The Shark Gets A Ruling With Bite

It was a case with enough extraordinary elements to lift it far above the run-of-the-mill NCAA vs. State U. tiff over basketball recruiting violations. At the start there were allegations of bought players, illegal transportation of prospects, fraudulent grades and illegal cash handouts. Along the way came claims of vendettas, intimidation of witnesses, covert wiretappings and overt lying. And at the end there was a judge's decision that may have far-reaching effects on the governing of college sports.

The massive cast included an ornithologist become university president, the Nevada attorney general's office, the NCAA staff, numerous ghetto athletes, a head coach's impassioned wife, a freelance playground scout from Brooklyn, an ex-coach suddenly born again and enough attorneys to fill a free-throw lane.

The case began six years ago when the NCAA opened an investigation of alleged basketball recruiting violations by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and its coach, Jerry Tarkanian, and its former coach, John Bayer. The case was supposedly closed on Aug. 23 this year, when after numerous hearings and reviews the NCAA informed Las Vegas that its basketball team would be put on probation for two years. Included in the judgment was a recommendation that both Bayer and Tarkanian be barred from all formal or informal participation in the school's athletic program—Tarkanian for the duration of the probation, Bayer forever.

Bayer took the blow quietly. He had already disassociated himself from the athletic program, having shifted to the UNLV physical education department when Tarkanian arrived in 1973 to coach the basketball team. Tarkanian's position was quite different. Though deemed by many college basketball insiders to be the perfect fall guy, he refused to go down. Not only would the suspension cost him his job for two years, but it would also mean loss of income from his biweekly newspaper column, his TV and radio programs, his summer camps and his lectures at basketball clinics. The NCAA's case, he claimed, was a trumped-up arrangement, a vendetta to get him out of coaching. "Ever since I wrote a column blasting the NCAA while I was at Long Beach State, they've been after me," Tarkanian says. His attorney, Sam Lionel, asserts that the NCAA Committee on Infractions simply will not listen to fact. "Jerry has been denied due process, which is completely wrong," Lionel says. "But even without due process, the man is innocent."

In hopes of obtaining a permanent injunction against the suspension, Tarkanian filed suit on Sept. 8 against the university in Nevada's Eighth Judicial District Court. It was a move loaded with irony, because until Tarkanian's suspension the school had been squarely in his corner. Indeed, UNLV President Donald Baepler, an ornithology professor and a tropical bird expert, had written letters to the NCAA proclaiming his coach's innocence. The irony was compounded when the Nevada attorney general's office, which normally would defend the state institution in such a case, refused to get involved. "Our own 21 months of investigation showed conclusively that Jerry was not guilty," says Deputy Attorney General Brian McKay.

Because the NCAA is a voluntary organization—that is, no school is required to join it—and had only "recommended" that Tarkanian be suspended, it was not cited in the coach's suit. Nevertheless, it obviously had a lot at stake in the case. A Tarkanian victory in court would be a sharp slap at the NCAA and would call into question its investigatory and enforcement procedures. The most immediate result would be an undermining of the so-called "Tarkanian Rule" enacted by the NCAA in 1975 after Tarkanian had abruptly left Long Beach State—which was about to go on probation—for Vegas. The regulation stipulates that a coach who has been suspended may not shift to another member college without his new school losing its eligibility to appear in postseason play for two years. Many of Tarkanian's supporters maintain that it was his opportune transfer from Long Beach to UNLV, not any newspaper column, that put the NCAA so relentlessly on his trail.

And a Tarkanian victory would be an open invitation to other coaches who might be suspended to bring their cases before the bar. In effect, that would take a large measure of the NCAA's disciplinary power over college athletics out of its hands and rest it with the courts. Of course, though the NCAA might lose its authority over individuals, it would still be able to take action against universities, and this became a cause for concern at UNLV. If UNLV reinstated Tarkanian at the court's order, the NCAA technically could put the school on indefinite probation for not following the NCAA's recommendation to suspend him. According to the rules, the NCAA could even suspend Las Vegas from the association. However, it is questionable whether the NCAA could make either of these penalties stick if Tarkanian chose to return to the courts to sue for a second injunction to protect his livelihood.

As the date for Tarkanian's hearing grew near, he and his outspoken wife Lois, who is studying for her doctorate in clinical psychology and preparing a book on her husband's coaching career that can only be described as an apologia, told their story to anyone who would listen. They encountered plenty of skeptics. Tarkanian, stocky and swarthy, unfortunately looks like a shady operator and even more unfortunately has the nickname Tark the Shark. He has been a marked man for years.

When he brought unheralded Long Beach State to overnight national prominence in the early '70s, he aroused suspicions that he had cut recruiting corners. Indeed, a subsequent NCAA investigation showed that the Long Beach basketball program under Tarkanian was guilty of 23 infractions. And his departure for Las Vegas and his sudden success there have not helped him gain a reputation as a rule-abiding coach, either.

"The problem is I get black kids from the ghetto, a lot of kids other coaches are afraid to recruit, and nobody can believe I don't give them anything," he says. "My reputation has been ruined. My goal in life now is to expose the NCAA for the fraud it is."