It wasn’t the four Final Four appearances. It wasn’t the 1990 NCAA championship. It wasn’t the blur of tireless legs and relentless swagger that put the run in Runnin’ Rebels.
A saliva-soaked towel became the signature of Jerry Tarkanian, the balding son of Armenian immigrants who tangled with the powerful NCAA at every turn while turning opposing defenses into Swiss cheese.
Among the high-profile winners in college basketball, from John Wooden to Dean Smith to Coach K, none married a trademark visual with vast athletic talent quite like the man known simply as Tark.
“After my dad retired, more people came up to me and said, ‘Your dad is the guy with the towel,’ not the guy who won the national championship,” said Danny Tarkanian, whose book “Rebel with a Cause: The True Story of Jerry Tarkanian” is now available on Amazon.
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Tarkanian’s towel was matched only, perhaps, by Bob Knight’s red sweater at Indiana. The neatly folded, precisely placed item offered a glimpse into the superstitious wiring of a unique coach.
If the team stumbled in a game, Tarkanian would change hotels on return trips. End up on the wrong side of the scoreboard and the tie he wore that day was banished to the closet. When he debuted a Rolex courtside, it landed on the arm of Danny’s brother after a single loss.
“It was his thing, there’s no doubt about it,” Danny Tarkanian said of the towel. “It wasn’t done for publicity. My dad was just really superstitious.”
The book outlines how Tark’s towel came to be. When Redlands High School played in a league championship game in the late-1950s, the back-and-forth thriller charged into overtime.
Necessity became the mother of bench-riding invention.
“His mouth would get really dry, so he would run to the water fountain so he could come back and yell,” his son said. “When the game went to overtime, he was like, ‘I’m not doing this anymore.’ So he wet a towel.
“From that day on, he always had that towel underneath his chair.”
Gnawing on cloth became so ingrained and recognized that Taco Bell paid Tarkanian $5,000 to add its logo to the towel during a 1987 national semifinal against Indiana.
The Rebels lost 97-93 to the eventual national champs.
“The trainer who folded and wet the towels, Larry Chin, got on the bus after the game and there was only one seat open, right next to him,” Danny Tarkanian said. “My mom sat right next to him. She turned and said, ‘It was the Taco Bell towel.’
“To this day, my mom believes that’s why we lost.”
When not gumming towels, Tarkanian established San Diego roots. He bought a Pacific Beach condo the family still owns. In retirement, he routinely met coaching friends at Del Mar racetrack. Danny attended USD Law School.
The biggest what-if: Tarkanian nearly coached the Aztecs.
Late athletic director Fred Miller filled the same role at Long Beach State when Tarkanian guided four straight teams to the NCAA Tournament. He hatched a plan to lure Tark to Montezuma Mesa, replacing Jim Brandenburg.
President Thomas Day nixed the deal, Danny Tarkanian said, confirming reports at the time.
“Fred said something like, ‘It would great to go to one more dance together,” he said. “Dad was so excited about it. The president wouldn’t even consider it. It broke my dad’s heart. He would have loved to finish at San Diego State.”
Tarkanian eventually landed at Fresno State.
When his career ended, Tarkanian had won 79% of his games — or 963 in a little more than three decades. Before being forced out at UNLV after a picture surfaced of players in a hot tub with a convicted game-fixer, Tarkanian was 60-3 with his final two teams.
The true undoing, his son said, was Tarkanian’s constant needling of the NCAA. He felt the NCAA picked on smaller programs while turning a blind regulatory eye toward blue bloods.
That led to his most quoted jab at the NCAA, a gem of a one-liner that developed a couple variations in the many re-tellings: “The NCAA is so mad at Kentucky they’re going to give Cleveland State another year of probation.”
“The rules my dad was against were the ones that caused kids to live at an inferior level compared to kids with discretionary income,” Danny Tarkanian said. “He was a vocal critic on that.”
Though Tarkanian eventually was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame, the stain lingered. The coach later collected a $2.5 million settlement after suing the NCAA for trying to run him out of the game. He died in 2015.
“He said the biggest mistake he made was going after the NCAA,” his son said. “It destroyed his career.”
Gone, but never forgotten. The towel guaranteed it.
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