Ticket buyers stricken with UNLV basketball fever

It was dark inside the Thomas & Mack Center at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, save for the message boards separating the Steve Wynn seats (lower bowl) from the nosebleed sections (upper deck).

"MIKE MOSER IS BACK." (flash)

"HOMETOWN HERO ANTHONY MARSHALL'S SENIOR SEASON." (flash)

"ESPN: NO. 7 RANKED RECRUITING CLASS." (flash)

"RICE'S REBELS ON NATIONAL SCENE." (flash)

"AND SO ON." (flash)

Hours earlier, UNLV fans learned their football team had been selected to finish ninth in what remains of the Mountain West Conference. So the bright lights on the message boards brought comfort, like those of a Best Western illuminating a lowly stretch of highway at the end of a long day of driving.

Out on the concourse, about 200 Rebels fans were lining up to purchase what few season tickets remain for the 2012-13 season.

The "NO VACANCY" sign at the Best Western was about to go up.

This was open house at the Thomas & Mack for prospective basketball season-ticket buyers (or upgraders). Within the hour, only 37 single seats remained in the lower bowl, which seats about 8,500 - about 8,400 when the giant "Mo-Zilla" cardboard cutout of Mike Moser is assembled in the student section.

One of the ticket reps said he hadn't seen that kind of demand for basketball tickets since 1992, when Jerry Tarkanian's last UNLV team packed the Mack and finished 26-2.

"FIVE KEY RETURNERS BACK." (flash)

"TWO MCDONALD'S ALL-AMERICANS: ANTHONY BENNETT, KHEM BIRCH." (flash)

"NO. 1 ATTENDANCE ON WEST COAST." (flash)

"THE REBELS WILL ROCK THE MACK AGAIN." (flash)

"TUCUMCARI, NEXT EXIT. (not really)

I was going to say that good seats remain, but that would be inaccurate.

A good seat - singular - is really all that remains.

Section 105. Row BB. Seat 1. On the aisle.

You can't bring a friend. You better bring a checkbook.

That particular seat will set one back $53,505 - $505 for the ticket, $3,000 for the priority location, $50,000 for a contribution to the Rebel Athletic Fund over the next five years.

Plus, you will have to deal with the rich guys and their trophy wives on Gucci Row who leave early, even when the Rebels are playing New Mexico.

But if you do wind up purchasing that seat, please tell His Highness Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum I said hello.

"Could you imagine watching from right here? This would be crazy," said 31-year-old Dane Szafranski of Boulder City, asking a rhetorical question of his parents, Ed and Candy Wilson, as he plopped down in Seat 1, Row BB, Section 105.

It was a rhetorical question because Szafranski's wife, Jen, is pregnant, and his stepfather is an accountant and, although Ed Wilson does well, he does not own oil wells in the Persian Gulf.

So it was looking as if they would just hang onto their seats halfway up in Section 101, above the rail, among the relatives of former Rebels 3-point sniper Kendall Wallace.

People shopping their pocketbook were shopping upstairs.

A few hundred seats were available up there, many in pairs, most without RAF taxes and surcharges.

A young man named Cade Cridland, a cameraman and editor at the local PBS affiliate, was thinking about removing the pastel-colored "This Seat Available" notices from a pair of seats in the end zone balcony, in the first row above an exit.

You couldn't shout at Steve Alford from there. Well, you could, but he wouldn't hear you. But at $105 those seats are affordable, even for a guy who graduated during the Lon Kruger era and was just getting started with a career.

"That's $7 a game. I can flip these" on Stubhub or eBay, Cridland said.

Were I him, I'd settle for face value vs. Canisius on Dec. 22.

The latest U.S. Department of Education statistics show that while the UNLV football team struggles to break even, the basketball program raked in a $7 million profit in reporting year 2010 - and that was before Dave Rice came on board as coach, and the Rebels knocked off No. 1 North Carolina at The Orleans and UNLV hauled in the nation's seventh-best recruiting class, according to ESPN and those message boards.

And before Mo-Zilla.

And as those message boards continued to flash and Rebels fans excitedly scurried from one end of the darkened arena to the other, checking out sight lines and whether they'd be able to shout at Alford from a particular location, one couldn't help but think of those old basketball media guides, the ones from the Tark years with Larry Johnson and Stacey Augmon on the cover that said "The Big Year Is Here."

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.