Wednesday, March 5, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
IT WAS LIKE an exhibition game, one of those preseason tuneups where the indistinguishable opponent goes by the name of Marathon Oil or Global Sports.
And, like an exhibition game, the crowd was small, the home team won and those who cared a whit went home happy.
Letdown? Not for UNLV, not with Rice offering only token resistance and not with the Rebels sufficiently motivated to reach a mildly satisfying landmark: the 20-victory plateau.
The Tuesday afternoon itinerary at the Thomas & Mack Center was pleasant, uncomplicated. The Rebels, in coaching jargon, "did what they had to do."
They dismissed Rice 71-61 in a game that was never really close, sending the Owls and their virtual one-man team back to Houston as if they were nothing more than a Marathon Oil clone with some vaguely familiar ex-star as their token centerpiece.
But that nice, smooth road UNLV traveled in the WAC Tournament opener takes a nasty detour Thursday when the opponent -- Tulsa -- is far more physically imposing than Rice and far less likely to be shoved aside as easily as the Owls.
While there was no heightened sense of drama for UNLV's tournament opener, there was a shared belief that a difficult game was at hand. Here were the Rebels coming off a disheartening loss to Colorado State only three days earlier, a defeat made doubly painful by its NCAA Tournament repercussions.
UNLV, knowing it has to at least reach the WAC final to receive an NCAA bid, could have -- in theory -- come out and stumbled against Rice. Instead, the Rebels ambushed the Owls, jumping off to 13-2 and 18-4 leads before settling into a workmanlike mode that paid off in a 10-point win.
Not everyone who was on the UNLV bandwagon just a week or two ago made it to the Mack Tuesday, the game time and the high ticket prices causing the less committed to rethink their position. The estimated crowd -- 5,500 -- had Global Sports written all over it.
But those who went to work as scheduled and didn't play hooky, didn't miss anything. Well, they did miss a career performance by Rice's 6-foot-11 center, Shaun Igo, who had 33 points. And they missed the Rebels' fantastic outside shooting in the first half, as eight 3-pointers went down -- including three straight from Damian Smith that turned a 21-15 score into 30-15.
A trifle of a scare in the second half -- Rice pulled within eight -- was quickly extinguished when UNLV scored 11 of the next 13 points. Not too many minutes later it was all but over, Keon Clark punctuating the obvious with a vicious slam off a rebound that made it 59-42 with 7:50 to play.
It was all too easy, the higher seeded team following the script and winning as expected.
But the Rebels will be sweating next time out in a quarterfinal pairing with 22-8 Tulsa, a rough club that counts wins over UCLA and New Mexico among its bounty.
Yet the Rebels come armed with this reassurance: Tulsa also lost a February game it shouldn't have, at Rice.
archive
