On Arkansas, Part I

Jerry Tarkanian

Monday, Feb. 16, 2009 | 9:58 a.m.

I was in Fayetteville, Ark., last week for a speaking engagement and had a real good time. I hung out with Nolan Richardson and he came to my speech.

He lives down there, so we went out and had lunch, and we spent a lot of time talking one day. I really like Nolan.

For about two days, nobody talked about anything but our game against the Hogs in 1991. We went there and beat them, 112-105, on Feb. 10, 1991.

There was a big article in the paper. My picture was in the paper. They passed out my picture at the luncheon, to about 170 people, in a hotel. It was for the booster club of their basketball program.

It was great. Hell, all they talked about was the fact that that UNLV team was the best one they had ever seen. We had them down 23 in the second half.

That was a fun day. We took a charter down there. It was a Sunday game and we got in there Friday night. The year before, they came to our place.

We had a deal with Arkansas that we’d give them 10 percent of the capacity of the arena. We have 19,000 seats at the Thomas & Mack Center, so we gave them 1,900 seats.

When we went there, they had something like 11,000 seats. They gave us 43 or 47 seats. I called their athletic director, Frank Broyles, and said, Hey, we’re supposed to have 1,100 seats?

He said that’s all they could give us. All their seats went to season-ticket holders, which is why they now have that much bigger arena. This was before the new arena.

We finagled 20 or 30 more seats in some storage area, so we had about 70 seats.

We went there to practice before the game and one of our boosters who always traveled, Susan Molaski, tells our athletic director, Brad Rothermel, that they had to have better seats. The ones they had were way high up.

She talked to Broyles. This was when we were having our feud with Dennis Finfrock and Robert Maxson.

We had dinner the night before the game at a hotel, up in a room with a big bar. It was a big social event. It was just packed. And Finfrock comes over to Freddie Glusman, my great friend, and says, You’re not going to have good seats at this game, Freddie. I’ll have better seats than you.

Freddie says, We’ll see.

Anyway, Susan talks to Broyles and arranges to have 16 seats in a row behind our bench. It was really nice. Billy Packer helped to get those seats. He got them to help, because he was broadcasting the game.

We come out to warm up and Freddie is right behind our bench. I’m coaching one of the biggest games of my life. Finfrock says, How’d he get those seats?!? How’d that happen!?!

I said, I’m getting ready for the game, leave me alone. Finfrock went nuts. Freddie had such a good laugh on Finfrock.

But that was a great rivalry at the time.

When we got in there on that Friday night, the bus driver who picked us up said, Coach, you’ll never believe this. I’ve never seen this place so excited about a sporting event.

They said it was one of the biggest events in their history, rivaling a big Arkansas-Texas football game, that big Game of the Century.

Students had been sleeping out in tents all week for the game. They took us by Tent City the next morning, before practice. I said, That would be great. The players would want to see it.

It was amazing. All these tents out there. They were sleeping there all week to get the best seats. They were calling it the Game of the Decade.

We had media from all over the world there. It was a real big event. We go into practice, and we always have boosters with us. They said they couldn’t get in. Well, we talked them into letting the boosters in.

Then I saw a writer that I hated. Curry Kirkpatrick from Sports Illustrated. He was always on our backs. I said, We’re not practicing as long as this (bleep) is there. And he wouldn’t leave.

He said, If I leave all the media has to leave. So I sent a couple of Vegas buddies, who looked like hit men, over to him. They told him to leave. And he left. They told him he’d better leave.

Then we practiced.

The rest of the story next time.