The night Tark zinged Fresno State, and nobody could pin it on him
The party was in his honor, and he didn’t want to be there. These weren’t his people – the stuffed shirts, the empty suits, the clowns he spent a career fighting. All of it was disingenuous anyway. They didn’t want him there, either.
Never one to let a potential victory slip away, Jerry Tarkanian waved me over. My first job out of college was covering Fresno State basketball’s first season after Tark, and I’d grown to appreciate his humor, his honesty and, best of all, his joy in embarrassing authority figures.
The din of the party was loud enough where Tark motioned me closer, so I could hear his whisper.
“Make sure you’re watching halftime tonight,” he said.
[The sports world reacts to the death of Jerry Tarkanian]
Of course I’d be watching. Fresno State finally was honoring the contributions of Tarkanian, its longtime coach and a legend for his years at UNLV, at the Save Mart Center, the on-campus arena that opened a few months earlier. In a town with a disproportionately large Armenian community, Tark was the patron saint. When he asked for donations, people gave. Even though it was more than happy to accept money procured by Tark, Fresno State didn’t dare name the arena’s court after him, not with the sting of academic violations under his watch still fresh.
Instead, the school named the arena’s basketball wing after him. One of Tark’s friends that night joked: “They might as well have named the men’s bathroom after him, because they [expletive] all over him.”
Tark smiled when I asked what he thought.
“Just watch,” he said.
It was a Thursday night. There were 13,535 people at the arena, most of them to see Tark, because Fresno State was a mess of a team. Its best player got kicked off the team and later was convicted of first-degree murder. Another who was booted ended up in jail for possession with intent to deliver. The coach got hit with a three-year, show-cause penalty for illegal recruiting. And people thought Tark ran a dirty program.
He meandered his way to midcourt at intermission so Fresno State could officially honor him by not honoring him. Tark was 73, and though he long ago had given up giving a damn, he found himself especially aggrieved by those who wanted to act like they had power. The man of the people wielded the truest power, and nobody spoke to the people of Fresno quite like Jerry Tarkanian, who sidled up to a microphone to address the crowd.
“I just want to thank everybody for the support I received in my time coaching here at UNL ... ”
There was an audible gasp. Laughter followed. Tark wore a sheepish look. Of all the things he could’ve done – run to the media wondering why the school was railroading him, withheld the money until he got a promise the court would be named after him, cut off the school’s Armenian lifeline – Tark chose the Tarkest of all: the one nobody could pin on him.
When Jerry Tarkanian died at 84 on Wednesday, I immediately thought about the time he gave Fresno State the finger and only the people to whom he gave it knew. He spent his whole career flipping off the NCAA and the moralists who denigrated him and the hypocritical establishment that leeched off him amid the demonization. All that time spent trying to portray him as the villain, and his death has brought out more celebration of his life, more great stories, more love than any real villain could ever get.
When I saw Tark a few days later, I said to him: “So, UNL ... ” I wanted to make sure that was why he asked me to watch at halftime.
Tark smiled and didn’t say a word. Like always, the victory was his.
