'Dog Days

By PAUL GUTIERREZ

March 8, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

FRESNO —

His office is relatively barren and cramped, hardly what you would expect for perhaps the most colorful and certainly the most controversial coach in college basketball.

Jerry Tarkanian’s cubicle is curiously devoid of personal memorabilia testifying to his wildly successful yet turbulent 35 years on the sidelines. After all, this is a guy whose career has had more than enough drama to be the subject of an “E! True Hollywood Story.”

There are a few pictures, but most of them are from Fresno State’s past, years before the Shark set up shop in the San Joaquin Valley, bringing with him a notoriety the campus had never experienced. The only evidence of his national championship is a framed photo, hanging slightly askew on a dingy off-white wall, of Tarkanian, then Nevada Las Vegas’ coach, smiling gleefully with President Bush at the White House in 1990.

The mood this day is different. Tarkanian and the three members of his young Fresno State coaching staff--son Danny, 38; John Welch, 37, and Wil Hooker, 29--are sitting, silent and glassy-eyed, in the cramped quarters, stunned at the Bulldogs’ predicament the morning after a seeming NCAA tournament-killing 85-75 loss to visiting Southern Methodist. They’re breaking down tape and trying to come up with a workable strategy for Texas Christian, the next Western Athletic Conference opponent.

“Unbelievable,” Tarkanian mutters to no one in particular as Hooker works the VCR remote with the deft hands of a point guard. “I’m more afraid of these guys [TCU] than I was of SMU and we lost to SMU.”

The towel-chomping Tarkanian, who built a legend on pressure defense and fast-break basketball, worried about the likes of Texas two-steppers SMU and TCU?

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

From the moment he was hired in 1995 to coach his alma mater, friend and foe alike predicted that Tark would have Fresno State in the Final Four by the turn of the century, for better or worse. Five years later, the Bulldogs have yet to sniff an NCAA bid.

The frustration takes its toll on Tarkanian, 69, whose moods and plans hinge on the result of the Bulldogs’ most recent game.

“It’s not even necessarily the tournament,” he says. “We just haven’t been the power that I thought we would be by now. I never anticipated we would be like we were at UNLV because Fresno is just not the attraction that UNLV was. But I thought that we would be right up there with the elite programs by now.”

While some wonder why he puts himself through such agony, others say that he’s merely paying for his sins of the past.

Image Is Everything

It didn’t get any better, or worse, for Tark’s image than resembling a shady Uncle Fester while going by the sobriquet of “the Shark” and coaching a team called the Rebels in Las Vegas, of all places. But if the image grew big as life at UNLV, it was created when he was at Long Beach State from 1968-73.

“Yeah, it always bothers me,” he said of the public’s perception of him. “But it’s something I can’t do anything about so I don’t pay any attention to it.”

But he does have an inkling as to where it came from--Westwood.

“We were a state college and we had replaced SC as the second power and we were challenging UCLA so the NCAA came in and really did everything they could to hurt us,” said Tark, who had coached at Riverside and Pasadena city colleges before Long Beach. “And we were doing it with all junior college players which, in those days, nobody did it with jucos.”

Tarkanian said that his 49ers simply got too good, too fast in the backyard of the Bruin dynasty.

“The funny thing is, I like John Wooden, I like Steve Lavin, I really like Larry Brown,” he said. “I like most of their coaches but I’m always bitter toward UCLA because I’ve always felt that they were the cause of one of my problems. And the only cause was that we were getting close to catching them and we were a [smaller] college doing it with all inner-city kids.

“J.D. Morgan [UCLA’s athletic director at the time] brought the NCAA in on us--J.D. ran college basketball in those days--and they just came out to destroy us.

“The irony of it all was that we were at Long Beach State, living as poor as you could possibly live, and UCLA, with [booster] Sam Gilbert--it was just incredible. It was like Beverly Hills against Watts.

“It would be like the UCLA guys are all in Mercedes and our guys are all on bikes and the NCAA’s coming in saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got to take these bikes away from these guys.’ It was the damnedest thing you’ve ever seen. I mean, the time they came after us was the Sam Gilbert era [at UCLA]. Everybody knows what went on during the Sam Gilbert era. The only [team] with a higher payroll was the Lakers. During the Sam Gilbert era, UCLA was in a different class. All those guys lived in beautiful apartments and drove beautiful cars.”

The NCAA ultimately hit UCLA with a two-year probation in 1981 and ordered the Bruins to sever ties with Gilbert, who was known as “the Godfather” of the UCLA program. Gilbert, who died in 1987, was reportedly a benefactor of such stars as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar--then known as Lew Alcindor--Bill Walton and Sidney Wicks.

It has been said that Tarkanian’s teams at UNLV also enjoyed the finer things in life. During his stint there, the Rebels went to the Final Four four times and won the 1990 national championship, thrashing Duke, 103-73, the most lopsided score in title-game history.

Controversy flowed there, though, as readily as cards at a blackjack table. A feud with the university administration and a photo of three Rebel players sharing beers and a hot tub with convicted sports fixer Richard Perry essentially ended Tark’s UNLV run in 1992.

He then had an ill-fated 20-game sojourn in the NBA with the San Antonio Spurs.

The Shark Resurfaces

He could have stayed retired, giving speeches, conducting clinics, judging bathing-suit competitions and kicking back on Gucci Row at UNLV games, taking on a Wooden-esque persona. Tark, at the time, had the highest winning percentage ever among college coaches and is still revered in Las Vegas.

But after a speaking engagement in Fresno, he was overwhelmed by the boosters’ campaign to hire him. Of course, there was an undercurrent, especially in the academic community, opposing the university’s apparent willingness to sell its soul to the Shark.

And once he was aboard, it didn’t take long for controversy to arise.

A point-shaving story that Tark calls baseless is reportedly still being investigated by the FBI, a behind-closed-doors documentary movie made for TV, highlighting the drug suspensions and arrests of some of his players, and an unflattering piece by Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes” during the 1997-98 season have been the lowlights of Tark’s Fresno State tenure.

“That was a very challenging year,” Fresno State President John Welty said with a sigh. “A positive did come out of that year since we did come up with a code of conduct for our student-athletes.”

Welty acknowledged that he hadn’t expected his university to be in such a spotlight when he hired the controversial coach. Yet, he said, a balance between academics and athletics has lately been achieved.

Senior guard Courtney Alexander and senior power forward Larry Abney graduated in December, earning degrees in anthropology and speech communication. Senior small forward Terrance Roberson took advantage of an NCAA rule allowing a nonqualifier to earn back his lost season of eligibility if he graduates on time. He has his degree in sociology.

“You can just treat Coach like one of your homies from back home,” Roberson said. “To me, he’s a mother figure, a father figure, a friend. He’s just a cool guy. People criticize him for being that way but that’s the way he is toward his players. He’s been winning being that way, so why criticize him?”

Welty, who co-authored a book titled “Alcohol and Other Drugs: A Guide for College Presidents and Governing Boards,” said: “My experience has been that [Tarkanian has] been responsible and willing to make changes. I have not found any reason to question his [manner of running] a program.”

Apparently not. Fresno State’s booster club, the Bulldog Foundation, generated $7.1 million for the school’s athletic programs in 1999, compared to the $3.9 million the year before Tark arrived. Plus, he was the catalyst for Fresno State’s planned campus arena, the 16,500-seat Save Mart Center, a multipurpose venue with those all-important luxury boxes. University officials hope to break ground in December.

And although the Bulldogs have not become a national power, they are in the midst of a successful stretch, by Fresno State standards.

In the 10 seasons before Tark’s arrival, Fresno State had one 20-win season and had not been to the NCAA tournament since 1984. With him at the helm, the Bulldogs have won at least 20 games every season and are taking a 21-9 mark into the Western Athletic Conference tournament, which the Bulldogs are playing host to beginning Thursday.

But during Tark’s often turbulent time, they have been mainstays of the National Invitation Tournament, rather than the NCAA tournament, despite having been ranked as high as 12th in 1997. In fact, Tarkanian, scant weeks away from the 10-year anniversary of his title, has not coached in the NCAA tournament since his undefeated Rebels were upset in the 1991 Final Four by those same Duke Blue Devils he had set to rout the previous year.

‘Dogs Ready to Dance?

Tark’s fretting over TCU seemed justified at the time. But not only did the Bulldogs outlast the Horned Frogs, Fresno State took to the road and dealt then-No. 12 Tulsa its third loss. The Bulldogs closed out the regular season with five consecutive victories and finished second in the WAC behind Tulsa with an 11-3 league record. As grim as the Bulldogs’ “big dance” prospects looked after the SMU loss, they seem considerably brighter now.

Fresno State opens the WAC tournament against Texas El Paso on Thursday night. But with the WAC no longer guaranteed an automatic bid, losses to Cal State Northridge, San Francisco and UTEP, and Tark’s less-than-amicable relationship with the sport’s governing body, the Bulldogs may have to advance to the WAC title game to get a bid, even with a relatively healthy Ratings Percentage Index ranking of 36.

A second-round game against nemesis SMU looms and if the Mustangs beat the Bulldogs for a third time, SMU may well get the Bulldogs’ bid, leaving Fresno State to ponder the NIT yet again.

Still, the Bulldogs, the fifth-highest scoring squad in the country at 82.9 points a game, make an attractive tournament team.

They have the best shooting guard in the country, Alexander, a transfer from Virginia who sports some baggage of his own, having pleaded no contest to domestic assault two years ago. He leads the nation in scoring with his 25.6 average, despite having missed seven games because of injuries.

The Bulldogs also have the fourth-leading rebounder in the nation in Abney, who averages 11.7 rebounds and had 35 against SMU, and one of the more athletic big men in junior center Melvin Ely, whose 3.1 block average ranks 13th nationally.

But with a streaky Roberson, who averages 15.6 points, 5.2 rebounds and 4.3 assists, and the Fresno State bench contributing only 4.9 points a game, the Bulldogs are thin indeed.

“The guys we had here two years ago that caused the problems, the only bad one, the only guy I was really upset at, is Avondre [Jones, the former USC center who was arrested in Fresno for assault, allegedly using a loaded gun and Samurai sword],” Tarkanian said. “The last two years, we haven’t had one single [off-court] problem of any kind. my guys have been absolutely great. The only thing is, they’ve been hurt all the time.”

With a major-college record of 730-179, 10th most victories all time, and a winning percentage of .8031, fifth best and second among active coaches behind Kansas’ Roy Williams’ .8034, Tarkanian sees his coaching days ending--maybe.

His wife, Lois, still lives in Las Vegas and he has a standing offer to join his old athletic director, Brad Rothermel, in the revival of the American Basketball Assn. with the Las Vegas franchise. And he feels a tad vindicated, though not completely satisfied, by the $2.5-million settlement the NCAA sent his way in 1998.

Tark’s act has played well in Fresno, especially among his fellow 40,000 Armenian Americans, and, unlike his Vegas days, he prefers to play it low-key here, hanging in lunch spots such as the Bulldog Brewing Company and after-game hangouts like the Elbow Room.

But his return to the coaching ranks has been anything but Machiavellian, considering his NCAA drought.

Even though he has yet to re-up on the one-year contract he signed last spring, there is work to do, film to watch.

A flash of that vaunted amoeba defense and the running game for which he has such an affinity flashes on the screen. But just as quickly, it’s gone, his depleted squad forced to play a slow, deliberate half-court game.

“I don’t even enjoy watching our tapes because it’s not the way I want to play,” said Tarkanian, who began his career as a high school coach in Fresno. “We don’t play with defensive intensity, we don’t pressure, we don’t deny, we don’t do the things I want to do. And every year we’ve got to back off [because we’re missing players].

“Sometimes I get real frustrated and I think that I’ll just go back to Vegas and retire,” he added. “And then I keep thinking that I haven’t finished what I came here to do and I’m just stubborn enough that I want to do it.”

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Shark Count

A look at Fresno State basketball Coach Jerry Tarkanian:

MOST 20-WIN SEASONS

1. Dean Smith: 30

2. Jerry Tarkanian: 28

3. Bob Knight: 23

3. Adolph Rupp: 23

5. Denny Crum: 21

TOP WINNING PERCENTAGE

* 1. Clair Bee (412-87): .826

* 2. Adolph Rupp (876-190): .822