Remembering Kenny Guinn

Former Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn died Thursday July 22 after an accident while working on the roof of his home. He was 73 years old. It's unclear if he died of a heart attack, or died because of the fall.

My thoughts of Kenny are many, but one that has rarely, if ever, been mentioned stands out to me.

Guinn loved education. After the mess at UNLV when Bob Maxson was President of the school, Guinn offered to take over and clean it up. His pay for that year....one dollar. That's it. He ran the university for a year for a buck.

While he was President of UNLV Rollie Massimino had already been hired as basketball coach, and unknown to Guinn, Rollie has a second, secret contract that paid him an additional $375,000 a year through something called the "Varsity Club."

Rollie was such a failure as coach, even those who once supported him in the Varsity Club had withdrawn their support and stopped paying the cash to the Club.

Guinn once described the shock to me that he had as he learned of this scheme to launder more money to Rollie without public disclosure. "I was amazed to learn what had been done by the previous administration. I knew the first thing I had to do was make the secret contract details public." UNLV is a public university and all contracts must be part of the public record.

Guinn cleaned up the mess left my Maxson. Within a week after learning of the secret contrat, Guinn engineered a deal to get rid of Rollie, buy him out of both of his contracts made by Maxson and close an ugly chapter in UNLV history.

He was a great friend and he will be missed dearly by Nevada.