THE MEN WHO MADE LAS VEGAS

–the 9TH IN a 12-part series by Byron Craft

TARK THE SHARK

Whatever fame the University of Nevada, Las Vegas enjoys nationally, rests largely on its Jerry-built basketball program. Jerry Tarkanian put UNLV on the map, bringing both prosperity and negative publicity to the university and its basketball program. Also known as “Tark the Shark,” he is the coach with the highest number of wins in college basketball history. Tarkanian is also well remembered for his colorful behavior, including habitually chewing on a towel during games, his public criticisms as well as his legendary clashes with the NCAA, which eventually paid Tarkanian the largest settlement in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s history.

Jerry Tarkanian’s mother was a refugee from the genocide that killed more than two million Armenians. It was a terrible event that sent his mother to America. Jerry’s grandfather, Mickael Effendi Tarkhanian, was a government official. His oldest son, Mehran, was a medical student. Turkish militiamen arrested Mickael Tarkhanian and forced him to watch while they beheaded his son. Then the elder Tarkhanian was himself executed.

Jerry’s grandmother immediately sent her other young son and one of her four daughters fleeing on horseback. As brother and sister climbed a hill not far from town, they turned and saw soldiers forcing women and children into a church. The soldiers locked the doors and burned the church to the ground.

Later, after escaping to Lebanon, Haigouhie (the sister) married a man coincidently with a name very similar to her father’s. She migrated with her husband to the United States where she became known as Rosie Tarkanian. The couple settled in Euclid, Ohio, and in 1930, Jerry was born.

Eighteen years later, high school athlete Jerry Tarkanian won an athletic scholarship to Fresno State University. Unfortunately Fresno’s athletic program was dirt poor back then and the scholarship was only worth fifty dollars paid once every three months. Tarkanian supplemented his scholarship by serving as a personal aide to football coach Clark Van Galder. Coach Van Galder ended up being one of the greatest influences on Tarkanian’s life. “He was an extraordinarily intense individual, and he demanded equal intensity from his players,” Jerry Tarkanian once wrote. “How he got it was by becoming close with them, by forging an emotional bond. He would take me and my roommate Fred Bistrick, Fresno’s quarterback, to the high school games with him. ... We spent a lot of time with his family.”

Most coaches in those days were generals on the field, goal focused and aloof, which made Van Galder a rebel. Tarkanian adopted Clark Van Galder’s creed and toted it over to the basketball gym. The Tark was too short and too slow for the first string, but had dedication and a gift for analyzing plays. Eventually, when his eligibility ran out, Tarkanian helped coach at a nearby high school. He proved so good he became head coach, in function if not in title, while still attending college. Years later, one of the many accolades on his resume was that he became known as one of the few college coaches who had never been an assistant.

Within a short time Jerry had coached at four high schools in California and then moved to college ball at Riverside City College. Riverside hadn’t had a winning season in eleven years. With Tarkanian at the helm, Riverside became the first team to win three consecutive state junior college championships. Moving to Pasadena City College in 1966, he converted another terrible team to state champions in his first year.

Tarkanian moved to Division I basketball as coach at Long Beach State from 1968–1973, where “the Shark” was among the first coaches to use more than 3 black starters out of five, violating an unwritten rule at the time and pioneered the use of Junior College athletes. Most four-year coaches considered junior college players second rate material, but they had helped Tarkanian build his name. He boasted that when he first took a team to the NCAA tournament from Long Beach in 1970, the entire first string consisted of former junior college men. Long Beach State soon became a regional power. Soon Tark the Shark’s reliance on junior college men contained the seeds of controversy. Tarkanian’s approach provoked complaints that he was running a “renegade program” built upon less than stellar students. Richard O. Davies, a University of Nevada history professor, in his book on controversial Nevadans, The Maverick Spirit, acknowledged that Tarkanian was one of the first to ignore the starting players three white rule. “This dramatic departure from racial convention established Tarkanian in the black community as a coach who not only talked about equal opportunity, but actually practiced it. This reputation would pay great recruiting dividends later in his career.”

UNLV boosters were not interested in the color of its players, either. They were interested in a coach who had put the obscure Long Beach State College onto the map by winning 122 games and losing only 20 in five years. When UNLV’s academic vice president hired Tarkanian, no one else was seriously considered.

Irwin Molasky, a wealthy Vegas businessman noted for supporting UNLV, said he wasn’t on the team that recruited Tarkanian, but understood their thinking. “For us to become the Harvard of the West would take 50 to 100 years, but in a limited amount of time he got us a lot of recognition.”

Tark the Shark’s first season was 20-6.

UNLV was originally famous for its slow, methodical play, but when Tarkanian came on board, he adopted an entirely new style. The second season found him with players who were short, by basketball standards, but could run like antelope. “I figured that if we got the bigger teams running, it would take away their size advantage. Rather than work the ball around the perimeter, I wanted us to get the ball up the court as fast as possible, and then take a quick jumper before the defense could set up.” Speed was the determining factor in the game. The team that got the rebounds would be the team that hustled for the ball more and reached it first, not necessarily the taller ones.

The strategy also required using a man-to-man defense instead of the zone defense that was Tarkanian’s celebrated forte. UNLV lost the first three games they played in the new style, but came together in the fourth and finished the season 24-5. The Rebels became the Runnin’ Rebels.

Of course the fans loved the non-traditional game. It had the energy of a high school game played with a lot more skill. Some even thought it looked like an NBA game. The 1975 team often scored more than 100 points a game and set a collegiate record of 164 points against Hawaii. They went to the NCAA tournament that year. In 1977 the University of Nevada, Las Vegas played in the semifinals, losing only 84-83 to North Carolina. Donald H. Baepler, then president of UNLV, said, “Prior to 1977, I had to explain at national meetings, ‘Yes, there is a university in Las Vegas.’ And after that, they knew.”

Success meant being taken seriously by the Nevada Legislature. They had treated UNLV in the past as a stepchild to the “real” university in Reno. Before the university hired Jerry Tarkanian, they dreamt of having a big facility and knew they had to have a big program to get it. The faculty thought Jerry could do that and he did. The Las Vegas Convention Center, where UNLV used to play its games, would sell out. There was a big demand for tickets and thus they were able to document the need for a bigger stadium.

Opening in December of 1983, the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas brought UNLV’s most high profile program onto the campus. The multipurpose arena lovingly became known as “The Shark Tank”, but it also would allow Las Vegas to host the National Finals Rodeo, as well as other events and concerts.

Storms have a tendency to move northeast in the Mojave Desert. A big one followed Tarkanian from Long Beach. Tark claimed it started when he wrote a newspaper column criticizing the NCAA. “It’s a crime that Western Kentucky is on probation, but the famous University of Kentucky isn’t even investigated,” he wrote. “The University of Kentucky basketball program breaks more rules in a day than Western Kentucky does in a year. The NCAA doesn’t want to take on the big boys.”

Quicker than a jackrabbit, the NCAA announced not only an investigation of Tark’s Long Beach program, but that it was also reopening a dormant investigation of the UNLV program he had just agreed to head up. By 1976, the NCAA charged UNLV with 10 major infractions of its rules, including one charge that Tarkanian had arranged for player David Vaughan to receive a “B” in a class without even attending it, had arranged for a player to get free clothing, and had arranged for players to travel free on airplanes chartered by casinos. Tarkanian expressed outrage at the grade fixing charge and denied the clothing comp. Regarding the junkets, Tarkanian said that he pointed out to the junket operators that NCAA rules required the plane seats be available to other students as well as players, then provided his players with a telephone number for the operators. The university conducted its own investigation, but was unable to corroborate the charges. The NCAA found UNLV guilty of all charges anyway and ordered Jerry Tarkanian removed from contact with the UNLV program for two years.

Tark the Shark sued. In October 1977, District Court Judge James Brennan granted a permanent injunction prohibiting the suspension. NCAA investigator David Berst “threatened, coerced, promised immunity, promised rewards to athletes in his effort to obtain derogatory evidence against the plaintiff,” Brennan wrote. Tarkanian had won, but it was only the first round. Each succeeding year brought new allegations, some leveled by the NCAA, some by the local media – accusations about players driving luxury cars of cloudy titles or players involved in brawls and petty crimes.

The most infamous case was the recruitment of Lloyd Daniels, a Brooklyn playground legend. A report by the Long Island Newsday said this alleged scholar was functionally illiterate and had failed to get a high school degree from any of five high schools… Tarkanian said Daniels was dyslexic, not illiterate. An unknown benefactor provided Daniels with a car, which was against NCAA rules. Arrangements for the young man were made for him to live in Las Vegas rent free. In what many speculated was an attempt to circumvent rules limiting the amount of contact coaching staff could spend grooming a prospect, assistant basketball coach Mark Warkentien became Daniels’ legal guardian.

Early in 1987 Daniels was caught buying cocaine from an undercover police officer. The buy was videotaped by a local television station covering the sting operation. Despite his reputation as “the Father Flanagan of college basketball,” Jerry Tarkanian said there was such a thing as a boy too bad to play for UNLV and Daniels was him.

Dr. Paul Burns was UNLV’s faculty athletics representative from 1985 to 1994, in charge of verifying the academic eligibility. “It struck me as odd that he [Tarkanian] made some of his biggest mistakes when he was at the peak of his career, when he could have his pick of a lot of players,” said Burns. “Recruiting Lloyd Daniels and letting Mark Warkentien become his legal guardian; those things are beyond the pale.” Some thought that the Tark was trying to help a troubled albeit talented kid. Almost disparate in his opinion, Dr. Paul Burns later stated that never once did Tarkanian or his staff exert pressure to bend academic rules.

The next character to come into play was Dr. Robert Maxson, recruited as president from the University of Houston in 1983, to do for UNLV’s academic reputation what Tarkanian had done for its athletic one. He did advance UNLV’s national academic image, but ultimately at the price of its most successful athletic program. Tarkanian cannot be assessed without assessing Bob Maxson. They both became historically inseparable. The two were embroiled in heated arguments where neither man controlled his logic or emotion. Career wise, they destroyed each other. The fight also divided Las Vegas. Maxson tried, initially, to make Tarkanian an ally, escorting important guests to UNLV basketball games. When an NCAA ban on post season play effectively prohibited the champions from defending their title, Maxson helped work out a
compromise that delayed the ban until 1992. However the relationship quickly soured when Maxson forced the resignation of

Brad Rothermel, the most successful athletic director UNLV ever had, and replaced him with Dennis Finfrock, a man who was no fan of Tarkanian. Rothermel later told a committee of the Nevada Legislature investigating the Maxson-Tarkanian feud, that Maxson asked him soon after arriving at UNLV, whether he had evidence that could be used to fire Tarkanian. Many fans conjectured that it wasn’t Tarkanian that was hated by a few on the university staff, rather it was his success they hated. It is difficult for some to work alongside an icon when their own life’s work wasn’t notable.

Rumors that most disturbed Maxson alleged that Richard Perry, a New York gambler who had been convicted in a basketball point shaving scandal, was hanging around the UNLV program. It turned out that Perry had helped UNLV land the ill-fated recruit, Daniels. Close association with any gambler was prohibited by NCAA rules. Hanging out with a Mafia associate famous for fixing basketball games looked infinitely worse. Tarkanian said he initially knew Perry only as a summer league coach who spotted great unknown talents. Once Perry was identified as the infamous “Richie The Fixer”, Tarkanian warned his players to keep away from him and Tark did the same.

The 1990-91 team produced the finest record UNLV ever had, thirty-four wins and zero losses only later to lose to Duke 79-77 in the 1991 NCAA semifinals. Duke had been the team that UNLV had eaten alive in the 1990 championship, scoring 103-73.

It came to a head on May 26, 1991, when the Las Vegas Review-Journal published photos of Perry sharing his backyard hot tub and playing basketball on his backyard court with three members of the 1990 championship team. The photos were believed to have been taken in the fall of 1989, months after Tarkanian told his players to stay away from Perry. One of the three, Anderson Hunt, subsequently admitted visiting Perry’s home sometime after the 1990 championship, along with another UNLV player he didn’t identify.

On June 7, Tarkanian resigned. His attorneys had worked out an agreement that he would be allowed to coach the team one more year, when it would be banned from post-season play in any case.

Although the FBI issued a curious, albeit somewhat encouraging statement, that “neither the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, nor its present or former basketball players are subjects or targets of a point-shaving investigation,” their actions spoke otherwise, because at least four people were questioned by FBI agents about Perry’s relationship to the team, or whether points might have been shaved. Nothing came of the investigation, but Perry subsequently was added to Nevada’s “Black Book” of people who are not allowed in any gambling establishment.

The 1991-92 Rebels, playing for pride instead of the playoffs, delivered 26 victories and lost only twice. Tark’s last game for UNLV, on March 3, 1992, was a 65-53 victory over Utah State. The Review-Journal headline the next morning printed, “Tark goes out a winner.” Maxson was gone two years later.

After leaving UNLV in 1992, Tarkanian coached the San Antonio Spurs briefly, but didn’t get along with the owner and was fired. He resumed college coaching at Fresno State and during that time he used a $1.3 million settlement from the Spurs to fund a lawsuit against the NCAA. By April of 1998, the National Collegiate Athletic Association announced it was paying $2.5 million to Tarkanian. It never quite admitted harassing Tarkanian, but vowed “some improvements in the enforcement process ...” To Tarkanian, it sounded like vindication.

Jerry Tarkanian had never suffered a losing season in 36 years at the major college and junior college levels. He is married to Las Vegas city councilwoman Lois Tarkanian. They have four children and ten grandchildren. One of their sons, Danny Tarkanian, was an All-American college basketball player while playing for Jerry Tarkanian at UNLV. He won the Republican nomination for Nevada Secretary of State in the 2006 primary, but lost in the general election. In 2010, he mounted an unsuccessful Republican primary campaign for the U.S. Senate seat held by Harry Reid. Jerry Tarkanian also started a basketball school in Las Vegas, named the Tarkanian Basketball Academy. His granddaughter, Dannielle Diamant, plays for Northwestern University women’s basketball team.

In January of 2010, the Associated Press reported: “Jerry Tarkanian still pulls no punches when talking about the NCAA. The former UNLV coach said he thinks the college sports governing body is ‘the crooked-est organization in our society,’ drawing several laughs during a luncheon at the Downtown Tip-Off Club in North Little Rock, Ark.” NCAA spokesman Erik Christianson said in an e-mail that Tarkanian’s comments were “off-base and ridiculous.”

Even after retirement, the Tark is still the Shark! SLV

The Men Who Made Las Vegas is a twelve-part series
by Byron Craft chronicling the growth of Sin City
and the men who made it possible.

Issue 65 featuring: Zoe Voss, Jessie Andrews & Virginia Mae