This Duel Is as Bitter as It Gets

What would you say was the greatest rivalry in the history of sports? Dempsey-Tunney? Yale-Harvard? Notre Dame-USC? Dodgers-Giants? Lendl-Becker?

Not even close. The greatest, longest-running, bitterest enmity in the world of sports has to be the NCAA vs. Jerry Tarkanian. For you classicists, the pursuit of Jean Valjean by the detective, Javert, in “Les Miserables” is the only thing that even comes close.

Take this summer. Jerry Tarkanian was sitting atop the basketball world. His University of Nevada Las Vegas team had just won the Final Four, the NCAA’s World Series of basketball, routing Duke in the final by 30 points. More than 100,000 people turned out to greet the team on their return home. Tarkanian could have run for governor.

They were all set to defend their title this season. Their team was intact. Two of the brightest stars had resisted the blandishments of the pros and the Italian teams dangling big bucks, and had elected to stay and repeat as national champions.

And then the NCAA went into their all-court press. They rained on Tarkanian’s parade. UNLV was to be placed on probation, barred from taking part in the Final Four or any postseason tournament.

Why? Because they hadn’t gotten rid of their coach 13 years ago when the NCAA wanted them to.

It’s a complicated story coated with elements of revenge, blood feud and uncompromising adversarial relationship that would be comprehensible only to the Hatfields and McCoys.

It all began, probably, with that nickname: Tark the Shark. Not Tark the Lark. Not Tark the Spark. Not even Tark the Aardvark. No, it conjured images of this awful predatory creature of the deep, prowling the basketball seas of the world, gobbling up recruits and swallowing them whole. “Jaws” in the locker room. Thum-thum-thum-thum .

Then, there was the man himself. Tark was not your basic Central Casting idea of the beloved old mentor. He did not have this shock of white hair and saintly expression. Amos Alonzo Stagg, the grand old man, he was not. When he talked, he didn’t put you in mind of Ronald Colman. His hoarse croak had /the rhythm of the streets in it. This flat-nosed, balding character always looked as if he just heard his dog died. He just sat there chewing on this wet towel looking for all the world like a guy who wished you would stop beating him up. Someone once said of Lute Olson, the Arizona coach with the white hair and the postage-stamp profile, that every time he looked at him, he had to resist the urge to vote for him. With Tark, you had to resist the urge to ask him what he did with the baby.

He was really a gentle, eager-to-please kind of guy, but there was something about him that seemed to make the NCAA froth at the mouth.

There was his team. It came into focus as a bunch of guys who just rode into town on motorcycles. The popular conception was, Tark had to arm-wrestle the N.Y.P.D. for them, and if they weren’t at UNLV, they’d be at Attica.

It wasn’t true. Not many of them became doctors, but neither did they become serial killers. Besides, a surprising 47% graduated.

It’s possible the regulators of the sport were not thrilled to see their No. 1 team coming out of America’s Gomorrah, the neon citadel of sin in some eyes.

To the NCAA, Tark the Shark was more like Moby Dick to their Captain Ahab. It was an obsession. It frosted them that a dozen of the best blacktop players in the nation annually showed up at UNLV, and they were sure, to a person, that the players, once in Vegas, would go straight to the crap tables where they would be permitted to help themselves to 20 consecutive passes whenever they needed pocket money. The truth was, the casinos were off-limits to any of Tarkanian’s players, no exceptions, under pain of dismissal.

The NCAA finally moved on its quarry, the great white Tark, in 1977. They threw the book at UNLV, 72 violations, 10 of them involving Tarkanian. They demanded the school banish him.

You have to understand an NCAA hearing is not to be confused with the kind of courtroom Perry Mason operated in or one where the judges wear powdered wigs. They run more to the ones of the Red Queen in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” where she says: “The execution first, the trial afterwards!”

Tarkanian had no trouble getting an injunction against his suspension. The university could try to suspend him but, as a state (of Nevada) employee, he could argue--successfully--that he had been deprived of his livelihood without due process of law. He won a permanent injunction. The NCAA suspended his team for two years, but Tarkanian remained on. And the case dragged on through the courts for 11 years--at a cost to the NCAA of more than $1 million--finally reaching the U.S. Supreme Court.

These Solomons really cut the baby in half. They ruled the NCAA, as a voluntary organization, had the right to suspend teams and coaches--Tarkanian was the only one they ever had--but that Tarkanian, as a state employee, could not be fired without due process, which NCAA hearings hardly constituted.

The NCAA, armed with this affirmation of its imperial powers, decreed this year that because UNLV had not dismissed its coach as ordered 13 years ago, it was in violation of its charter, and its basketball team was suspended from tournament play and thus from defending its title. UNLV protested that it had tried to comply, it had tried to dismiss Tarkanian as ordered, but could not violate a court order.

The NCAA takes the position Tarkanian must be cheating. UNLV takes the position it has to abide by the laws of the state of Nevada and the rules of the highest court in the land, that it would have been a scofflaw to suspend the coach. Tarkanian takes the position he is Joan of Arc, persecuted for excellence.

It’s a legal problem only Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen would relish. Tarkanian, although muttering darkly about “blackmail,” has offered to sit out any postseason play and relinquish the coaching post for those games--and only those games--if the team is reinstated. “They are punishing kids who were only 7 and 8 years old when the original hearings were held,” he protests. The NCAA counters that Tarkanian is like the guy who murders his mother and father and then pleads for mercy on the grounds he is an orphan.

Whatever the outcome, it is the greatest manhunt and the bitterest rivalry in the annals of games people play. Dempsey-Firpo? A love-in compared to this.