Commitment to Tarkanian Is Truly for Better or Worse

Liking Jerry Tarkanian, rooting for him even when his players weren’t graduating or sometimes even going to class, when they’d be arrested or suspended, when his team was on probation or headed there, has always been a guilty pleasure.

Despite the sleazy image of his players in a hot tub with a convicted sports fixer, the academic shortcomings in most of his programs, the players who tried their luck with samurai swords as weapons of destruction, despite his career-long battle with the NCAA and all the recruiting irregularities, Tark was hard to root against.

Apparently, Tarkanian, 71, will retire today from his job coaching Fresno State. Temple Coach John Chaney seemed to make the announcement for Tarkanian on Wednesday night. After Chaney’s Temple team had eliminated Tark’s Bulldogs from the NIT, Chaney grabbed a microphone and told the Selland Arena crowd in Fresno how much they were going to miss Tarkanian.

And it was Cincinnati Coach Bob Huggins, speaking during NCAA tournament media day, who quickly put his finger on why so many people will miss Tark.

“I think what Tark gave us was the idea that anybody can think they have a chance,” Huggins said Thursday. “Some of the places he went to, Tark never should have had a chance. He goes to Long Beach and he challenges UCLA and USC for superiority on the West Coast. That shouldn’t have happened. He went to Vegas. They didn’t even have a gym in Vegas.”

It always seemed best to know as little as possible about how Tark put together a team. Kind of like it being better not to know how sausage is made--if you knew, your stomach would turn.

Tark’s teams were like that.

He’d take them to NCAA tournaments, a collection of hard guys who’d had hard lives and who were proud to be loathed by the NCAA. If the world wanted to look at Tark’s players as thugs or nonstudent-athletes or unworthy of being on the same court as Duke or UCLA or Kansas or North Carolina, that was fine with Tark and his players.

The conundrum about Tark was always whether he was to be admired for taking kids others wouldn’t stomach, giving them a chance, offering opportunities where others saw only trouble, for proudly exposing the NCAA as hypocritical, for flouting rules publicly that others flouted secretly; or whether he was to be disdained as the epitome of what is wrong with college sports, for his lowering of standards instead of his giving of chances, for his encouragement of cheating instead of his advocacy of the underdog.

There’s never been an argument about whether Tarkanian always followed NCAA rules. Of course, he didn’t. Tark’s point always was that neither did anybody else, mostly.

Tark has always wanted to take rough-edged basketball players and make them winners. He wanted his kids, who wore tattered jeans and worn sneakers, to beat the other kids, the ones at the fancy places, the ones wearing designer suits and alligator shoes, the ones who flew on university charters and who were always on TV. He wanted his kids to win because they played harder, tougher, more desperately.

If he broke rules, if he brought to college some basketball players who weren’t students, if he brought onto campus some bad kids who resisted redemption and committed crimes, if he excused overzealous alumni as good-hearted citizens trying only to help an underprivileged teenager, Tark could still come off as the good guy.

The first real notice of Tark for many of us came back in 1977 at the Final Four in Atlanta.

The Nevada Las Vegas fans were so noncollegiate in their red windbreakers and deep tans, with almost every man wearing a pinkie ring and with seemingly so little connection to college basketball, especially when they were standing in the hotel lobby next to North Carolina fans and their suit coats and sense of history.

And the way Tark’s Runnin’ Rebels played basketball, at such a fast pace, with such desperate ferocity and with such a purpose. Who were those guys? Were they the uncoachable punks who some saw or were they amazingly focused underdogs with righteous anger on their side?

One day, at another NCAA tournament, Tark stood in a hotel lobby talking to the national media on the eve of a Kentucky-UNLV game. Tark was passionate as usual. There was no way, he said, that UNLV could ever compete with a program such as Kentucky’s. The NCAA wouldn’t let it happen. The power structure wouldn’t let it happen.

But Tark made it happen.

His UNLV teams of the early 1990s were a “program.” There was a national title and another finals appearance. Tark’s teams were playing the Dukes, the Kentuckys, the North Carolinas. They were equal.

And then we found out how the sausage was made. The NCAA got Tark. Probation came, Tark spent an unhappy partial season in the NBA, then an unhappier time in retirement.

He returned to college, to Fresno State, his alma mater, and the Bulldogs played ferociously and the players got in trouble and Tark kept railing at the NCAA and how the collegiate powerhouses were never going to let the UNLVs or Fresno States make it to the top. As Tark was always fond of saying, NCAA investigators could always find their way to Vegas or Fresno but never to Westwood.

If Tark had coached Gonzaga this year and the Bulldogs had gotten worked over with that No. 6 seeding instead of a No. 2 or No. 3, Tark would have gone bonkers, would have called out the NCAA officials, would have made it a crusade to mock every member of the NCAA selection committee. If Tark had coached the 25-5 Butler Bulldogs this season, when the Bulldogs were left out of the NCAA tournament, his indignation would have made even the selectors flinch.

What a delicious thought this would be--if Tark could be invited to join that NCAA selection committee. If only his voice yelling, “Give the little guy a chance,” could be heard. Or if only Tark could be invited to join the NCAA enforcement committee so that every time an NCAA investigator went searching at a UNLV, one would go searching at a “program.” Tark using his power for “good” instead of “evil.”

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.