Shark's bite

Tarkanian will be missed for his hatred of hoop hypocrisy

So Tark has thrown in the game's most famous towel. His very own Javert, NCAA gumshoe Dave Berst, is surely smiling somewhere.

As I take in the NCAA subregional in Washington, D.C., a continent away from Fresno, where Jerry Tarkanian played his first college game and coached his last, a smile comes to me, too -- but not in the same spirit.

I might be presumed to join in a goodbye and good riddance to the man whose multiple contraventions of NCAA rules sustained one of the longest-running stories in basketball. I am, after all, someone who has spent much of his career chronicling and deploring abuses in college sports. A magazine of political thought -- a magazine of conservative political thought -- once ripped me for being a "bluestocking."

Why, then, will I miss Tark so?

He detested hypocrisy. He was, in a roguish and bracing way, honest. Of a recruit who slipped away, he once said, "We got vanned." And "I love transfers because their cars are already paid for." Watching others -- better-connected or better-coiffed -- get a pass from the NCAA's enforcement staff, he refused to abide by the coaches' code, that mutual-protection racket governed by a Sicilian omerta. He pointed fingers, named names. E.g., Arizona. Lute Olson. "Midnight Lute," he said, cackling.

Oh, Tark and his spinners tried to make him over -- tried to peddle that storyline about the Father Flanagan of the desert, persecuted by Berst, who did once call him a "rug merchant." Tark would protest his innocence in an obligatory way, but always with such halfheartedness -- laced with world-weariness -- that we all knew better. I certainly did; once, about to leave Vegas after doing some reporting for an innocuous father-son piece about Tark and his point-guard son, Danny, he promised me the favors of a hooker the next time I came through town. That kind of oafishness explains why he was forever on the lam.

But then easy women are the coin of the college basketball realm -- along with easy cash, easy grades and easy SUVs. More than ever at this time of year, when the NCAA and CBS clog the airwaves with oily PSAs about "student-athletes," I long for Tark and his contempt for the veneer.

There are many other, pure basketball reasons to rue Tarkanian's leaving. He refused to hire assistants who played golf, believing that a coach's dedication to the game should be year-round and unalloyed. He made a fetish of defense even when fielding his most offensively gifted teams. He met the test coaches have for one another, winning big with different kinds of talent -- playing walk-it-up at Long Beach State; playing double-time at UNLV.

He was the first person to tell me of the promise of a New York City playground prodigy named Lloyd Daniels. A high-school dropout, Daniels had no business going to college, of course. Tark brought him to Vegas anyway, of course. The recruit was -- of course -- ultimately as star-crossed as the recruiter. A tragic-hero player for a tragic-hero coach.

If you hang around the college game long enough, it's impossible not to develop a bicameral mind, to better compartmentalize the virtues of the game and the vices of those who make a business of it. The backroom bid-fixers, the transcript tamperers, the men who spout phrases like "f------ Mexican idiot" in one breath and tell you they're builders of character in the next -- they get shunted into one chamber. The other chamber I permit to govern my thinking at this time of year; it houses grace, devotion, even those concepts that have been appropriated by the shoe companies, like "respect" and "love."

Tark had a place in both sides of my b-ball brain. But today I recall the man who first described Lloyd Daniels to me, and the aching appreciation of the aesthete in his voice as he said, "He throws the softest pass ..."

Basketball does not wear Armani. Basketball wears terrycloth. Here's to the nudist who pointed out that the emperor has no clothes.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Alexander Wolff is the author of Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure (Warner Books), available online and in stores everywhere. You can contact him at biggamesmallworld.com.

 

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