This is a Christmas story that has nothing to do with the one that will be shown on TBS on a continuous loop Friday. This one is about UNLV coaches with soft spots in their hearts, and a Rebels basketball player who is much better beyond the 3-point stripe than he is with a Mexican yo-yo, and sick kids in the hospital, and the local sports radio host who brings them all together each year.
These college basketball lid-lifters and early-season games against teams supposedly easily vanquished have not always gone well for Dave Rice’s UNLV teams. The words “gasoline” and “fire” immediately come to mind.
There’s something in the sports writer’s code, an unwritten rule, about not asking for autographs. When I heard that Jerry Tarkanian had died Wednesday morning, asking him for his autograph when I was a young sports writer was one of the first things that popped into my mind.
The Rebels, a talented if rudderless bunch, had somehow slipped to 1-5 coming into Saturday.
UNLV lost to UNR in basketball again on Wednesday night, and that was a bad thing if you were Rebels coach Dave Rice, who takes a ration of grief — or something like it — whenever the Rebels stub a toe against the lesser squads of the Mountain West Conference.
