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UNLV's fall to Cal brings about inglorious distinction

Anthony Marshall will leave UNLV having lost all four tournament games. (Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images) SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Zero-for-Four. UNLV senior
George Dohrmann|
UNLV's fall to Cal brings about inglorious distinction
UNLV's fall to Cal brings about inglorious distinction

Anthony Marshall will leave UNLV having lost all four tournament games. (Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images)

Anthony Marshall will leave UNLV having lost each of four tournament appearances. (Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images)

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Zero-for-Four.

UNLV senior guard Justin Hawkins contemplated that statistic for a moment while sitting in a chair in the Rebels locker room at HP Pavilion on Thursday night, a red hoodie covering his head.

That was not Hawkins’ shooting line, nor will you find it anywhere on the stat sheet from fifth-seeded UNLV’s 64-61 lost to 12th-seeded Cal. Rather, it is the NCAA tournament record of Hawkins and fellow Rebels senior Anthony Marshall.

“I can’t believe it,” Hawkins said. “I really thought we would finally win one. It is just … it’s hard.”

In 2010, Hawkins and Marshall’s first season, UNLV lost 69-66 to Northern Iowa on a three-pointer with 4.9 seconds remaining. In 2011, the Rebels went seven minutes without a field goal in the first half against Illinois, fell behind by 22 at halftime, and lost 73-62. Last season, Marshall and Hawkins watched as Colorado built a 20-point lead early in the second half before prevailing 68-64.

In every one of those games, UNLV was the higher seed, as they were Thursday, and yet the Rebels still faltered.

“Three of the four games I felt like we were the more talented team,” said Hawkins. “The exception was Illinois. All the others, I really believed we should have won if we played the way we were capable of playing.”

But they never did and so Hawkins and Marshall will leave UNLV with an inglorious distinction. They were the first players since Stacey Augmon (now a UNLV assistant coach) and Chris Jeter to go to four consecutive NCAA tournaments, and now they are the first ever to loss all four games.

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George Dohrmann
GEORGE DOHRMANN

Senior Writer, Sports Illustrated Sports Illustrated senior writer George Dohrmann is the rare sportswriter to have won a Pulitzer Prize. He earned journalism's top honor in 2000 while at the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The Pulitzer cited his "determined reporting, despite negative reader reaction, that revealed academic fraud in the men's basketball program at the University of Minnesota." In 2000 he joined Sports Illustrated, where his primary beat is investigative reporting. He has also covered college football, college basketball and high school sports for SI and SI.com. Dohrmann is the author of the book, Play Their Hearts Out, an expose about youth basketball that was published by Random House in October 2010. It won the 2011 PEN/ESPN Award for literary sports writing and was named the best sports book of the year by Amazon.  Dohrmann cites the 2010 story Confessions of an Agent and the Michael Vick dog-fighting case in 2007 as the most memorable stories of his SI career. He has also written investigative stories on Ohio State football, UCLA basketball and other schools. Dohrmann's previous experience includes stops at the aforementioned St. Paul Pioneer Press (1997-2000), where he covered University of Minnesota football and basketball, and the Los Angeles Times (1995-1997), where he was the beat writer for USC basketball. Dohrmann graduated from Notre Dame in 1995 with a B.A. in American studies and later earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of San Francisco (2006). He resides in San Francisco with his wife, Sharon, daughter, Jessica, son, Justin and a crazy mutt named Reyna.

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