Sam Morris / Las Vegas Sun
Coach Jerry Tarkanian smiles during the announcement of the creation of The Jerry Tarkanian Legacy Project, which includes a statue of Tarkanian and his ubiquitous towel, Wednesday, May 1, 2013.
Saturday, April 6, 2024 | 2 a.m.
The UNLV basketball team was ranked No. 1 nationally for the first time in program history in 1983.
As a reward, coach Jerry Tarkanian had the complimentary car as part of his contract upgraded from an Oldsmobile to a Cadillac, the legendary Rebels coach frequently shared when looking back on his 19-year run at UNLV.
One of the UNLV players, Eldridge Hudson, as Tarkanian tells the story, saw the coach in his flashy ride one day and raved about the new vehicle. That’s when Tarkanian barked, “If you would have got that damn rebound against N.C. State, I’d be driving a Mercedes,” Tarkanian’s son, Danny, recalled this week in an interview with the Sun.
Those watching the Final Four this weekend will surely see at least one replay of the last time N.C. State played in the national championship game, college basketball’s biggest stage.
It’s an iconic clip in which the Wolfpack’s Dereck Whittenburg heaved a desperation shot in the final seconds of the 1983 national championship game against Houston that wound up so short of the basket that teammate Lorenzo Charles grabbed the ball midair and secured the championship on a buzzer-beating dunk.
Coach Jim Valvano raced onto the court looking for someone to hug in one of the signature moments of March Madness.
It’s a moment the Rebels should have prevented from happening, those UNLV players of the 1980s have long maintained. They led by 12 points with 11:40 to play against N.C. State in the 1983 tournament’s second round but lost 71-70 on Thurl Bailey’s rebound and basket over Hudson with four seconds remaining.
“We led for 39 minutes and 56 seconds,” said Danny Tarkanian, the UNLV point guard in the 1983 season. Coach Tarkanian died in 2015.
Hudson, a freshman McDonald’s All-American out of Los Angeles, was hobbled after tearing ligaments in his knee earlier in the season. UNLV supporters still contend that Bailey went over Hudson’s back and committed a foul.
“If I get the rebound, we win the game. It’s as simple as that,” said Hudson, who was also part of UNLV’s 1987 Final Four team and affectionately called “El-Hud” by fans. “People don’t remember that I was on one leg because I had a bum knee, but I knew my importance to the team, even at 70%.”
The game that day in Corvallis, Ore., wasn’t lost on the one play.
Rather it was UNLV’s inability to make free throws in the final 10 minutes. The Rebels made just 14 of 23 free throws.
“We couldn’t run our offense,” Danny Tarkanian said. “They kept fouling us, and we kept missing.”
Bailey would score 17 of his team-high 25 points in the final 11 minutes, 40 seconds.
Sidney Green scored a game-best 27 points for UNLV — including making all nine of his free throw attempts — and had a 3-point play to give the Rebels a 52-40 lead with 11:40 to play. That’s when the game turned into a free throw shooting contest.
“We should have beat them. We should have won the national championship that year,” Hudson said. “We had the team to do it.”
The Rebels were playing in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since their 1977 Final Four season. Danny Tarkanian said that came with “more pressure to not let each other down.”
They were already looking at other teams in the bracket, including powerhouse Virginia with Ralph Sampson — the national player of the year — later in the NCAA West Regional.
“Our biggest concern was getting past Virginia. We would have been big underdogs,” Tarkanian said.
While the outcome against N.C. State wasn’t ideal, many look at the 1983 Rebels as the group that cemented the program’s rise.
Green went on to the NBA and had his UNLV jersey retired, Tarkanian was one of the best point guards in program history, and others like Hudson and Larry Anderson are some of the university’s most respected players.
They had a 24-game winning streak in rising to No. 1 in the polls, executing an electric style of basketball where they raced up the court for easy points in transition and played suffocating full-court defense.
That style led to games being televised nationally, and as Hudson points out, many players electing to play for coach Tarkanian at UNLV.
“The 1990 team doesn’t win the national championship if it’s not for the 1987 team and the 1983 team,” Hudson said. “Why would you come play for a losing program? Stacey (Augmon) would not have been here. Larry (Johnson) wouldn’t have come. They watched us. We were on television every day.”
Hudson continued, “You have to know your history. No matter what coach comes to this school and what players come to this school, if you don’t teach them the history, they will never win. Las Vegas, Nevada, is waiting for UNLV to become the Runnin’ Rebels again.”
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