COLLEGE BASKETBALL 1995-96 : Friendly Waters? : Tarkanian Has Quickly Become Beloved at Fresno State, but It Hasn’t All Gone Swimmingly

In his three years of exile, away from the spotlight--or was that a searchlight?--Jerry Tarkanian learned a thing or two.

First, there was a world out there that was not after him.

And how about those seasons? Did you know there were four?

Christmas was a kick. The holiday just before New Year’s, right?

And passing lanes. They have them on highways, too.

After 24 years on the bench, where he reigned as college basketball’s winningest coach, where his stomach always turned to knots, where he dug his teeth into those terrible towels, Tarkanian found himself blissfully judging a beauty contest.

After 24 years of fighting the Establishment, the NC- two -A, of beating back the critics, of scribbling plays on napkins, of sunken eyes and shrugged shoulders, of explaining away Lloyd Daniels and hot tubs and Richie (the Fixer) Perry, of turning basketball into show biz, Tarkanian took a load off and cracked open a book that didn’t start with Street and end in Smith.

“I never read a book in my life that wasn’t a sports book,” Tarkanian says.

Soon, Tark the Shark was swept away with romance.

“I went on a trip with him to Greece,” Tarkanian’s son, Danny, says. “I like Danielle Steele’s books. I read one and gave it to my dad. Halfway through the book, he came up to me with tears in his eyes, and he said, ‘This is the saddest thing I’ve ever read,’ and I’m just dying.”

And so it was with this new perspective, and an understanding of John Grisham, that Tarkanian decided to come back and complete the final chapter of his book.

He chose Fresno, his alma mater, surrounded by 40,000 friendly sons of Armenia, claiming he had nothing to prove while everyone around him knew better.

Tarkanian was starting over, at 65, after 625 Division I victories and just as many headaches and NCAA inquiries.

Tark with a clean slate. The sentence seemed so strangely juxtaposed.

When last we left him, Tarkanian had resigned under pressure from Nevada Las Vegas in 1992, one step ahead of the NCAA posse that had been chasing him for 20 years.

Two years after his crowning achievement, the winning of his lone NCAA title in 1990, Tarkanian was run out of town. The sheriff had said to be gone by noon. Tark waited until 11:59.

A brief stint in the NBA, with the San Antonio Spurs, proved disastrous.

So Tarkanian roamed the world, a coach without a team, catching up on a world he had largely ignored.

Then, in October of 1994, weary of the battle, the NCAA dropped its case against Tarkanian. The NCAA claimed fatigue. Tarkanian saw it as exoneration.

Tarkanian says he was content to live out his life, that he had no need or desire to get back into coaching. But when he made a speech at Fresno State, and the townsfolk clung to his every word, Tark was willing to listen to offers.

A rabid sports town in good times, Bulldog basketball had not been worth hayseed since Boyd Grant made a few NCAA runs and won the National Invitation Tournament back in 1983.

Bulldog basketball was in tatters--134-160 since 1985-86--and Tarkanian saw an avenue home again, a chance to restore a program and a reputation.

Tarkanian pretended he wasn’t interested at first, but ultimately signed a three-year contact in April.

“After some very successful years at UNLV, things didn’t end on a positive note,” says Danny, who abandoned a law practice to join his father as an assistant coach. “I think he’d like to see his career end on a positive note.”

Jerry Tarkanian contends he is a changed man.

“I’m trying to approach games differently than I ever have before,” Tark said in his Spartan office in early November. “I’m trying to have a good time. At least I’m telling myself I’m not going to let it tear me up.”

Yet, Tark admits his stomach was imploding during the team’s exhibition against a team called Brewster Packing in early November.

If Tark has mellowed, it hasn’t shown in recruiting. On the power of his name alone, the Bulldogs figure to be contenders in the Western Athletic Conference this season.

Terrance Roberson, a Parade magazine All-American forward from Saginaw, Mich., signed on the dotted line as soon as he heard Tark was back in business.

“I came here because of him, his style of play,” Roberson said after a recent practice. “My coming here gives me the best chance of making it in the [NBA] some day.”

Tarkanian invited six players to visit the campus and all six signed. It wasn’t because of the glossy brochures.

When highly touted guard Chris Herren, a redshirt transfer from Boston College, joins the team next year, Fresno State figures to be back in the national picture.

This isn’t a 10-year plan.

“Hell no,” Tarkanian says, “I’ve got to do it fast. We’ve got to do it right away. But I think we’re going to win. I think we’re going to be good.”

As for Tarkanian’s past, well, it came with the initiation packet.

“It scared me a little,” Roberson says. “But it’s a chance I take to be with the best coach in the business.”

*

This isn’t Vegas. Tarkanian, a 1955 Fresno State graduate, has exchanged his plushly carpeted office for a bare-walled cubbyhole in the FSU athletic department.

Viva Las Raisins!

From his perch, his assistants are only a yell away, but Tarkanian prefers to equip each coach and himself with a cellular phone.

Some habits die hard.

But in his mind, this is a step back to the days when Tarkanian averaged two points a game as a scrappy Bulldog guard, met his wife, Lois, and started his coaching career at San Joaquin Memorial High.

“I kind of of like this,” Tarkanian says. “I was never too big on offices. And I’ll bet you I was the only coach at UNLV that never gambled.”

At least with money.

Beside him are crates of fruit, sent to him by one of the many Armenians living here.

“One does my laundry,” he says. “And I’ve got an Armenian dentist.”

When word spread that Tarkanian was being considered for the Fresno job vacated by Gary Colson in March, the Bulldog Foundation, the athletic department’s fund-raising arm, reported an increase in fund-raising of $500,000 in one week.

Pat Ogle, the foundation’s executive director, estimates Tarkanian generated $1 million more in expected pledges.

Tarkanian is already bigger than Grant was in his heyday, and “Boyd could have been elected mayor at one point,” Ogle says.

Tark-mania has hit campus bookstores.

But what is the ultimate price tag?

Everyone likes to think things are going to be different this time. There have been few dissenting voices in this reprise, an ethics professor now and then.

To be safe, Tarkanian, long plagued by guilt-by-association tags, has surrounded himself with gatekeepers.

Harry Gaykian, a longtime friend and fellow Armenian, is handling his finances. Jack Fertig was brought in to serve as coordinator of basketball operations, a title that loosely translates to “Make sure Tarkanian knows the rules.”

Danny, who played point guard for his dad at UNLV in the mid-1980s, offers a legal mind to sift and sort through the mind-boggling NCAA manual.

“There is so much more scrutiny for us right now, for him right now, than anybody else,” Danny says. “We’re trying our best to be as careful as we can. That’s all we can do.

“We’re under scrutiny by our own university, because they brought my father in. They took a little bit of a risk.”

And there is this little matter of Tarkanian vs. the NCAA.

The governing body of collegiate athletics says it has no vendetta against Tarkanian.

“Nope,” Kathryn Reith says flatly from the NCAA office. “We love all of our coaches equally.”

But it’s difficult to believe there are no hard feelings.

In 1977, the NCAA infractions committee ordered Tarkanian suspended for 18 alleged rules violations. Tarkanian went to court and kept on coaching.

The NCAA was closing in again in 1990, this time for 40 alleged violations, mostly tied to the recruitment of Daniels, a New York City playground phenom. Daniels never played for Tarkanian, but had been arrested for trying to buy crack cocaine from an undercover cop in 1987.

Daniels eventually squared his life, and even made it to the NBA.

The NCAA slapped a postseason probation on the Rebels in 1992, but Tarkanian refused to leave, leading his team to a 26-2 record.

But after photographs were published of UNLV players in a hot tub with a shadowy figure, Richie (the Fixer) Perry, Tarkanian resigned.

So the NCAA isn’t paying special attention?

“We keep a watchful eye on any member of our institutional staff that we get information on,” Reith says. “We don’t have any particular list of people we keep an eye on.”

Danny Tarkanian isn’t so sure.

“I think if there’s something out there, they’re going to come in with as much firepower as they can to find something,” he says. “No. 1, that’s supposedly their duty. They’re supposed to do that with all colleges. Whether they do or not . . . “

Jerry Tarkanian always portrayed himself as the victim in all this, and his three-year layoff changed none of those feelings.

“I’m going to come back and try to do the best I can, that’s all,” Tarkanian says. “I know the damage the NC- two -A did to me and that will never change. I went through 4 1/2 years of all the innuendo and rumors, and getting blitzed by writers. But then last Oct. 12, not this one, but the last one, the NC- two -A comes out and totally clears us, and nobody wants to print it. After 4 1/2 years of getting blitzed. So I just say there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Tark once remarked that, if he went to a picnic, controversy would follow.

And it has.

Last month, an in-house investigation cleared Tarkanian of wrongdoing after rumors circulated that the coach and his staff had violated NCAA rules by watching players practice in the summer.

His comeback season is already rife with setbacks.

Last week, a Fresno assistant coach, Johnny Mack Brown, 32, was arrested for investigation of felony spousal abuse. He is free on $1,000 bond, pending a preliminary hearing Dec. 6.

Tarkanian’s team played its first exhibition with only seven players because several had not been cleared academically.

Tarkanian, again, is suspicious of the delays.

“I believe that part of it is over,” he says of his ordeal with the NCAA. “But I don’t know. I can’t say what they’ll do. I don’t know.”

The biggest blow to Tarkanian’s program was delivered last week, when Roberson was held out of a preseason NIT game against Weber State because of questions surrounding his American College Test.

Without Roberson, Weber State defeated Fresno, 102-86.

A school spokesman said the school hoped to have the matter resolved before the team’s next game, Tuesday night.

No one doubts that once Tarkanian gets things squared away, the Bulldogs will be a contender.

He has already raised the stakes in the much-improved WAC.

“He’ll have a hell of a team,” predicts Rick Majerus, whose Utah team starts the season highly ranked.

What does Majerus think of going against Tark?

“I’m happy for him,” he says. “He obviously wants to do it. Everybody does these things for a certain reason. I myself couldn’t envision even wanting to step into a gym at that age, except to watch.”

*

Next year is going to be the killer.

As part of a conference realignment, UNLV will join the WAC in 1996.

After coaching the Rebels for 19 seasons, Tarkanian admits he would rather be anywhere else than on the visiting side at the Thomas & Mack Arena in Las Vegas.

“It won’t be that tough playing here, but playing at UNLV will be really tough,” Tarkanian says. “That’ll be about as tough a thing as I’ll ever do in my whole life, walking in that arena, and going on the other side to the bench. That’ll be a long, long night.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Tark File

COLLEGE COACHING RECORD

*--*

Overall 31 seasons 837-148 .850 Major college 24 seasons 625-122 .837 Junior college 7 seasons 212-26 .891 UNLV 19 seasons 509-105 .829 Long Beach St. 5 seasons 116-17 .872

*--*

NCAA VICTORY LISTS

All-Time Winning Percentage

*--*

1. Jerry Tarkanian 625-122 .837 2. Clair Bee 412-87 .826 3. Adolph Rupp 876-190 .822 4. John Wooden 664-162 .804 5. Dean Smith 830-236 .779 Winning Percentage, Active Coaches 1. Jerry Tarkanian 625-122 .837 2. Roy Williams 184-51 .783 3. Dean Smith 830-236 .779 4. Nolan Richardson 371-119 .757 5. Jim Boeheim 454-150 .752

*--*

Most 20-Victory Seasons, All-Time

1. Dean Smith: 28

2. Jerry Tarkanian: 23, Adolph Rupp: 23

4. Lefty Driesell: 20

5. Denny Crum: 19, Bob Knight: 19

Note--Records do not include 1995-96 season.

COLLEGE COACHING HIGHLIGHTS

* All-time winningest major college basketball coach with an .837 percentage.

* One non-20-victory record in 24 major college seasons.

* Never a losing season in 31 years at the major college and junior college levels.

* A 37-16 record in 16 NCAA tournaments, including a national championship in 1990 and Final Four appearances in 1977, 1987 and 1991.

* Nine consecutive NCAA tournament appearances at UNLV from 1983-91.