Columnist Ron Kantowski: Tark and his towel still have place on Las Vegas billboard

Ron Kantowski's notes column appears Tuesday and Thursday. Reach him at [email protected] or 259-4088.

Almost from the day he left town, Jerry Tarkanian has cast a huge shadow over the UNLV basketball program.

Now, he's doing it literally.

A billboard depicting Tark chomping on his trademark towel went up in the Spaghetti Bowl this week. It towers over the busy freeway interchange. If the sun were going for a rebound, Tark's image would block it out.

Tarkanian has been hired as a spokesman by HIH Insurance, a workers' compensation carrier based in San Francisco with offices in Las Vegas, Sacramento, Irvine, Chicago, Detroit, Phoenix, Denver, Honolulu and Buenos Aires.

Although his legacy always has been larger-than-life here, you've got to wonder how it makes Bill Bayno feel when he jumps on the I-15 on-ramp and can look right up Tark's similarly larger-than-life right nostril.

* ROLLIE IN DOUGH: Don't know how much Tark was paid for his billboard ads, but it probably pales in comparison to what another former Rebel basketball coach is reaping from a new three-year contract extension.

Cleveland State elected this week to re-up with the notorious Rollie Massimino, whose "secret" contract at UNLV is on the verge of finally being paid off by the university.

If they ever make a sequel to "A Simple Plan," the movie in which Billy Bob Thornton and Bill Paxson found a bag of cash so big that they didn't know what to do with it, Massimino could reprise their role. Cleveland State decided to throw more money his way despite his pedestrian 35-49 record in three seasons there.

* DRAGON BREATH: It appears Mandalay Sports Entertainment is at it again. The co-owners of the Las Vegas Stars and Thunder, Mandalay contributed greatly to the latter's demise by not securing a building in which it could play hockey next season. Now it is courting a similar situation with its new Class A baseball team in Dayton, Ohio.

As a wire service report put it, the group has league permission to field a team and has settled on a name. Now all it needs to do is build a stadium.

Mandalay Sports has launched a marketing campaign to introduce the Dayton Dragons, the new Class A affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds, to Dayton and its surrounding communities. But Mandalay has yet to break ground on a stadium, the site of which remains a muddy pit.

The Dragons are expected to open their first season next April.

"Thank God we have another year to plan for this," said Las Vegan Hank Stickney, the Stars and Thunder co-owner and front man for the new team in Dayton.

* PIECE OF THE ROCK: Rocky Marciano Jr., on the upcoming Showtime movie chronicling the life of his father, undefeated heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano:

"Just about every scene was fictional, or the chronology was wrong."

In other words, the third good movie about boxing ("Rocky I," "Requiem for a Heavyweight") still is waiting to be made.

The movie about Marciano, said his son, contains more half-truths than a Don King news conference.

"It makes him look like a money-driven, rude, second-rate fighter," he told Richard Sandomir of the New York Times. "It was very hard to watch."

* RELIGION IN THE FAST LANE: When the track announcer at Road Atlanta said "Religion is gaining fast" he literally meant it.

A driver with the singular name of Rael (not Dale), representing a group of zealots known as Raelian Religion, recently drove a Firebird in a Motorola Cup endurance race at Road Atlanta, thus ending a self-imposed 25-year hiatus from motor sports.

According to a press release that was faxed to auto racing media, the driver known as Rael stopped racing in 1973, after an encounter with an extraterrestrial (or was it just a young Jimmy Spencer?). Rael's car displays the colors of UFOland, the "world's first information center of the UFO and extraterrestrial phenomenon."

The car number, 79, is a little more down to earth. Were I his crew chief, I would have suggested a more out-of-this-world number, such as Apollo 13, Fireball XO5, Area 54 ... or even Spencer's No. 23.

* MR. CUB: Ernie Banks, the only Mr. Cub (sorry Sammy Sosa) to anybody who grew up when Old Style beer rather than Starbuck's Coffee was the drink of choice at Wrigley Field, was spotted spreading cheer around the Caesars Palace casino Wednesday.

It was such a nice day that Banks might have been inclined to tell the slot machine patrons "Let's Pull Two."

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