For Years, Tarkanian Has Been One Step Ahead of NCAA; His Team May Be a Step Better, Too

Down the strip and through the electric galaxy rolls the solid beige his-for-as-long-as-he-needs-it or until-the-next-model-year Cadillac. Neon reflections splash over the hood and joy across his brainpan.

Imagine all your dreams trying to come true at once and you’ve got Jerry Tarkanian, long-suffering coach of the UNLV basketball team as he takes his fluorescent victory lap.

Imagine stopping the NCAA dead in its tracks in court (which he has), and then raising a group of waifs to No. 1 (which they are). Picture taking them to the Final Four (which is conceivable, even if he concedes it’ll take some luck) and winning it (a man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for?).

What could beat that? The only thing he’d rather do than win the NCAA is disband it, but for now he’s OK.

Tark puffs on a foot-long cigar. Mrs. Tark, his trusty sidekick, rides shotgun. In the back are two reporters who have been graciously invited to join the Rebel boosters for tonight’s post-game revelry.

Tarkanian offers the scribes cigars but since they’re leery of cultivating any taste that would require more than 10% of their weekly income, they decline. The writers assume they’re about to see more pinky rings in the next hour than they have in their lives.

Tarkanian entertains them with an assault on what’s left of the NCAA’s good name. On any given day, he may liken it to most of the nations that America has fought in wars and to the leading crime consortia. UNLV’s president has recently asked him to knock it off but indignation is indignation and fun is fun.

This is an important clue to an understanding of the Tarkanians.

Lesson one: The agony is never far from the ecstasy.

Lesson two: The lash back is never far from the agony.

How can they ever forget the years of torture the NCAA put them through? How could the NCAA have suspected them?

Let’s see if we can figure it out.

It’s earlier in the same day, in Tarkanian’s office in his desert fortress, the imposing Thomas and Mack Center. Thomas and Mack has more seats than the Forum and charges higher prices for them.

He’s allocating his free tickets for the game against Cal State Fullerton while talking to the reporters. In walks a man.

Tarkanian: “This is Mike Toney, fellows. He’s my main man from the Dunes. Mike, what you need?”

Toney: “I need six. I need four for Figaro’s.

Tarkanian: “I’ll give you six but they’re not going to be all good ones. I’ll give you some bad ones, too.”

Toney: “I don’t care where they are. I need two good ones. I got to have two good ones for Jackie.”

Tarkanian: “Jackie who?”

Toney: “Jackie Salem, the guy who feeds us.’

Tarkanian: “Where?”

Toney: “At Figaro’s . The guy who owns Figaro’s. The boys are going there every day now for freebies.”

Tarkanian: “They’re not supposed to be going down there for freebies! What are you talking about? (Laughing) You s.o.b.!”

Oh, that’s how.

Then there are his prize recruits: Lloyd Daniels, said to be the best player from New York since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who has attended five high schools and a junior college without completing eligibility requirements; and Clifford Allen, a 6-10 center who is completing high school at El Paso Robles detention home in Paso Robles.

Allen has been convicted of armed robbery and is being treated for alcoholism. He’s doing so well, Tarkanian calls him “my valedictorian.”

“He’s gotting better than a B average,” Tarkanian says. “But he’s taking his courses in a detention home and the competition is. . . . “

Meanwhile, back in the Caddy. . . .

Tarkanian pulls up to a tavern in a mall. Inside is no bunch of fat cats, but a young crowd in red UNLV Rebel jackets drinking beer from long-neck bottles. Does he mind? Does he notice? The bar is one of his radio sponsors and besides, he’s never met a Rebel fan he didn’t like, however drunk the fan may be or full of coaching advice.

“Uh huh,” says Tark, interrupting his dinner to sign an autograph for and listen to feedback from a heavyset man with “Larry” in an oval on his chest.

Larry tells him of his concerns.

“Didn’t we play great the second half?” Tark asks him.

The TV set on the wall plays his video over and over, “Walk Like a Tarkanian,” a takeoff on the Bangles’ hit. It ends with a shot of people walking around the campus with towels stuffed in their mouths, the way he does during tense games.

The crowd sings along. Tark beams and beams and beams.

OH, THE SHARK HAS POINTY TEETH, DEAR

Does he mind being Tark the Shark?

Hardly.

“John Hall (then a Times columnist) gave me that nickname,” he says.

Does it bother him?

“Nah,” he says, grinning. “I like it. It rhymes.”

So, why him?

Possible reasons include:

Success--When Tarkanian went from Pasadena City College to Cal State Long Beach in 1968 and won the California Collegiate Athletic Assn. title in his first season, his team didn’t even get an NCAA bid. Three years later, it came within one point in the Western Regionals of upsetting UCLA, which was on its way to its seventh NCAA title.

His wife, Lois, says that when they went to court against the NCAA, they subpoenaed its file which contained the original complaint. She says she saw it, that it came from the late UCLA athletic director, J.D. Morgan.

Coaching style--Tarkanian has never flinched from taking problem children that no one else could keep in school, or coax into the occasional pass to a teammate.

The great majority of his starters have been blacks. Wrote Jack Scott in his 1978 biography of Bill Walton, whose Portland home he was then sharing:

“Bill was speaking for quite a few UCLA basketball stars when he recently told me, ‘It’s hard for me to have a proper perspective on financial matters since I’ve always had whatever I wanted since I enrolled at UCLA.’

“Looking pained, Bill continued, ‘I hate to say anything that may hurt UCLA, but I can’t be quiet when I see what the NCAA is doing to Jerry Tarkanian only because he has a reputation for giving a second chance to many black athletes other coaches have branded as troublemakers. The NCAA is working day and night trying to get to Jerry but no one from the NCAA ever questioned me during my four years at UCLA!’ ”

Personal style--This is going to come as a surprise if you’ve only seen him on television, sucking on his towel, with worry lines going from his eyebrows to the top of his bald head and those raccoon rings around his eyes looking as deep as black holes in space, but Tarkanian is a man who enjoys himself hugely and has a skin as tough as . . . well, a shark’s.

That being the case, he barely bothers to duck until it’s too late, or to try to sound more like a statesman than a corner boy.

Of course, when cornered, he’s a little bundle of tenacity. When the NCAA came down on him at UNLV, he even turned down two Laker offers, he says, to pursue his vindication.

The one who really suffered was his wife, Lois, who is a different personality type. A Ph.D in human behavior, she met Jerry when they were undergraduates at Fresno State.

His behavior was a little different, all right. She was serving on student court. He was up before it, along with his roommate, Darryl Rogers, now coach of the Detroit Lions, for unruly conduct at a campus square dance.

Jerry asked her out. She couldn’t imagine why. She wondered if he wasn’t trying to bribe her so she waited until finding him guilty to say yes.

“My friends said I was crazy,” Lois says. “He was a wild man.”

“I was a nice wild man, though,” says Tarkanian, sitting next to her, beaming.

“He was sweet,” Lois says.

It’s certainly been for better and for worse. Tarkanian had already had a controversy-filled career by 1977, when the NCAA alleged 18 violations and recommended UNLV suspend him. He got a temporary injunction and kept on coaching. The case wasn’t decided until 1984. If it was tough on Jerry, it nearly finished Lois.

“Every arrow that hits Jerry in the rear end hits Lois in the heart,” says a man who once covered them. “And he has iron underpants.”

Says Lois:

“I wanted him to get out of coaching. To me, this seems like the biggest farce, the phoniness. He says to me, ‘Lois, don’t talk against basketball. It’s been good to me my whole life.’

“I said, ‘Well, Jerry, if you’re going to stay, you better learn how to talk like all the rest of those guys.’

“Let me tell you something, I know who the phonies are. I wish I didn’t. I’d be happier if I didn’t.”

She tells a story she heard from a UNLV player of the days when he was being recruited, of a famous coach coming to his house with $15,000 cash. Lois says she’s talking for publication, even though she knows her husband will be upset.

“Aren’t (the coach) and Jerry close?” the writer asks.

“(The coach) and I aren’t close,” Lois says.

THE NCAA WON

That’s what Lois thinks. That favorable court decision notwithstanding, the damage to Jerry’s reputation has been done, she believes.

Could it all have been a bad rap?

Is it possible that he’s not the worst pirate out there?

Or even a pirate?

Tarkanian disputes every allegation of illegal aid and transcript-fixing at UNLV or Cal State Long Beach. The NCAA found him guilty at both schools but Tarkanian can be forgiven for noting that it was only confirming its own investigation.

When Tarkanian brought suit in Nevada state courts, he was upheld. The NCAA could be forgiven for regarding this as a hometown decision, but it’s also the one that counts.

His graduation rate has been sneered at. The UNLV alumni office says that 28 of Tarkanian’s 67 players have graduated. It has been suggested that most of his graduates have been white bench warmers. UNLV’s breakdown shows 17 whites, 11 blacks.

If a 42% graduation rate is a modest accomplishment, it would still be better than the national average for players in Division I basketball programs--27% according to the Boston-based Center for the Study of Society in Sport.

Tarkanian stills argues that a diploma isn’t all-important and says he’s offended by a program in which someone actually knocks on players’ doors and hounds them to get to class. But in recent years he has allowed Lois to upgrade the academic side and put in the hounds.

Lois brought in Dr. Harry Edwards, a forerunner in warning about the seduction and exploitation inherent in college athletics, for counsel. UNLV basketball now has two full-time tutors and a part-timer. This season, for the first time, all six seniors, five of whom are black, are scheduled to graduate.

HE WON

Tarkanian is in his expansive office at mid-day, a few hours before the Fullerton game. By reputation, he should be nearly comatose by now, or eaten up with worry.

Instead, he’s working on his tickets. They’re sorted out before him on his desk in little piles. He regards them fondly, smiling to himself, like a child going through his baseball-card collection.

For a man so often described in terms of suffering, he enjoys himself. His eyes are always half-lidded and there is always a smile crinkling at the corners of his mouth, a kindly grandfather happy at having an audience. He likes people, even newspapermen who cross him. He’ll blow up and forget it immediately.

“Jerry,” says Lois, who is easier to hurt and not as forgetful by half, “isn’t judgmental.”

He keeps finding messages he hasn’t seen, with more requests for tickets. The casinos have high rollers in who want to see the Rebels.

“These are the two for Figaro’s,” he says, handing them to Mike Toney.

Toney: “Wait a minute! The guy got no parachute! He ain’t got no parachute, man, I’m telling you! The guy’ll get a nosebleed up there! You know where 110 is? Please man, give me two good seats for him!”

Tarkanian: “Oh (bleep), I need three for Mike Sterling. Mike, let me have those two back.”

Toney: “ What two? Please, please don’t! They ain’t no good, honest they ain’t!”

Toney heads for the door, still holding his tickets.

“Good luck to you,” he yells to the reporters. “You know you’re in the hands of the Philistines.”

Tarkanian wasn’t supposed to have this particular problem. This was just supposed to be another of his good teams, nothing special. It had two fine players, Armon Gilliam and Freddie Banks, both likely No. 1 draft picks but in Vegas tradition, all but anonymous.

Gilliam split power forward with Pitt’s Charles Smith on the U.S. team that won last summer’s World Cup and was left off The Sporting News’ list of 13 All-American forward candidates. Banks, a guard shooting 45% from behind the three-point line, couldn’t make any of the five All-American teams selected by the respected Blue Ribbon Yearbook.

“I mean, we don’t have the who’s who of high school basketball,” Tarkanian says. “We don’t have the big-name players. We don’t have the guys everybody recruited.

“Our point guard, Mark Wade (of Banning), went to Oklahoma, couldn’t play and transferred. My center, Jarvis Basnight, played junior college ball at Mt. SAC and didn’t even make all-conference. Armon Gilliam was not a great high school player or a great junior college player. Freddie Banks was a big-name player but he was a local kid.

“We got damn good kids, they play harder than hell, they’re good athletes, they bust their ass. But what we’ve done the last five years here, we’re realistic. We are not going to get the real big, big-time players. So what we wound up doing, we’d get a kid who was great at a certain phase of the game. Then he would do only those things.

“Like my point guard, Mark Wade, he’s a tremendous ball handler and a great defensive player. But Mark can’t shoot. Tonight I’m going to have him shoot ‘cause nobody’s guarding him. If you’ve seen us play, his man sits right in front of Armon Gilliam.

“Gerald Paddio. Gerald can shoot the hell out of the ball. He doesn’t rebound, he can’t dribble. When he puts it on the floor trying to make a play, we all hold our breath, ‘cause we know he’s going to screw it up.”

Voices are heard in the office doorway. Tarkanian looks up.

“Bring those in,” he says. “Let these guys see it.”

In come two men with a cardboard box full of gray shark hand puppets. You put your hand in a glove and on top sits this shark with his mouth open and big, white, cloth teeth showing. On its side, it says, “Tarks the Shark.” It’s a typographical error.

“The first 5,000 will be like this,” says one of the merchandisers. “The next 10,000 will be right. They’re going into Osco’s, Food King, 7-11, the bookstore, the airport.”

Tarkanian puts one on, looks it over and pronounces himself pleased.

“How many can you let me have right now?” he asks.

They give him six and depart.

“So anyway, where were we?” Tarkanian asks.

“Paddio screwing it up,” says a reporter.

“Paddio can shoot the hell out of the ball,” says Tarkanian without missing a beat, “but wait ‘til you see him dribble the ball.

“Armon Gilliam is a great player. Armon Gilliam is as good a power forward as there is in college basketball in my opinion. Jarvis Basnight our center, he’s 6-8 and he’s quick, can jump, can do a lot of things pretty well. But Jarvis is not a tough kid. So we don’t throw him the ball inside a lot. We hit him in the open court.

“But we’re a good team, don’t get me wrong. But the reason we’re a good team, see, we don’t let Paddio do anything but shoot the ball. When he dribbles the ball, I scream at him, ‘Get rid of the damn thing!’ About 4-5 games ago, I told him not to get any assists: ‘If you don’t have a shot, just give it back to Mark.’

“But he still tries. I think I offended him.”

LLOYD: A DIGRESSION

Not that you could tell from the ongoing party in the office, but this is a tender time. A few nights previously, Lloyd Daniels, Tarkanian’s greatest-ever prospect, had been arrested, charged with trying to buy cocaine from an undercover policeman.

The arrest was recorded and shown on the air by a Las Vegas TV station. You couldn’t get a bigger story locally unless Moses came down one of the mountains carrying a divine injunction against casino gambling.

Tarkanian, who has promulgated a vigorous anti-drug program, first said that Daniels could never play at UNLV. After talking to Daniels, he said he might have acted too quickly. But, he added, Lloyd was still gone.

“He’s the best I’ve ever been around,” Tarkanian says. “Nobody’s close to him. He has the ability to be as good as Magic Johnson. He passes it like Magic Johnson. He’s a 6-8 guard. I loved Lloyd. I still do.

“A lot of times, I’d be on the road somewhere, dreaming in the middle of the night, all the things we could do with Lloyd. Eventually I was going to give him the ball and just have the other guys move.”

And his academic record?

“That’s the biggest BS thing!” Tarkanian says. “That tees me off every time I read it.

“Here’s a kid who was a great street player in New York City and who’s not doing everything he should academically. So he goes to Laurinburg (N.C.) Prep. Just like Charlie Scott, just like Bruce Dalrymple. So he goes there but he’s a New York City kid and he doesn’t like that environment. He’s a 14-year-old kid and he’s away from home. And he can’t read. He’s dyslexic. So he leaves, which is perfectly normal. . . .

(The narrative winds through three more high schools plus Mt. San Antonio College to UNLV.)

“His situation is no different than Walter Berry’s. This is what tees me off, the hypocrisy. Berry was not a high school graduate. He was admitted to St. John’s without a diploma on a special program that they have for New York City kids. Then the NCAA came in and said, ‘Hey, this is not sufficient, he can’t play.’ So they sent him to a junior college, exactly like we did.

“Their backgrounds are exactly the same. And why is it that St. John’s is so nice for giving Walter the opportunity and Lloyd shouldn’t have the opportunity?

“I don’t understand why anyone would say he went to five high schools, so that makes him a bad kid.”

But does it make him a college student?

“There are a lot of guys who aren’t college students when they get here. I wasn’t a college student when I went to college. Let me tell you, I lived with eight guys at Fresno State, we raised more hell. We had every party. I had the greatest time. I wasn’t into studies until I met my wife and that was my senior year.

“So I graduate from Fresno, I get my teaching credential. I coach two years, we move to Redlands and I work on my master’s degree at the University of Redlands, which is a much tougher school than Fresno. I got all A’s but one B. All it was, my priorities changed.

“One thing we have done through the years, we have taken some kids in that some other schools knock. But they take them anyway. If you knew the school today that called about Lloyd, you’d (bleep).”

It’s not that you can’t make a case for open university enrollment. It’s just that this isn’t the way most deans of admission would put it.

The next day a Kansas assistant acknowledges having called to inquire about Daniels.

A UNLV booster says he’s talked to Daniels’ lawyer. “He says he’s going to win the case,” says the booster, “and sue everybody.”

Dean Smith hasn’t seen this much turmoil in a decade.

OH YEAH, THE GAME

He has won something. Other coaches seem to admire Tarkanian for having stood his ground. There is an ever-spreading recognition of just how good he is at his profession. That .821 percentage--highest among active coaches--is no accident. Bobby Knight, the purist’s purist, now calls him up to chat.

Maybe Tarkanian really is mellowing. Maybe a PCAA game can’t scare him to the bottom of his being as it once could.

Of course, a big intersectional game on national TV is something else. . . .

“I think he’s enjoying coaching as much now as he ever has in his life,” Lois says. “People will say, ‘I saw Jerry smiling on the bench today.’ And it’s not just when we’re way ahead.

“But he still defines his identity by losses. The worst thing about losing the Oklahoma game was going back to the bus and hearing Jerry saying ‘Oh my God.’ Sitting there by himself.

“I know when we went to Auburn, everybody was saying, ‘Please, God, let us win.’ We couldn’t stand another trip like that.”

The loss at Oklahoma is the Rebels’ only one in 29 games. It came by one point, against a top 10 team they’d already beaten on a neutral court, and only after the referees went to an instant replay for a ruling and blew it, mistakenly calling Gary Graham’s three-pointer a two-pointer.

The Rebels won the pre-season NIT. At Auburn, they routed the Tigers who knocked them out of the NCAA tournament last season. Only PCAA opposition stands between taking that No. 1 ranking into the NCAA tournament.

After that, who knows?

“I’m very realistic about that,” Tarkanian says. “You know what it is? We have a good team and if we’re lucky, we can get there. I think that any team that gets there has to be lucky, with the exception of North Carolina. They can get there because they’re so damn good.”

That night, the Rebels have all kinds of trouble with Fullerton, which has a 6-6 PCAA record. At halftime, the fans in the courtside seats sip champagne from plastic goblets. Mike Toney, Tark’s “main man from the Dunes,” is seen coming out of the dressing room with him.

In the second half, the Rebels actually fall behind before rallying. Knight would be starting his next practice as soon as the final horn sounded but Tarkanian says he’s delighted. He says that Fullerton, a team that everyone knows has some ability, “is probably better than Auburn and just as good as Oklahoma.”

No one faints. Everyone goes off to file his game story.

Tarkanian is left alone in the hall with one reporter.

“You gotta love the Rebels don’t you?” Tarkanian asks, beaming.

‘I wanted him to get out of coaching. To me, this seems like the biggest farce, the phoniness. He says to me, “Lois, don’t talk against basketball. It’s been good to me my whole life.” . . . Let me tell you something, I know who the phonies are. I wish I didn’t. I’d be happier if I didn’t.’--LOIS TARKANIAN

‘I think he’s enjoying coaching as much now as he ever has in his life. People will say, “I saw Jerry smiling on the bench today.” And it’s not just when we’re way ahead.’--LOIS TARKANIAN

‘We got damn good kids, they play harder than hell, they’re good athletes. . . . But what we’ve done the last five years here, we’re realistic. We are not going to get the real big, big-time players. So what we wound up doing, we’d get a kid who was great at a certain phase of the game. Then he would do only those things.’--JERRY TARKANIAN