Columnist Dean Juipe: Plenty of bull as Mesquite ready to run

IT'S THE kind of event that attracts the giddy, the rowdy, the bloodthirsty and their gawkers.

Got a taste for Hades? For a living hell? For a hot spot where muscular and enraged animals not only run rampant but pursue and inevitably wound their antagonists?

Then, by all means, you must circle July 11 on the calendar, update your will if you intend to participate, load up the '72 Nova and set your sights on the initial Mesquite bull run.

With the Mesquite Resort Association having lent its approval to the project this week, the Mesquite City Council has little choice but to climb aboard the bandwagon and vote to sanction the grisly event when it meets Tuesday.

For Mesquite, there's no shying away now. Think of the embarrassment, the loss of prestige, if the bull run was blocked in Mesquite but then welcomed with opened arms in the rival outskirts of Pahrump.

(Incidentally, they're kicking themselves in Pahrump for not coming up with this bull-run idea first. "We got slickered by those yahoos," said a glum and marginally despondent patron at Terrible's Casino.)

But will the bull run be all it's cracked up to be? Will it be exciting and gory and an invigorating success with thousands of drunkards on a weekend binge destroying the landscape and urinating where they please? Or will it flop, the victim, perhaps, of docility on the part of the bulls or a mistimed Budweiser strike?

And, either way, will it measure up to the real bull run, the one in Pamplona, Spain, that annually attracts a higher class of the brash and the foolhardy?

"It's not going to be anything close to Pamplona," said someone who should know, former UNLV basketball player Danny Tarkanian. The son of the former Rebel head coach ran with the bulls in Pamplona in his wilder days, the ones before law school and his current position as an assistant coach at Fresno State.

Tarkanian lives to tell of Pamplona, although he didn't come away unscathed.

"I got through the streets OK but my mistake was going into the arena at the end of the bull run," he said. "You're there on the arena floor and the bulls come in and you're supposed to do what you can to infuriate them. I told myself, 'I can't leave without doing something' so I tried sneaking up on this bull.

"But he saw me and he snorted and I tried to run to the side. But I got bumped by some Spaniard and I got tossed by the bull. I got knocked in the air a little bit and I blacked out.

"I lost a tooth."

But not his memory.

"It was a great time," Tarkanian said. "But it's the atmosphere that makes it special."

The atmosphere in Mesquite for its bull run may not be quite as electric. For starters, they're considering a proviso in which each participant (who is paying $50 for the privilege) will be required to sign a release that not only frees the city of any liability but states that the runner won't arrive for the cattle call in an inebriated state.

Enforcing the no-drinking ban seems downright impractical, and the voice of experience elaborated. "No drinking?" Tarkanian repeated in disbelief. "If they do that, there won't be anyone left to run."

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