A Runnin' Rebel resurrection

Eric Prisbell, USA TODAY Sports | USATODAY

LAS VEGAS -- When the "Jaws" theme music grew deafening and the clapping reached a crescendo, Anthony Bennett, a prized 19-year-old freshman playing in his first college exhibition, looked around at the frenzied scene inside Thomas & Mack Center and thought everyone had gone mad.

Bennett had no idea to whom the pregame ritual paid homage or why his second-year head coach had dusted off the two-decade-old tradition last season. He had no sense of the significance of the shark motif or why its return spoke volumes about where UNLV is now and how it took 20 years to reconcile a complicated legacy.

One man who understood sat in protected seat behind the basket, an 82-year-old Armenian in corduroys who is defined as much by duels with the NCAA as being the architect of some of the greatest teams ever assembled. Jerry Tarkanian, watching the game with a USA TODAY Sports reporter, still flashes that U-shaped smile when he relishes a moment like this one, which transports him back to all those game nights he gnawed on a towel opposite Gucci Row.

The Runnin' Rebels this season are chock-full of potential NBA talent and can dream of a Final Four run again. And for the first time in two decades they are doing it by fully embracing the on-court success of Tarkanian's teams. With two former players – head coach Dave Rice and assistant Stacey Augmon – on staff from the 1990 national title team, and with an overt push to illuminate positive memories of those glory years, one of history's most unique programs has finally rediscovered its roots.

"The most important thing," says Greg Anthony, the point guard on UNLV's Final Four teams of '90 and '91, "is you are starting to see the identification of all that was positive about what we were able to accomplish as a group. I am just happy that Coach Tarkanian, his legacy, particularly in Nevada, has been embraced by both generations, and that's extremely important."

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For so long around UNLV, anything associated with the Tarkanian era represented the towel-chewing elephant in the room. It was too radioactive for most to sell or market. It was a mini-dynasty ignored or buried. Many former players had distanced themselves from the program, harboring bitter feelings about how the university, NCAA and media treated Tarkanian during his final few years, which culminated in a forced resignation following the 1991-92 season. And the program that reached four Final Fours between 1977 and '91 spiraled into irrelevance.

The late Charlie Spoonhour, UNLV's coach between 2001 and 2004, took baby steps to reconnect the program with the past. His successor, Lon Kruger, went further, eagerly extending a hand to former players. The court was named after Tarkanian in 2005. But some former players remained estranged, angry at the university because Anthony says, particularly in the early 1990s, "you had an administration that for many years was anti-Tarkanian."

"With Dave taking over and Stacey there, it just elevates it to another level for the players that have played there in the past," says Kruger, who took UNLV to four NCAA tournament appearances – including a 2007 berth in the Sweet 16 – in seven seasons. "As much as we could invite them back and wanted them to be a part of it, those are people who actually lived it and can do it even more aggressively."

And now the man Anthony says was the "perfect hire" at the perfect time presides over the program, a former Rhodes Scholar candidate who celebrated on the court in Denver when the final buzzer sounded in the most lopsided national title game in history. He rode atop the convertible during the championship parade on that early April day in 1990, realizing then how a team of college kids can galvanize even a community of transients. And he is cognizant of the political minefield that once existed here, with different factions wanting everything or nothing to do with the past.

In his office these days, down the hall from grainy pictures of Larry Johnson and Anderson Hunt, are two cushioned seats from Denver's McNichols Sports Arena emblazoned with the 1990 Final Four logo. In more ways than one, UNLV has no reluctance now in keeping reminders of those years nearby.

Rice calls himself a "facilitator of tradition." He speaks to parents and high school coaches about how he wants to infuse his team with the same mental and physical toughness those teams espoused. His discussions with players are so Tark-like that Augmon often knows what's coming out of Rice's mouth before he says it because "Dave and I come from the same cloth." Players say they have worked on a version of Tarkanian's famed Amoeba defense in practice. And Rice is showcasing a familiar style of play. Ask Roy Williams if Rice's Rebels can run: UNLV beat then-No. 1 North Carolina, 90-80, almost one year ago.

"This town is still so infatuated with those teams," said forward Mike Moser, the face of this year's team. "It is almost hard to breakout from that shadow until we win a championship."

History is laden with other memorable, influential champions, but few as dominant. These were men; the starting lineup in 1991 consisted of players with a combined 23 years of college experience. They exuded an us-against-the-world mentality, thriving in 1990 in spite of nearly perpetual player suspensions. And they possessed the glitzy aura of showtime basketball, playing games within view of that neon horizon of The Strip.

George Lynch, who played for North Carolina in the same 1991 Final Four, and Eric Snow, who played at Michigan State from 1991-1995, say no national champion since – not 1996 Kentucky, not 2009 North Carolina – has come close to matching UNLV.

"When Vegas was good, all the kids idolized them," Lynch says. "Seeing how those guys played, expressed themselves, to most youth, they were the Fab Five before Michigan's Fab Five."

So why then did it take UNLV so long to look backward and hug its past?

"That's a great question," Rice says. "Those were tough times. It was a time when Runnin' Rebels basketball was polarizing. We choose to remember the great times, the wonderful accomplishments on the court, the success of so many of those former players, what they are doing now … I am always very careful not to make any judgments about those times."

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Embracing the past is easier at most other schools, such as Indiana and UCLA, where the narrative, for the most part, is more family friendly. UNLV's history is associated as much with on-court dominance as with more controversial memories: from the ill-fated recruitment of Lloyd Daniels to a hot tub picture of players sitting with Richard "The Fixer" Perry to Tarkanian recruiting a valedictorian (of a penitentiary).

Rice spent 11 seasons as a UNLV assistant in the 1990s and earlier last decade. Despite the university not explicitly embracing those years, he pushed the on-court success of those teams as much as he could in recruiting. But all the while, he told USA TODAY Sports, he had some frustration over the fact that more wasn't done to do the same.

"I am sorry that it did (take this long) because there were so many good things going on on the court, off the court at UNLV … " Rice says. "The thing that concerned me was that from a years standpoint, it was starting to get away from us a little bit. The further we got away from 90, 91, the more of a past memory it was going to be."

So when Rice was hired in spring of 2011, his primary goal was to add a former player to his staff. He called the one least likely to come.

Augmon, who in 2011 was on staff with the Denver Nuggets, was the first UNLV player in 1990 -- as it looked like the NCAA might strong-arm UNLV into ousting Tarkanian -- to publicly say he would not play for the defending national champions if Tarkanian was not permitted to coach.

And in the two decades since, Augmon divorced himself from his school. He never followed the team. He didn't care. The program may well have been dead to him. He rarely took phone calls from anyone there. The one phone call he accepted from Kruger, he said, was only because it was facilitated by Rice.

Augmon says the school needed Rice to bring back Tarkanian's coaching philosophies, to build a bridge to the past. After some persuading, Augmon accepted the job. He told USA TODAY Sports he never would have accepted the assistant position for any man other than Rice.

"Dave," Augmon says, "was the breakthrough."

Augmon says his feelings toward UNLV have evolved. But the healing process for all endured so long that time was squandered. The program is now selling the success of those years to high school players who were not even born the last time Tarkanian watched his players direct a fast-break in this city.

"The only person hurt during that president (Robert Maxson), coach Tark situation was the university," Augmon says. "That is the only thing hurt. It hurt UNLV. The president is gone, coach Tark is gone. The university is still here trying to recover. It has taken two decades to do it. And that's just two people, two people who could not get along, could not see eye to eye. It brought down the whole fortress."

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What Rice and Augmon stress most to current players is that it is time for them to author their own legacy in a new age in college basketball and a new time at UNLV, which has a world-class practice facility. Though Rice is striving to make UNLV nationally significant, his recruiting has distinguished itself in both who the staff has pursued – Rice says Bennett will be in the NBA before he is a senior – and who the staff has not pursued.

During the national recruitment of Las Vegas' Shabazz Muhammad, the NCAA warned schools recruiting him that there may be unresolved issues that would warrant further investigation. UNLV exhibited discretion and respect for the NCAA's position, despite receiving some criticism in the community for not pursuing arguably the nation's best high school player more aggressively. (Muhammad sat the first three games at UCLA this season because of a violation of amateurism rules.)

"If you can keep getting one top-five recruit every year, those who may have had an issue with his reluctance to recruit Shabazz would be rewarded with a very strong program," Anthony says. "The other issue is, not that any of us expected this to be the case with Shabazz and the NCAA, but Dave is not in a position where he can have a scandal or controversy surrounding the program as he goes on this journey. I fully understand his decision to not necessarily pursue Shabazz."

In his heyday, Tarkanian passed on few of the nation's best prospects. And he and others still wonder about how dominant UNLV could have become in the early 1990s had things not come tumbling down at UNLV, which was banned from the 1992 tournament and placed on probation.

"We were in really good with Jalen Rose," a wistful Tarkanian says, contemplating whether his recruiting efforts could have broken up Michigan's Fab Five.

Tarkanian has long danced between charming and controversial. But he doesn't deliver the same humorous jabs as much, like when he said recruiting rival Jim Harrick was as ethically straight as the letter 'S.' He labors when speaking.

In March, he suffered what family members called a mild heart attack. Asked about his health at UNLV's exhibition, Tarkanian says he doesn't get around much, resting his gaze on the walker in front of him.

But he loves this basketball team. He has told Rice that having him and Augmon on the bench means something. It means a lot. During the first half, Tarkanian turns his head toward the protégées who had been so loyal to him, and who are now giving history lessons to newcomers like Bennett and reconstructing a national contender with a nod to the past.

"They are doing good," Tarkanian says. "Really good."