All Riled Up: Unlikely Fan Relishing Rebels' Resurgence

February 17, 2012

 

During the 1975-1976 NCAA basketball season, Jerry Tarkanian's UNLV Rebels rattled a lot of cages and battered a lot of egos.

They lost twice in 31 tries and thrashed opponents by an average of 22 points. Two of Riley Wallace's teams felt the sting of 83 of those points.

UNLV hung 121 on Wallace’s Centenary team, issuing his Louisiana boys an embarrassing 29-point loss in the school's first-ever nationally televised game. Their next time out, the Rebels scored an NCAA-record 164 (in regulation) against Hawaii, beating the team Wallace would go on to coach four years later by 53 points.

It wasn't like either one of those teams weren’t proud, either. Centenary was ranked in the top 25 and featured NBA hall of famer Robert Parish, and Wallace won 333 games in 20 years as head coach at Hawaii.

So when the NCAA began the slow process of investigating and sanctioning Tarkanian and his Rebels into oblivion following that 1975-1976 season, Wallace cheered along with the rest of the rattled masses, right?

He booed as loud as anyone.

The sight of Tarkanian has got to make him sick, right?

The two eat lunch together almost every week.

Wallace wouldn't be caught dead in the Thomas & Mack Center ... right?

That facility is the reason Wallace’s great nephew Kendall Wallace is now playing for the Rebels and the reason he's a season ticket holder.

So what happened to that battered ego? Wallace never had one.

“Tark had one of the best teams I ever saw, and off the court, he's one of the best human beings I know” Wallace said. “I’ve got nothing but respect for him and his teams.”

From a shared distaste for the old NCAA guard to their affinity for advancing the game they once coached in Las Vegas, Wallace and Tarkanian are much more kindred spirits than they are bitter old fogeys.

But how did the two come to call the same town home?

Shortly after he retired in 2007, Wallace traded one temperate climate for another, becoming one of what he's told is "between 40,000-50,000" islanders who now call Las Vegas the "ninth island."

Wallace still regularly visits the other eight, as he keeps a condo in Waikiki. And if there's a smidgen of resent for that record-breaking beat down Hawaii's Warriors suffered at the hands of UNLV nearly four decades ago, Wallace hasn't seen it.

"Hawaii still loves Vegas," Wallace said. "They'd be out one of their favorite vacation spots if they didn't."

For Wallace, Vegas is hardly a vacation. The same way he draped himself in a Hawaiian shirt when he was coaching in the 50th state, the Illinois native has surrounded himself with the driving force behind Sin City by joining Boyd Gaming Corp. as an executive host.

Wallace greets Hawaiians when they step off charter flights and helps with the organization of all the Orleans Hotel's college basketball tournaments. Both the West Coast Conference and WAC hold their conference tournaments at the Boyd-managed property.

Wallace's house in the Vegas borough of Summerlin also serves as a refuge from the strip for Kendall, who lived with his great uncle as a sophomore and now again as a fifth-year senior.

"It's given me a chance to see a great community that most people who visit Vegas don't get to see," Kendall said. "Plus my aunt's cooking is a lot better than mine."

Sticking around his family – all of whom tend to consider Riley’s house a home-away-from-home – has also afforded the UNLV shooting guard and aspiring coach a cache of stories from some of the best in the business.

Kendall’s dad and grandpa were both successful Illinois high school basketball coaches. He has one uncle who played college football at Alabama, another who played at Oklahoma and a third who golfed at Louisiana Tech.

And his mom, a college basketball player at John Brown, beat him at one-on-one until he was in fifth grade.

Get them all in the room and let the fibs fly.

"Almost all of them claim they can or could once dunk," Kendall said. 

"Based on my jumping ability, I know that's a lie."

Despite the fact that it seemed like an equally-improbable tale in 1972, the story about Parish, one of the top high school players in the country, choosing to attend Centenary, a school of about 750 students in his hometown of Shreveport, La., is entirely true.

Riley would know. As an assistant at Centenary, he helped recruit Parish and, according to Kendall, Riley "doesn't let anybody forget it."

According to Riley and Sports Illustrated writer Anthony Cotton, the NCAA might have been the most shocked of all that Parish chose Centenary.

Cotton in 1981: "Perhaps it never seemed right to the NCAA – which launched an investigation that such a giant talent could go to such a tiny school."

The result of that investigation, Riley said, was that the ACT to SAT conversion method Centenary was using to determine player eligibility – a method the school had gotten from Princeton – was a “technical violation" of NCAA legislation. Centenary was subsequently banned from postseason play for all four of Parish's seasons there.

Tarkanian came to Centenary's aid in one of two famous editorials that appeared in a Southern California newspaper while he was coaching at Long Beach State.

"There is no way Centenary is cheating like the big SEC schools that buy all their players," Tarkanian wrote.

Riley and Tarkanian had been friends before. At that point they became allies.

“In those days, the NCAA was a dictatorship,” Riley said. “Tark knew that and spoke up. I always respected him for it.”

Riley saw it as no coincidence that UNLV struggled through 14 seasons without an NCAA tournament win after Tarkanian was forced out in 1992. So when Lon Kruger had the good sense to not only recruit his great nephew but to name the court at the Thomas & Mack Center after Tarkanian in 2005, Riley was among the standing ovation, cheering as loud as anyone.

These days, with the Rebels led by Tarkanian protégé Dave Rice and appearing to be on the verge of their fifth tournament appearance in six years, Riley is still at the Thomas & Mack.

He says he'll be there long after Kendall graduates, applauding the rebuilding of a program that once demolished his.

"Was I ever mad at Tark or UNLV for the way our games in the 70s went? The opposite," Riley said. "It was an honor to play those teams. And it's real cool to be in that arena watching Kendall play and watching Tark get standing ovations now. It feels a lot like it did when he was coaching.

“It’s fun to be a part of it.”