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By John Katsilometes
Review-Journal
Twenty years later, the game can be recounted through verbal snippets.
A blown 10-point lead. The four-corners offense. No 3-point line. No shot clock. Glen Gondrezick's elbow. Larry Moffett's nose. Lewis Brown's sudden interest in facial disfigurement. A conspicuous disparity in free throw attempts.
And for UNLV's 1976-77 basketball team, a loss that stings decades later.
The Rebels, soaring into the NCAA Tournament's Final Four with an 11-game winning streak, were knocked off 84-83 by Dean Smith and North Carolina on March 26, 1977, at the Omni in Atlanta.
It was UNLV's second-lowest scoring output of the season and certainly the Rebels' lowest moment.
"We were on a roll, we were playing so well," former UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian said. "We had a 10-point lead and things just started going wrong."
A few elements (such as the rules of the game) were out of UNLV's control. The most obvious disadvantage was that no 3-point line was in place in college basketball, which hurt a UNLV team that delighted in long-distance artistry.
The game's official play-by-play sheets reveal that the Rebels hit 13 shots that, in today's game, would have been 3-pointers. North Carolina made none.
"Our offensive philosophy was, after we hit half court, whoever had the open shot took it. Period," said Gondrezick, a starting forward for UNLV that night. "Who knows what would have happened if we had the 3-pointer that night."
One guess is that UNLV would have scored 13 more points. And won.
"The game would've been over," former UNLV guard Reggie Theus said. "It would've been ours."
The game's key moment occurred less than three minutes into the second half, when the elbow of Gondrezick met the nose of Moffett, the team's 6-foot-7 starting center. The Rebels, who were ahead 55-45 early in the second half, still led 55-50 when Gondrezick clipped Moffett and broke his nose while battling for a rebound with 17:15 left.
Moffett sat for two minutes and the Tar Heels pounced, scoring nine straight points to take a 59-55 lead.
A strange sequence unfolded on the UNLV bench immediately after Moffett's injury.
"The story is that my elbow hit Moffett's nose and that was the key play, but turn the page and there's more to it," Gondrezick said. "Our 6-10 center, Lewis Brown, is supposed to enter the game but doesn't. So Tark puts in Reggie Theus, a great player, but he's only 6-6. So we have no inside presence."
Tarkanian offered his memory of the episode.
"We call timeout, and Larry goes down the bench, and Lewis is looking up his nose like he's a doctor," Tarkanian said. "I got upset. I'm trying to get Lewis into the game, saying, `Let's go, let's go,' but he's not responding. So I got mad and put Reggie in."
Starting point guard Robert Smith said he remembered the incident well.
"Yeah, we didn't have a big man for a while," he said. "Tark was trying to get Lewis in there, but Lewis was down there checking Moffett like he was our trainer. I guess he didn't hear Tark, so Reggie got thrown in there."
Moffett eventually returned, his nose plugged with gauze, but by then Dean Smith had ordered up the four-corners offense, spreading the floor and running time off the clock to protect the lead.
It was the four-corners, an effective but sleep-inducing offensive set, that led to the shot clock used today. UNLV stayed close but couldn't wrest the lead from the Tar Heels in the final 15 minutes.
"The four-corners, to me, is not basketball," Gondrezick said. "But Dean Smith won a lot of games with it."
The Tar Heels put UNLV away from the free-throw line, making 4 of 5 in the final minute. The final statistic sheet shows a head-scratching 18-for-28 free throw performance by the Tar Heels and a 1-for-5 showing by UNLV.
The Rebels did not shoot a free throw in the entire second half.
"Ask Glen or any of the guys to this day, and they'll say we didn't get a call in that game," Tarkanian said. "We didn't get one call. It just wasn't meant to be, I guess."
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