creative Education, has written extensively about the culture of Las Vegas surrounding Jerry Tarkanian’s Runnin’ Rebels. He shares with KNPR some of the Tarkanian legacy, and the effect it had on Las Vegas.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
On watching the Runnin' Rebels play at the Convention Center:
"I started going to those games on the eve of my 7th birthday and I got spoiled forever. The Convention Center... as you drove up to it, think about this from the perspective of a little kid, as you drove up to it, it was like this giant pale green flying saucer. It has these pale green lights projected upon it. So as you came from your suburban low-slung ranch home and drove up to this incredible futuristic place you really did feel like you were walking into another realm. And what you experienced when you got inside and that team took the floor in front of 6,300 absolutely crazed fans did not disappoint that idea of walking into another realm."
On being a fan before Tarkanian
"The program had had some success in the late 60s under some very good coaches - Rolland Todd and Ed Gregory, and they had established something of a running style and, as we know, programs ebb and flow - that was the flow. At the outset of the 70s,the program hit its ebb. A coach named John Bayer came in. The program stumbled. I believe the year before Jerry Tarkanian arrived the team had gone 13 and 15."
On Tarkanian's arrival:
"When Coach Tarkanian arrived, he brought with him a rivalry with the NCAA that dated back to Long Beach State where he had coached previously, very successfully. Coaching in the shadow of John Wooden's UCLA team and also very good USC teams at the time and giving them both a run for their money in Southern California. He had written some newspaper articles when he was at Long Beach criticizing the NCAA for selective enforcement, for going easy on the big guys, the Kentuckys of the world, and those roused the ire of the NCAA and so when he arrived here in a city with a reputation for living with different mores than other places and at a university that was very young and a program that had already attracted at least a little bit of attention the spotlight intensified greatly when Coach Tark arrived."
On how the NCAA 'going after Tark' dovetailed with the city's self image:
As a community that has always been defined from the outside, the Rebels were our way to define ourselves from the inside. And Las Vegas had a reputation as a place where the standards that the rest of the world lived by didn't apply. We had an interesting way of looking at ourselves. On one hand, we embraced that: 'We're different!' It was a sense of swagger. It was a sense of pride in being different. At the same time... there was a desire to show the world that we were real. A desire to show the world that we were not, and I'll never forget a line in the newspaper when I was a kid that said, the fans from one of the other schools viewed us as 'Sin City on the edge of Hell.' There was as desire to say, 'No! We're more than that!' We're a place of families and schools and good people who in many cases would do anything for one another."
Signs that the Unstoppable Team was going to be stopped in 1991:
"That team seemed invincible. Honestly! The only thing that I could point to is that Greg Anthony played so many minutes on that team, he was the point guard on the Rebels that year, and his backup was H Waldman, who was a local kid and a really good player, didn't get that much experience on the floor that year.
Kaufman: "Let's point out that Greg Anthony was a local kid too,"
Miller: "He went to Rancho"
"So we had these two local point guards. H Waldman was the heir apparent but Greg Anthony was such a motivational leader. It was his coming back from his jaw being broken the year before, he had broken it against Fresno State in about mid-season, and it was his return next game with his jaw wired shut that helped rally that team down the stretch to victory.
It was Anthony's motivation and leadership that had really brought that team together and he was a 38 - 39 minute a game guy and when he got into foul trouble against Duke in that game, it put us in a situation where you had to go to a backup point guard that hadn't gotten that much experience."
On allegations that the players were trying to cover the point spread on that game:
"Well there's never been a shred of evidence to that effect. It's not something that hasn't been in the cross hairs of the national media and nothing has turned up about that. So, again it's one of those things that people look at what the Rebels were that year and fail to look at what Duke was that year. Now, the fact is, a big part of the eventual end of the Tarkanian era was when after that season the Review-Journal ran the famous photo on the cover of a couple of the Rebel players in a hot tub with man named Richie 'The Fixer' Perry and you really shouldn't be associating with someone with that particular nickname."
Could another team come in an unite us like the Rebels once did?
"I think a lot of important things have happened that make that not impossible but more difficult. One thing is the surburbanization of the town. When I was growing up here, the suburbs meant Paradise Valley. So Maryland Parkway was the center of our world. So, whether you were coming from Paradise Valley or whether you were coming from the older neighborhoods of Las Vegas... Maryland Parkway was central. The Boulevard Mall was central. The UNLV campus was central and then up the road a ways off Joe W. Brown Drive, the Convention Center was central. Just at the point where the Rebels had their burst of final glory under Tarkanian, '89 - '91, that's when Green Valley was really up and running. You really had this sort of flight to the edges of the valley."
"And the traditional supporters of the university moving out to the suburbs. People who had been season ticket holders. We saw people over the years who stopped coming, stopped coming to the Thomas & Mack for no other reason than after getting home from work and getting home to Summerlin, it's a long drive."
On losing that feeling that the Rebels were the city's team. Was it just that Tark left?
"It's not that alone. It was also the change that happened in the city in those years. It was people coming from elsewhere that didn't have that memory of the Rebels. Don't forget from '73 to about '89 was a period of relative stagnation in the Las Vegas economy. There wasn't that much growth during those years and then suddenly with the onset of the 90s there is extraordinary growth and people coming who hadn't been steeped in the Rebel tradition over all these years and at the same time you have the geographic change and at the same time you've got departure of Tarkanian and the departure of Tarkanian under circumstances that sort of broke the spirit of the Rebel fans."
On Tarkanian leaving:
"It wasn't just that Tark left. It was the way it happened. It was the entire pitched battle between the Tarkanian forces and the forces who backed Robert Maxson. There was a fracture in the city. For someone who loved this town, it was hard to watch. And you saw people who previously cheered side by side at those games taking different sides of this battle."
On the Tarkanian Era:
"In talking about the Tarkanian Era, you have to also engage not only the beauty of those years and sometimes the excitement of being different, of being the Rebel Program but also sort of the pain of it. You were always waiting for some other shoe to drop, whether justly or not. Through the Lloyd Daniels investigation, you were always waiting for some kind of bad news that was going to ruin your next year."
(Editor's Note: This story originally ran December 2015)
Greg Miller, writer and former editor, Vegas Seven, director, Olympian Creative Education