Why Aren’t You in Bed, Mister?

As I write this column, and the publishing template takes up most of my computer screen, I have devoted a small corner of it to a stream of the UNLV/UC Santa Barbara basketball game. In doing so, I'm trying to recapture a bit of nostalgia from my youth.

How does a Midwestern kid have any nostalgia for either of these teams? Let me explain. I've been a sports fan all of my life, and from a very early age, that meant watching or listening illicitly — that is, past my bedtime.

I remember the first time I realized that I didn't have to go to sleep when my parents said to go to bed. It was October 21st, 1984 (I admit I'm looking up the details, but I remember the teams), and there was a special Sunday Night edition of Monday Night Football. According to Wikipedia, it didn't start until 9:45 EST, thanks to ABC showing a Ronald Reagan/Walter Mondale debate, and although my parents sometimes generously extended my bedtime to watch the first quarter or so of MNF, I was only allowed to watch the first few plays of this one, where the Cowboys hosted the Saints.

A light bulb went off in my head — I have a transistor radio! And my parents wouldn't be able to hear it from downstairs! So I sneaked the radio under my pillow, played it at the lowest volume where I could still hear it, and reveled in my subversiveness. I made it all the way to the end of the game, which the Cowboys won in a barn burner. I was 8-years-old.

That was it for me. Every Monday Night Football game could count on me as a listener in the dark, straining to hear in case my parents came upstairs.

My perfidy only increased when my parents put a TV in my room. It was then, however, that I was first busted. The TV was one of the huge, old black and white models which would emit a small dot of light for several minutes after turning it off. One night, I was watching a game, and was surprised to hear my stepdad lumbering up the stairs. I turned it off and jumped into bed, but it was too late.

"What went 'click?'" my stepdad asked from the hall. That was the other thing about this TV ... turning it off was loud. It wasn't so much "click" as "KA-THUNK!"

I tried to sound sleepy when I answered, "I didn't hear anything." But my stepdad came in, the accursed power-down light on the TV betrayed me, and I was grounded from TV for two weeks.

However, it was too late for rehabilitation; I was a complete reprobate. We moved to a new house when I was in sixth grade, and the logistics of my furtive late-night-watching changed. On one hand, the TV was no longer in my room, but in what we called "the middle room," a sort of foyer that led to the right to my bedroom and straight ahead to my sister's.

That was the bad news. The good news was, the middle room was upstairs, and the kids' bedrooms were the only other rooms. That meant my parents had no reason to come upstairs at all. Heck, whether I was up past my bedtime or not, it became clear that hearing parents coming upstairs equaled trouble.

Still, with the television close to the stairs, I had to be very, very quiet and stealthy, and adopted new methods. First, I would cover myself and the television with a big blanket to snuff out the light. Second, if we did go to Defcon-5 and I heard a parent coming upstairs, I learned the trick was to not turn the TV off, but to turn the brightness all the way down. The TV appeared to be off unless you happened to hear the soft buzzing the TV would emit. Luckily, my stepdad wasn't very eagle-eared and I never got busted in the new house.

By this time, my sports appetite had expanded beyond football and I became the college basketball junkie I still am today. This coincided with the birth of a competitor to ESPN, called SportsChannel America. SportsChannel America would eventually morph into FOX Sports Net as we know it today. Back then, though, their production values were endearingly low, and they only got the rights to leagues and conferences ESPN didn't want.

One of those conferences was the Big West Conference. The Big West Conference, back then, was UNLV and a bunch of minnows that UNLV would roll over. These were UNLV's glory years, when they made back-to-back Final Fours and snagged a national championship. You remember those years: Stacey Augmon, Larry Johnson, Anderson Hunt, Greg Anthony. I watched every UNLV game SportsChannel America showed, which was most of them.

I always rooted against them, because they were always huge, huge favorites. They were way too big, too good for their conference, so I got to watch them mop the floor with the likes of Pacific, or the Anteaters of UC-Irvine. Sometimes the minnows kept it close. Mostly, they didn't.

But the upshot of watching all these UNLV games was I got to know them really, really well. I always rooted against them, but I didn't dislike them. I watched them bash their way through the early rounds of the NCAA tournament at 11:30 at night, where ESPN, at the time, would pass it off to CBS for one late-night game that usually included UNLV against the likes of Idaho State or Montana. One year, 1987 to be exact, the CBS late-night first round game was Oklahoma winning a close one against Tulsa in Tucson, Arizona. For this nostalgic reason I always try to watch when those two teams play in basketball.

UNLV started to fall on hard times. They went undefeated in the 1991-92 conference season but were ineligible for the NCAA tournament. The 1992-93 season brought more troubles. Instead of nearly knocking off the Rebels, Big West teams — like Long Beach State (twice) and Cal-State Fullerton — were actually beating them. They were not selected as an at-large team for the NCAA tournament, and were blown-out by USC in the first round of the NIT. These teams consisted of guys you don't remember and probably never knew, but I do. Dedan Thomas. Lawrence Thomas. Sunshine Smith.

By this time, I had completely converted to an out-and-out UNLV fan, but the era had ended. UNLV wasn't an elite program anymore, and hasn't been since. They left the Big West for the Mountain West. SportsChannel America became FOX Sports and stopped showing their games. I was far enough into my teens that I didn't really have a bedtime anymore.

But tonight, they are playing UCSB, an old Big West foe, in non-conference action. Maybe if I turn off all the lights and expand the screen to full-size, I can pretend it's 1990 again, and I'm under the TV blanket, listening carefully for my stepdad's footsteps.