On Arkansas, Part II

Jerry Tarkanian

Friday, Feb. 20, 2009 | 10:13 a.m.

So we’re in Arkansas for that game in February 1991. What a big game. It was a 1 o’clock game, so we leave the hotel late in the morning.

We’d always dress at the hotel then bus to the game. In my whole career, that’s what we’d do. We’d go through a tunnel in the arena and walk to the locker room.

We’d be already dressed. They’d we’d meet and they’d we’d go out and shoot. This time, I did something different.

I figured those students were out there all week, in that Tent City outside the arena. So when they released them inside the arena, I figured they’d be drunker than hell, and it was crazier than hell.

I had tough guys, really tough guys. I knew what I was doing. So had told the bus driver to stop the thing at the front entrance, where people were going through a gate.

I said, We’ll get out and walk right through the crowd. It’s the only time I did that in my career. We walked right through their rooting section. We had our sweats on, hoods over our heads.

It was colder than heck. As soon as they saw the first UNLV Runnin’ Rebel, they started booing and raising hell. I was right in the middle of it. The guys didn’t look up. They kept looking down all the way.

We heard some of the worst comments. They were brutal. But my guys were tough. If they weren’t, I wouldn’t have done that.

In the locker room, my guys were talking about how they were gonna kill these (bleeps). They were so fired up. We went out and played a great game.

We had them down 23 with three or four minutes to go. I put my subs in and they cut it to 9 or 10. We wound up winning, 112-105.

You know what was nice? They had that nice full-court press, that 40 minutes of hell defense. Well, we came out and pressured them. It wasn’t full court. We played our same game.

Larry Johnson would get a rebound and threw it to half court to Anderson Hunt, sometimes past half court, and Anderson would go in and dunk it on one of those guys.

You could throw the ball over Anderson’s head and he’d always outrun it. He was so fast in the open court. George Ackles blocked shots and dunked. It was an incredible game, one of our best wins.

Dick Vitale picked Arkansas to win that game. Then he went on SportsCenter and said how great we were. He said we’d definitely get beat in Arkansas.

To go into Arkansas and win like that was amazing.

We had so many boosters at that game who didn’t get tickets. There were even two Major League Baseball players from Arkansas who told me they wanted tickets but couldn’t get them.

They asked ME for tickets! I told them I couldn’t get them. Even Frank Broyles, the Hogs’ athletic director, said no.

But Walter Payton called Frank the day before the game and said he was coming, and Frank sent a limo and gave Walter two seats next to him.

Arkansas fans were great. After I retired from coaching, I got a hand-written letter from William Jefferson Clinton. He congratulated me on a great career. It was when he was governor of Arkansas.

He wrote, Your great Rebels team came in here in February 1991 and destroyed our team. He went on and on about that game. I’ve got that one framed.

William Jefferson Clinton!

Hogs fans are great fans. They flew me in for that speech to their booster club week before last and I had no idea where they were flying.

I didn’t know there was an airport in Fayetteville. We went in on a charter, in what I thought would be a little plane. But it was this big plane. It landed at Northwest Arkansas Airport.

They picked me up and took me to a hotel 20 miles away, through a wooded area on both sides. It was not a major road.

I said, How’d you get an airport like this here. My guy said Wal-Mart’s headquarters were 18 miles from the airport and that three of the five richest people in the country are located in that area.

The Wal-Mart people, a Hunt trucking company and a chicken company were right there. I really enjoyed giving that speech and talking with all of those people. All we did was talk basketball for two days.

For those people, it was like that game in 1991 was played yesterday. In many ways, it was like that for me, too.