When two iconic figures die within a week’s time, it’s hard for the larger community of human beings to find the space and clarity that are needed to fully recognize the contributions of both people, now gone.
How much more difficult it is, then, when two iconic figures die within a week’s time… and they both occupy the same field of human endeavor.
Dean Smith and now Jerry Tarkanian have left this Earth… and a college basketball community that has not had a chance to breathe.
Just when the memory of Smith was settling into the public consciousness after a few days of reminiscing, Tarkanian died. What had been a continuous outpouring of affection and appreciation from the state of North Carolina — one of the cradles of college basketball in this country — has given way to an expression of admiration for how Tark the Shark’s UNLV teams of the early 1990s captured our attention in ways few teams ever have… or ever will.
The contrasts are immediately recognizable and striking.
Smith’s four-corner offense. Tark’s amoeba zone defense.
Smith’s patient approach. UNLV’s high-energy, always-attacking style.
Smith not only attended the University of Kansas; he played for Phog Allen, who learned the game directly from its founder, James Naismith. As a college student-athlete, Smith won one of Kansas’s three national championships in 1952.
Tark pulled his way through Fresno State and a brief, unremarkable collegiate playing career following a hardscrabble upbringing in an Armenian-American immigrant household.
Smith coached at Air Force before coming to North Carolina as an assistant to the legendary-in-his-own-right Frank McGuire, and then getting the keys to the Tar Heel program in 1961.
Tarkanian moved from the high school to the community college ranks, and then landed at Long Beach State, which had never before reached the NCAA tournament. When he moved to UNLV from The Beach, the Runnin’ Rebels had never made a single NCAA tournament appearance, either.
Tark made Long Beach State’s first four NCAA tournament appearances and remains the only coach to win an NCAA tournament game at that school. He made UNLV’s first several tournament appearances, and only one other UNLV coach (Lon Kruger) has ever won an NCAA tournament game. No other UNLV coach has ever reached the Elite Eight or beyond. At Fresno State, Tark is one of only two coaches (Boyd Grant) to lead the Bulldogs to the NCAAs and win a tournament game once there.
You can pretty clearly see that Dean Smith lived and moved within the circles of college basketball royalty, the lines of dynastic succession in the sport. He achieved richly at two of the sport’s most famous programs. He learned the game from a man who was taught by the sport’s creator. He inhabited the spotlight wherever he went (at Air Force, the prestige associated with that job came from the reality of working at a service academy).
For Tark, a life in and around basketball was spent on the margins, in the out-of-the-way places and then at college programs where no one had ever won before.
These two men spent so much of their careers on opposite sides of the tracks. Their personalities and methods were accordingly different as well.
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Smith’s career was about The Carolina Way and an enduring architecture which guided actions and safeguarded valuable principles. Tark’s career was spent roaming what the late Al McGuire referred to as the “cracked sidewalks” of the recruiting world, the gritty territories where Smith and other “showcase-program” coaches would often not venture. (The deaths of Smith and Tark, just days apart, magnify in history the 1977 Final Four, when Smith, Tark, and McGuire all held court in Atlanta.)
This column by Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports illustrates Tark’s identity better than many other remembrances you’ll read in the coming days. You’ll find it at our reading list on The Shark, which will continue to be updated.
Smith coached at one of America’s foremost public universities — Chapel Hill, a place which, while stained by the reality of recent academic scandals, has not seen the NCAA as something to be hated. Tarkanian coached at UNLV, a school which has existed in the midst of an identity crisis for decades, caught between the tug of sporting glory in a glitzy, entertainment-focused city and the desire to create an academic reputation in the midst of so many distractions. This tension between sports entertainment and academic ambition is what engulfed much of Tarkanian’s career and ultimately brought it down. The NCAA was, on an organizational and institutional level, persona non grata in Tark’s world, and given that the reality of sports as entertainment was so easy to see in Las Vegas, there’s no particularly compelling reason why Tark ever should have seen eye-to-eye with the NCAA in the first place.
If Smith was a product of his Midwestern values and the modesty they promoted — which certainly informed the way he went about his business at North Carolina — Tark was also a product of his time and place, Vegas in the 1970s and the greed-is-good aspirational ’80s.
Academically, socially, athletically, and otherwise, you’d be hard-pressed to find two university communities more different than Chapel Hill and Las Vegas. Accordingly, you’d be hard-pressed to find two coaches who — on a great many levels — were more temperamentally different than Dean Smith and Jerry Tarkanian. These men shared the one label of “basketball coach,” but beyond that, their lives acquired fundamentally different trajectories and tones. They shared the stage at the 1991 Final Four semifinals, and they met on the court in the 1977 Final Four semifinals, but they inhabited fundamentally different basketball ecosystems. That their deaths have arrived in such close proximity underscores their differences on many levels, at least at first glance.
And yet…
… when you look a little further beneath the surface, you can see that while these men were so substantially different, a true odd couple in college basketball, they shared some powerful unifying traits, the ones that a lot of people will take with them as memories of these two larger-than-life figures.
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What you can also find in Dan Wetzel’s piece on Tarkanian is a recognition of this Armenian-American’s recognition of his own place as an outsider throughout much of his life, and how this self-awareness obliterated distinctions of race, class and color for the man who would come to define UNLV basketball for generations. Through his own path and in his own situation, Tarkanian showed the same color-blindness Smith did at North Carolina. Because the Tar Heels and the Atlantic Coast Conference existed (and still exist) at the center of college basketball, what Smith did with Charlie Scott carried more weight and drew more attention at the time. Yet, Tarkanian’s reach across barriers was similarly profound. It wasn’t as revolutionary, and it didn’t occur in a once-segregated South, but it meant every bit as much to the recruits who were on the receiving end of Tark’s attention.
Dean Smith and Jerry Tarkanian illustrate two vastly different ways of going about their daily business and building a program in two very different corners of the United States. Yet, through all their work and the ways in which they coached basketball for decades, Smith and Tarkanian won similarly powerful degrees of loyalty, respect and trust from their players.
It is easy to sit here and play the comparison game with Smith and Tark — or with any two high-profile figures who pass away within a week’s time. If some feel that in an examination of degrees and measures, one man did more (or less) than the other, and that this somehow matters, well, that’s fine — no one’s being harmed in the process.
The point which should last, however — for those who want to study each of these men as their names now recede into history — is that for all their obvious differences, Dean Smith and Jerry Tarkanian both captured our imaginations. They both won fierce loyalty from their players. They both showed a divided American nation that for all the ways in which we might disagree with each other and take a completely different view of how to travel along life’s road, we can still forge similar achievements and earn the lasting respect of a wide swath of people when we too meet our inevitable end.
That is a comforting and — one would hope — richly powerful message during a week when college basketball has lost another one of its most memorable coaches.
