Dean Smith, Jerry Tarkanian, and the murkiness of right and wrong in college basketball

There was a time for all of us when everything was an absolute. Talking back to your parents was bad. Eating all your vegetables was good. Biting was bad. Hugging was good.

It’s only natural that when we started to follow sports, we viewed them in this same light. The teams our elders cheered for and the ones we were told did things the right way were the heroes, the ones that didn’t were the villains.

Dean Smith and North Carolina were the good guys. Jerry Tarkanian and UNLV were the bad guys.

That’s the way it was for an entire generation of college basketball fans who were introduced to the game in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. When it gets instilled deep enough at an early age, it’s usually there for good. Time and experience are going to allow you to better rationalize the issue at hand, but your first thought is always going to be related to your original stance.

The good in this instance wasn’t up for debate, and remained unchallenged even when the free-thinking years of adolescence took hold.

Smith was the coach in college basketball for a lengthy period, a distinction earned as much by who he was as by what he did. He had the presence and the demeanor necessary to be the face of prestigious and pristine Chapel Hill, as well as the courage and the austerity to change it.

Most people already knew that Smith was the man responsible for recruiting Charlie Scott and making him the first African American scholarship athlete at North Carolina, and the first true African American star of ACC basketball. What this week has been good for is the lesser-known stories that reveal the same truth. Like in the late 1950s when Smith, then just an assistant at UNC who didn’t wield nearly the same type of power as he would a decade later, didn’t bat an eye when he brought an African American pastor and student with him to dine inside a segregated Chapel Hill restaurant.

“You should never be proud of doing the right thing,” Smith once said. “You should just do the right thing.”

It always felt like Smith was acting on instinct. The modern trend of spending time in deep thought before giving a measured response that best serves both program and self was never going to hold him. He spoke freely and often about topics like the death penalty (he was against it), war (he was against it), charity (he was for it), and gay marriage (he was for it).

In an era where basketball coaches are now reminded early and often that they aren’t employed to be spokespeople for their universities on social issues, it seems more and more likely that we’ll never see a Dean Smith again. And that has nothing to do with his 879 wins, 11 Final Four appearances, 30 ACC championships, two national titles, or one gold medal.

If Smith was going to serve as the archetypal good guy of the early ‘90s, then Jerry Tarkanian had to be the villain.

For anyone who has just or who is just about to turn 30, the Runnin’ Rebel teams of the early ‘90s represent your earliest memories of true sports dominance, a characteristic which only added to their nefarious status. They were brash, they seemed mean, they ran up the score, and everyone you looked up to told you that they cheated. Even just in appearance, Tarkanian resembled the bad guy from a comic book or a Disney movie.

At the heart of Tarkanian’s villainous persona was his feud with the NCAA. There wasn’t one stop on his Division-I joyride where Tark’s program wasn’t hit with sanctions by its sport’s governing body, even if -- as Tarkanian was fond of reminding people -- none of those sanctions were ever major.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where and when it started, but the feud between the pair of larger than life entities dates back to at least the late ‘60s when Tarkanian earned his first Division I head coaching job at Long Beach State. He criticized the institution, which he viewed as a fraud for exploiting athletes (especially poor black ones) in order to make millions of dollars, both in print and verbally to anyone who was willing to listen. The NCAA struck back with constant surveillance -- and, eventually, 23 sanctions.

After that, it was on. Tarkanian was young Omar Little after getting popped for the first time, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do or say in order to abide by his code or prop up his cause -- even if it wasn’t always entirely clear what either of those were. He was the consummate anti-hero: righteous enough in cause, but too flawed, proud or whatever to behave in a manner that could possibly breed the type of change you assumed he wanted.

Tarkanian spoke out often, serving up two of the most oft-referenced quotes in college basketball history:

“The NCAA is so mad at Kentucky it’s going to give Cleveland State two more years probation.”

And:

“I always like to get transfers, especially from the Pac-10. They already have their cars paid for.”

He also acted out, recruiting players that other colleges wouldn’t touch, and doing so in a manner that could most innocently be described as tap-dancing around the rules. He was the likable mobster from a Scorsese flick, winking at the cop on surveillance duty as he left his house to go to work in the morning.

A few weeks ago, the official Facebook page of a major college basketball program posted a picture with a happy birthday message to one of its players. The first comment under the picture asked simply, “Is this legal?” This was the type of thing Tarkanian loathed about the NCAA, an organization which had grown so large and powerful that its often difficult to understand rules were viewed in the same light as federal law by much of the American public. It never seemed right to him, and he didn’t mind if making that feeling known to everyone he came in contact with made him a target.

“For 30-some years they presented themselves as these on-a-white-horse, holier-than-thou, highly moral guys,” Tarkanian’s wife, Lois, said in 2013. “All the time, they hounded us, never gave us any peace, and they had no reason to do it. Jerry’s coaching friends told him he’d never get in the Hall of Fame unless he shut up about the NCAA. Well, he wouldn’t shut up.”

Tarkanian was inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame in 2013, an honor which came 15 years after the NCAA settled a civil suit with him for $2.5 million and, perhaps even more importantly in Tark’s eyes, was forced to apologize to him. He commonly referred to the events as “my greatest victory.”

There’s a marked disparity between the courage it takes to stand up to deep-seeded Southern racism and the governing rules of a sport which you believe aren’t fair, but in a broader sense, there’s a very real correlation between the pair of stances from the pair of Hall of Fame coaches.

Though I’m sure he hoped as much, Smith probably could have never guessed at the time that defying the rules of segregation in the late ‘50s would be an act as universally applauded as it is today. Tarkanian was also ahead of the game when it came to pointing out the hypocrisies of the NCAA, an exercise which one of college basketball’s foremost voices seems to engage in on nearly a daily basis now.

The sports as theater phenomenon can be so enveloping that the notion of absolute good and absolute bad can be difficult to resist. Pulling apart that first thin curtain only makes things more complicated, and that’s certainly the case when you look deeper into the lives of two larger than life figures who passed away just four days apart.

The ultimate legacy of both Dean Smith and Jerry Tarkanian is this: they didn’t give a shit. They knew basketball better than 99 percent of the people on Earth, but they also had a very strong, very personal belief system that nothing, not even the game they loved, was going to stand in the way of.

Two titans of college basketball who were as different in personality as they were alike in purpose left the world this week. They didn’t do so without letting it know exactly what they stood for. That’s something every good person should be fortunate enough to say when their time comes.