Sport: Making Its Points, the Hard Way

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None of the country's choice basketball players ever arrive at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on the fly, though a few have come in on one bounce. Jerry Tarkanian, a coach who looks like an all-night poker game, is the best rebounder in college basketball. At the moment, five of his first seven players are junior-college transfers. Three of the starters, including Star Forward Armon ("the Hammer") Gilliam, had no other scholarship offers at all. They are merely the top-ranked team in the nation.

Neglecting to win only one game in 29, Tarkanian is still deliberating over "whether we're really a great team" or just quite a good one "that plays awfully hard." Six-Foot Guard Mark Wade, a selfless passer unnoticed at his first stop, Oklahoma, operates the offense. An outside shooter named Gerald Paddio has come along to encourage opponents to emulate Tarkanian's bedrock man-to-man defense. "The only ones crying about the ((new three-point)) 19- ft. rule are the coaches who like to play zone. If anything's hurting college basketball, it's zone defenses."

While several statuesque thyroid cases share the Las Vegas pivot, the team is fundamentally centered if not completely built upon the solid 6-ft. 9-in. soft shooter and rugged rebounder Gilliam. A high school wrestler from Pittsburgh, he toyed with the notion of playing football at Clemson and embraced basketball last. "When you mention Las Vegas, people think of glitter," Gilliam says, "but glitter wears off."

The thought of college basketball thriving in Las Vegas is slightly chilling. Of all the extracurricular activities, basketball might be the most worrisome to universities today. Chances are, at the bottom of the Iran-contra scandal is a basketball coach in a checkered jacket and plaid pants. As bleak history shows, the potential for corruption, particularly of a gambling kind, is potent enough in places like Kentucky and New York without putting a franchise in Gomorrah.

Games begin in Las Vegas much the way they do in small towns everywhere, with indoor fireworks and Wayne Newton singing the national anthem. Several times this season, the home attendance record has been broken. "We've had live television and 20,000 people," Tarkanian sighs. "Our fans are going crazy."

Guard Freddie Banks, who was actually born and raised in Las Vegas, mentions that "the hotel owners, the really big-time people, all sit in the front row. Now and then, Jimmie Walker -- you know, J.J. on Good Times? -- plays with our band." But, generally, Banks has kept his hometown in perspective. "It's a good place to lose money, and it never snows." Banks' father is a bellman at the Hacienda, his mother a housekeeper at the Union Plaza. "Everyone's dream here is the N.B.A.," he says, but a few have ended up at the M.G.M. Banks says, "It's my dream too," though he is preparing to fall back on the city's second leading industry, social work.