Columnist Jeff German: Winning is best way to embrace Tarkanian

Friday, Aug. 12, 2005 | 5:52 a.m.

Jeff German's column appears Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays in the Sun. Reach him at german@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4067.

WEEKEND EDITION

August 13-14, 2005

It's not guaranteed to bring back the winning ways of UNLV's once-mighty Runnin' Rebels.

But naming the basketball court at the Thomas & Mack Center after Jerry Tarkanian, the team's legendary former coach, is a chance to finally heal the wounds that ripped apart the community in 1992 when he was driven away under the weight of an NCAA investigation.

"It's going to take some of the bitterness out," the 75-year-old Tarkanian says. "Everybody still misses those days and wants those days to return."

Every time I talk to Tarkanian, who guided UNLV to an NCAA championship in 1990, he reminds me of how much greater he believes the Runnin' Rebels were destined to become under his leadership.

"We would be where Duke is right now," he says. "I wouldn't be surprised if we had three or four more championships. We were going to dominate college basketball."

But it wasn't meant to be.

Instead, the Runnin' Rebels have gone through a string of less-talented coaches and wallowed in mediocrity over the last 13 years. They have lost their national reputation on the basketball court and, along with it, the support of a community that once revered them.

You had to be at the Thomas & Mack Center in the Tarkanian era to appreciate what the colorful coach meant to the fans.

There you'd be in "Tark's Shark Tank," packed to capacity with 18,000 roaring fans, watching college powerhouse after powerhouse get their behinds whipped by Tarkanian's star-studded teams. It all usually unfolded in front of a national television audience that couldn't get enough of the high-flying Runnin' Rebels.

When you left the Thomas & Mack Center in those days, most of the time you left with a smile on your face.

Today, Tarkanian still believes that his untimely departure, after 19 years at the helm, was orchestrated by his own university president, Bob Maxson, to curry favor with the NCAA, which had been on Tarkanian's tail much of his celebrated career.

But Maxson, like Tarkanian, is also long gone from UNLV.

And UNLV's current president, Carol Harter, says it's time once more to embrace one of the winningest coaches in NCAA history. Harter is hoping the move to name the basketball court after Tarkanian will bring back the fans.

"Its time has come," says developer Irwin Molasky, a wealthy UNLV donor who helped bring Tarkanian to Las Vegas from Long Beach State in 1973. "Hopefully, this will go a long way toward easing some of the hurt feelings out there in the community."

Bob Goldberg, a longtime basketball fan who has remained loyal to the program all these years, recalls how ugly things had gotten between Tarkanian and Maxson. Even the influential boosters were at each other's throats.

At one point the Maxson administration was paying students to spy on the players and planting video surveillance cameras in the practice gym in the hopes of finding NCAA violations.

"It was a terrible atmosphere," Goldberg says.

That animosity festered even after Tarkanian left in 1992.

A few weeks after his departure, a bronze bust of Tarkanian, displayed in a glass case, mysteriously disappeared from the hallway of the main entrance to the Thomas & Mack Center. The bust later showed up at the Southern Nevada Sports Hall of Fame.

University officials may have tried to remove Tarkanian's face from the arena, but they couldn't remove his legacy -- the championship banners hanging from the rafters, including the prized 1990 NCAA banner.

And so now, with time filtering out some of the bad memories, the basketball court Tarkanian made famous is being named in his honor in an effort to recapture the glory years.

But, as Goldberg reminds us, there's really only one way for UNLV and its Runnin' Rebels to win back the hearts of the community.

"They have to do what Jerry did," he says. "They have to win."