“I have loved the game of basketball since my earliest memories,” Jerry Tarkanian said in a recorded message revealed on the evening he was inducted to the Hall. “Basketball has been good to me.”
He struggled to read this for the audience in Springfield, Mass., and nationwide on TV, his voice responding reluctantly to his demands, like a defiant point guard with ideas of his own about where the basketball should go. He had his wife Lois read most of his speech, but he wanted to say some of it. So try to listen to him say “I have loved the game of basketball,” then consider how it often treated him, and try not to weep.
Jerry Tarkanian died Wednesday at age 84, leaving behind a vast extended family of children, grandchildren and former players who loved him, UNLV Rebels fans devoted to him and a nation of college basketball fans sometimes conflicted about what to believe.
His protracted battle with the NCAA — its officials suspecting he ran an outlaw program, Tark believing he was helping to elevate disadvantaged young men — endured for nearly three decades and through two different college programs.
The war began when he was at Long Beach State and trying to challenge the West Coast superiority of John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins, the 49ers making four consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances and winning 85 percent of their games.
It continued and escalated through 19 seasons and four Final Fours at UNLV, his final Rebels team going 26-2 and winning all 18 of its Big West Conference games even as it was banned from competing in the postseason tournament.
He won 784 games and the 1990 NCAA Championship, and his 1991 team steamrolled into the Final Four with a 34-0 record and left as perhaps the greatest team not to win the national title.
In 1977, the NCAA infractions committee asked that Tarkanian be suspended for two years, an order that was reversed by a Nevada judge and never reinstated. The confrontation between the two sides never really ended, though, bouncing in and out of courts of law until finally a settlement was reached in 1998. The resolution coincided with that year’s Final Four in San Antonio, from which the Kentucky Wildcats emerged as champion but Tarkanian seemed like the biggest winner.
He got $2.5 million. The money didn’t hurt, though it seems unlikely Tark ever had to buy his own steak in Vegas. More important was that he’d won. Sure, not as clear a victory as with a judge or jury verdict, but the fact the NCAA was paying could be construed as an admission that Tark was at least mostly right. He had been treated badly. He deserved better.
“I just hope people will now realize that the accusations against me, 25 years worth of them, were unfounded and without evidence,” Tarkanian told the Los Angeles Times that night. “They can never, ever make up for all the pain and agony they caused me. All I can say is that for 25 years, they beat the hell out of me.”
That we think of this first when we think of Tarkanian still seems a shame. His story as a first-generation American, the son of immigrants whose Armenian family was chased from its home, is a success story uncommon among the great basketball coaches. His stepfather told him he was wasting his time with sports, but he went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees and to play varsity ball at Fresno State. He climbed the coaching ladder as they rarely do now: from high school to junior college to Division I and all the way to the Hall.
His teams played aggressively on both offense and defense. He was innovative enough to be among the early adopters of fullcourt pressure but open enough to others’ ideas to unleash the Amoeba defense, developed by Fran Webster as a Pitt assistant coach in the 1970s, as the foundation of his greatest teams from 1989-91. Webster’s scheme was brought to Tarkanian by his loyal assistant, Tim Grgurich, who’d been a colleague of Webster with the Panthers.
Tarkanian’s teams weren’t just the Rebels, they were the Runnin’ Rebels. They were exciting, dazzling, thrilling and, right at home near the Vegas strip, flashy. “Gucci Row," where celebrities such as Frank Sinatra sat for games, became enough a part of the lexicon that rapper Drake wrote and recorded a song with references to UNLV and the Rebels.
Tark’s teams sometimes seemed to play as much for his cause as for the championships any team wants to win. They were treated as poorly as he was at times. At the Final Fours in 1990 and 1991, when matched against Duke each time, many in the media tried to present them as the malevolent force against the heroic Blue Devils. Because Tark was supposedly the bad guy. I was appalled at the time. That hasn’t abated.
He had friends among the coaches, though. Tarkanian made sure to thank them using his own voice when he fought through his acceptance speech.
He walked onto the floor when that tape ended. So many members of basketball’s royalty stood to applaud him: Olajuwon, Stockton, Walton, Payton. There were tears in the eyes of many in the audience, but not from Tark. He smiled broadly. He’d earned that, at last.
