COMMENTARY : Johnson, Augmon Caught in NCAA’s Crossfire

Lois Tarkanian feels bad today for her husband, Jerry. She feels worse for Larry Johnson and Stacey Augmon.

Johnson and Augmon led her husband’s team, Nevada-Las Vegas, to the NCAA basketball championship a few months ago. Each would have made lots of money by entering the NBA draft a year early. But they wanted to stay and win another title. They won’t get that chance.

Friday, the NCAA placed UNLV on probation for a year for violations that occurred prior to the 1977 season. The term dribble had a different meaning then for Johnson and Augmon.

“These two kids epitomize what the NCAA says a student-athlete should be, what the college system is all about,” Lois Tarkanian said in a telephone interview Friday. “They are great athletes, and they turned down millions of dollars to stay in school and finish their education. Now the college system has thumbed their noses at them.”

A little background:

In 1977, the NCAA found Jerry Tarkanian guilty of violating several of its rules and placed UNLV on two years’ probation. In addition, the NCAA told UNLV it had to suspend Tarkanian for those same two years. But Tark took the NCAA to court and won. UNLV served its probation, but a Nevada court ruled that the NCAA had violated Tarkanian’s rights to due process and that UNLV could not suspend him.

The NCAA has been after Tarkanian for 13 years. Friday, it got him.

The NCAA said a large part of the 1977 penalty was Tarkanian’s suspension. Because Tark got around that, the NCAA felt UNLV hadn’t paid enough. So Friday, it slam dunked the Rebels’ chances of repeating.

Tarkanian was in San Diego on Friday and unavailable for comment. He talked with his wife shortly after learning of the penalty.

“Jerry is very, very disappointed,” Lois said. “He feels it’s totally unfair to the kids.”

It should be pointed out that NCAA-leveled sanctions often are a result of misdeeds committed before any of the current players showed up on campus. But in this case, the NCAA didn’t just penalize a program. It nailed Tarkanian, which had been its goal for 13 years.

Tark did something his buddies at the NCAA never forgave him for. He embarrassed them in court. He had beaten the NCAA, and deep down, he knew he would eventually pay for that.

I covered the UNLV basketball team during the 1986-87 and ‘87-88 seasons for the Las Vegas Sun. Tark was careful never to say anything in public about the NCAA. Occasionally, at his weekly luncheons, he would slip. But as soon as he said it, he’d get that goofy grin on his face and say, “Now don’t any of you guys print that. I was just kidding.”

Tark knew he had humiliated the NCAA and that it would love to make an example of him. It must have really hurt the NCAA to have awarded its trophy to UNLV after the Rebels creamed Duke in the championship game last spring.

But nobody expected the hammer to come down yet. The smart money was on a light slap on the wrist. In fact, folks at UNLV were more worried about what might happen after the NCAA was done investigating the recruitment of former New York legend Lloyd Daniels.

Lloyd had trouble in school. In fact, he had trouble reading. But man, could he play basketball.

Tark once said that when they write the book about basketball, they’ll talk about four guards -- Jerry West, Oscar Robertson, Magic Johnson and Lloyd Daniels. How did Tark know as soon as Lloyd turned up in Las Vegas he’d get busted in a televised raid at a crack house? Daniels left town in 1987 before he ever played for the Rebels, but the legend -- and the investigation -- live on.

Tark probably shouldn’t have bothered with Daniels. And he almost certainly shouldn’t have had anything to do with convincing an assistant coach to become Lloyd’s legal guardian. Maybe this isn’t against any NCAA rules, but it certainly bends the intent of what the NCAA had in mind.

UNLV and Tark will probably get more sanctions from the Daniels case. But this one really hurts. It has been 13 years.

“I expected something,” Lois Tarkanian said. “And at first, I didn’t think the penalties were going to be that severe. This has gone on a long time, and we just wanted to put it behind us. I thought the NCAA did, too.

“But you know what? The honest to God’s truth is that I thought they might do something like this to us. I knew they wanted to do something that would really kill us.”

Tark met with the NCAA at a hearing last month, when they discussed the case and the possible sanctions. Lois Tarkanian said her husband offered at the time to take any personal penalties the NCAA might care to give him, just don’t hurt the program. No thanks, the NCAA said.

Tark and UNLV may have to pay for the bending, or flat out breaking of rules in the recruiting of Daniels. Fine.

And Tark broke some rules back in 1977. But UNLV already paid for that. Now UNLV is being penalized again. The NCAA wasn’t so much interested in penalizing UNLV as it was in getting even with Tark and making a point.

“They’re the ones who have kept this alive in the courts for 13 years,” Lois Tarkanian said. “The NCAA never wants to lose, or give the impression it lost. They became obsessed with that. They’re very caught up in wanting to let the rest of the world know how powerful they are.”

So finally, after 13 years, the NCAA wins. Larry Johnson and Stacey Augmon lose.