"Cheer" is much too banal. "Root" feels vaguely dirty. The Russian word for supporting an athletic team is bolet—literally, to be sick—and that feels about right. In 1976, the year I turned 7, my parents recklessly exposed me to the infectious illness that was UNLV Rebel basketball. For three months of winter Saturday nights, we filed into the late, great, flying-saucer-shaped Convention Center Rotunda and watched Gondo, Easy Eddie and the "brothers" Smith score 110 a game. I haven't been well since.
This February, when Rebel Coach Charlie Spoonhour stepped down with health concerns of his own, I had a sort of fever spike. Athletic Director Mike Hamrick would soon be looking for a new permanent coach, and the choice he had before him took on a terrible significance in my mind—for the university, for the city … dammit, for me. There was something invigorating, bracing, and not a little infantile in the intensity of my interest. Coaching candidates marched through my dreams like Dumbo's pink elephants on parade. Worse yet, while Hamrick had made it clear he was looking for a coach with substantial experience and a bit of fame, I'd attached my enthusiasm to a candidate with little of either, young Jay Spoonhour, Charlie's boy, who was serving out the season as the Rebels' interim boss. Maybe it was because I'd just finished a first-person novel about a son who goes to work for his basketball-coach father and was conflating poor Jay not only with my protagonist, but with me. Or maybe it was just that the guy had the Rebels playing so darn well. Whatever the reason, I found myself awake nights, watching the ceiling fan turn and mentally composing ornate paragraphs for a letter to Hamrick that would explain just why Jay was The Man.
But weeks passed, and I neither wrote nor sent a word. A dreadful sense of guilt built up, as if I were ditching a wartime election. So it was that I was sitting at my computer at 1:40 a.m. on Saturday, March 13, two hours after the Rebels' victory over Colorado State in the semifinals of the Mountain West Conference Tournament, drafting and redrafting an e-mail that had to say, well, everything, and yet be short enough that Mike Hamrick would read it. Brevity, after all, is the soul of a letter to a guy who probably gets 300 impassioned e-mails a day from people just as sick as I am…
From: [email protected]
Mr. Hamrick,
I realize this can't have been a particularly easy time for you; no doubt you've heard from plenty of Rebel fans, each of them with strong opinions. As a supporter and close observer of UNLV basketball for over 25 years, though, I can't help but add mine to the mix:
Jay Spoonhour is a young coach of extraordinary ability, one capable of building a program characterized by both excellence and integrity.
Since we live in a city so often defined by the tourist experience, Las Vegans have an understandable hunger for something truly local that will represent us to the world; for a generation, that something was UNLV basketball. There is no reason to believe that it cannot be so again. But the focus among many locals seems to be on the need to swiftly, urgently recapture the old magic before it goes away. This strikes me as a lack of confidence in what the city and the university have to offer (as well as in the durability of tradition).
UNLV is perfectly capable of building, not simply reconstituting, a basketball program. The vision in which a big-name coach spontaneously re-conjures the glory years is, of course, not entirely unattractive. But—and such formerly anonymous luminaries as Gonzaga's Mark Few have illustrated this nicely—it's not the only path to victory. No coach is a magician. Any coach will have to work patiently and steadily to create something of lasting quality here. It is, of course, always an exercise in speculation to predict who will be right for any job, but it seems to me that Jay Spoonhour has demonstrated abilities that will make both the city and the university proud. Twenty years down the road we may look back with bemused appreciation of the fates (not to mention the father) that brought him to our valley.
Thanks so much for your time, and good luck with this hectic process. And rest assured that, no matter who's prowling the sidelines next November, I'll be supporting the Rebels.
Sincerely,
On Monday mornning, March 15, former Illinois and Florida coach Lon Kruger was named the new coach of the UNLV Rebel basketball team.
Sorry, Jay. I tried.