Friday, April 3, 1998 | 6:20 a.m.
IT WOULD have been a juicy confrontation.
On the plaintiff's side there was an abundance of bitterness and a barrelful of resentment. There were damaged feelings and a therapeutic need for a public washing of the issues.
Add in Jerry Tarkanian's penchant for telling it like it is and his trial with the National Collegiate Athletic Association would have been great theatre. Given his outspokenness, the stories that figured to emerge may have been weighted in his favor yet it was an assignment that tapped the salivary glands.
And, at last, the trial date was in sight: May 18. Twenty-one years after he initially sought legal counsel and seven years after this particular case was entered into the court system, Tarkanian was closing in on the satisfaction -- if not the vindication -- he and his supporters had yearned for since, well, at least since he had been deposed as UNLV basketball coach in 1992.
It was a long-awaited showdown that was certain to produce angst, distress and all kinds of other heightened emotions. Courtroom seating would have been at a premium.
But then the usually indestructible and deep-pocketed NCAA had a change of heart. With the trial nearing fruition, it sent up the white flag.
Hat in hand, it approached Tark's attorney, Terry Giles, and offered him $800,000 and Tarkanian $1.7 million in exchange for withdrawing the suit. Just like that, it vanished from the court ledger.
"They screwed me and they know they did," Tarkanian said of the NCAA during a conference call Thursday. "And they knew I would never give up."
A series of mock trials convinced the NCAA it couldn't win. Supposedly using jurists pulled from Clark County, the mock trials inevitably ended with Tarkanian's hand raised in victory.
Discretion being the better part of valor, the NCAA capitulated without putting up its usual good fight. That decision not only brings to an end a long-running soap opera, it demonstrates the NCAA was, indeed, working overtime while trying to sully Tarkanian's reputation and drive him from college basketball.
"No, it does not," disagreed NCAA executive director Cedric Dempsey, who also took part in the conference call. He offered the rebuttal in spite of the facts and in spite of the cashier's check his agency had just sent by express mail to Tarkanian's Las Vegas address.
Dempsey was merely painting with the in-denial brush. The NCAA lost the mock trials and would have lost the real one, Giles said, because for all the testimony it would have presented from ex-players, boosters and university officials, it had nothing concrete to support the probations it handed out to Tarkanian-coached teams at both UNLV and Long Beach State.
It was guilty of a prolonged harassment that Tarkanian would claim "beat the hell out of me." More to the point, the NCAA knew a commiserative jury was going to hear that plea and was apt to extract a little revenge.
So it withdrew from this potentially volatile clash before the explosions could result in banner headlines and "film at 6." It put a cap on the drama with some good old-fashioned payola.
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