Basketball, Dantley Walker and sports in Las Vegas

Much has been made of Las Vegas as a destination for professional sports, but the UNLV Rebels prove that the city doesn’t need another team.

Every college basketball team has one. A player at or near the end of the team’s bench that doubles as a “victory cigar” of sorts, setting foot on the floor only in situations where the contest is fully out of reach, preferably in the positive direction. For the men’s basketball team at UNLV, that player is Dantley Walker.

In what was otherwise an innocuous 34-point blowout over San Jose State on January 10, Walker took the court with the lead nearing 30 points in the second half. The redshirt freshman scored 3 points and grabbed 2 rebounds in 13 minutes, and if you weren’t in the building, there was nothing that would stand out from his performance on this night.

The Thomas and Mack Center is an unusual place, simply because the massive, 19,522-seat college basketball arena sits just over a mile from the famed Las Vegas strip. On this particular night, it was not at full capacity, but that had much more to do with the opponent (San Jose holds a dismal 2-14 overall record) than anything else, and even with that on the table, the crowd was lively throughout.

Nothing compared to the sound made when Dantley Walker leapt from the bench and headed to the scorer’s table. As an outsider, this was interesting and, frankly, jarring. Much of the crowd rose to their feat, almost in unison, and for a game that was firmly out of hand, the thousands of fans remaining in attendance lived and died with every shot, or even touch of the ball, from Walker.

In digging a little bit deeper, this makes sense. Walker, who is generously listed at 5-foot-11, is one of the oldest basketball-playing freshmen in the country, as the 22-year-old spent two years on a Mormon mission after signing with the Rebels out of high school. In his prep career, Walker played at Lincoln County High in Panaca, Nevada, and this hometown kid happens to be the state record-holder for career points.

At well under six feet, Dantley Walker earned the reputation as a small-town legend, in large part due to his shooting proficiency. On a chilly night in January, it felt like an event when Walker hoisted a long-range attempt, and that no-doubt reminded longtime UNLV fans of Walker’s senior season in high school, when he led the country in scoring with more than 1,000 points and 148 three-pointers while cracking the 60-point (yes, 60-point) mark on six different occasions.

The stories surrounding Walker are the stuff of legend, with a source close to the UNLV program waxing poetic about the redshirt freshman making “90% of his threes” in practice shooting games, or simply opining that he is often the most unstoppable force on the Rebels practice court. While Las Vegas “isn’t a sports town”, this type of thing reminds you that sports fans can be found everywhere.

There are undoubtedly a number of reasons that professional sports leagues have avoided Las Vegas, seemingly at all costs. Tales from the NBA’s All-Star Weekend festivities in “Sin City” are gruesome at the very least, and without the reputation as a city driven with enough local ticket-buyers to support a 41-night product, David Stern and now Adam Silver have fought off any overture. On the hockey side, the buzz is growing louder, especially with a large arena set to be completed somewhere in the vicinity of the New York, New York hotel, but even now, that facility is being built without anything approaching a promise of a future professional team.

All of that is okay for the locals, however, as UNLV is their team.

Much like places like Lexington, Kentucky or Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where college sports serve as an all-encompassing force, Las Vegas gets behind the team with big-time numbers. “Locals” in Las Vegas are an interesting bunch, but for as much as tourism drives the economy, it is a top-40 market in the United States based on people who actually spend the great majority of their time living within the city limits. No one would dare to make an apples-to-apples comparison between UNLV basketball fans and the diehards from Big Blue Nation or any football fan from the state of Alabama, but Thomas and Mack Center holds nearly 20,000 people (a top-15 arena capacity in the country) for a reason.

Dantley Walker probably won’t ever see his name hanging in the Thomas and Mack Center rafters alongside collegiate legends like Larry Johnson, Stacey Augmon and Armon Gilliam. Because of his size and age, it would be a big ask to see Walker joining the starting lineup during his time at UNLV, much less the Mountain West elite, but his cult following simply speaks to the diehard nature of a portion of the Rebels fan base.

In all fairness, tales are mixed with regard to this group of patrons. The team sometimes fails to sell out games when they are moved to other venues (i.e. the Orleans Arena or MGM Grand), leaving some with a sour taste in their mouths, and in a city largely driven by gambling of any kind, things can get ugly on the UNLV campus when the team does not “cover” or compete in the way that many desire.

Still, this feels like big-time basketball, and it happens in the middle of the desert. The Jerry Tarkanian-led teams from the early 1990’s may as well be royalty in the city of Las Vegas, even as students at UNLV were not members of this universe when they took the floor. It seems apt that “the Shark” has the current floor at Thomas and Mack named for him, but even in that vast shadow, the crowds haven’t waned.

If you have never been to Las Vegas, trust in the stories that tell you that the city feels big. UNLV isn’t an on-strip attraction, but just walking distance from famous venues like Caesars Palace and the Bellagio is some of the best basketball being played in the Western United States.

The 2014-2015 UNLV team likely won’t join the conversation from a national perspective, and that seems to be okay with the locals. This is their team, most of the diehards went to school there, and much like other diehard fan bases around the country that happen to reside in locales not conducive to nightly professional sports, Las Vegas supports their squad with fervor.

There are stories similar to Dantley Walker’s tale from coast to coast, and that in itself doesn’t make UNLV basketball a unique entity. However, the sound and the feeling in the Thomas and Mack Center is a sobering reminder that Las Vegas doesn’t need professional sports.

They have their squad and the team plays just steps from the bright lights.

Next: Who has the best home court advantage in college basketball?