Every hero needs a villain.
Eliot Ness needed Al Capone. Ronald Reagan needed the Soviet Union. The Road Runner needed Wile E. Coyote.
And so it seems that heaven needed cosmic balance this week for both North Carolina coaching royalty Dean Smith and Nevada-Las Vegas coaching rebel Jerry Tarkanian, college basketball's most renowned saint and sinner are together again.
Of course, much as Deano got the best of ol' Basset Hound eyes by a single point in the 1977 Final Four inside Atlanta's Omni, he beat him to the Pearly Gates by four days, which is probably a lot less time than many folks figured it would take Tark the Shark to negotiate an entrance.
It wasn't just the NCAA probations all three of his Division I programs suffered - Long Beach State, UNLV and Fresno State - that caused some to look alarmingly at Tark. Alexander Wolff, the great Sport Illustrated writer, recalled in his obit on Tarkanian how Tark had once promised to get the writer a hooker the next time he came to Vegas.
Yet it was also Wolff who wrote on Wednesday: "With his death, college sports has lost its original honest man."
After all, it was Tarkanian who once uttered the greatest line ever about the NCAA's unjust justice: "The NCAA's so mad at Kentucky they just gave Cleveland State two more years probation."
It was also Tark who won $2.5 million from the NCAA in a court settlement and fought college athletics' governing body all the way to the Supreme Court.
And from a pure basketball perspective, it was the Shark's sublime and superb 1990 Runnin' Rebels outfit that delivered the most dominating NCAA title game performance ever in destroying Duke by 30 points (103-73), still the widest victory margin ever in an NCAA final.
Said Duke's Christian Laettner after that final, "It was like being eaten by a shark chomp, chomp."
Never mind that Laettner and his Dookies got revenge the following season, stunning pretty much that same UNLV bunch in the Final Four semis to do in an undefeated season and thwart a repeat.
Said Tarkanian decades later, "That one still hurts."
Yet what hurts his supporters more is how long it took a man with four Final Fours, one national championship and 729 wins to reach the Hall of Fame, his induction held up until two years ago, when he was already so sick and weak that his wife, Lois, had to give his induction speech.
And that's where framing Tarkanian as a pioneer or a punk morphs into 50 shades of gray. Did he give junior college and inner-city kids a break because they needed one? Or because that was the easiest path to victory? Did he use them or the system? Was he godfather to young men who needed one or the Godfather.
"Jerry Tarkanian beat the odds, challenged the system and wrinkled the feathers of basketball traditionalists everywhere," begins his Hall of Fame biography. "But there is no arguing his success."
On that narrow but significant point, there was never an argument. Whether it was riding underrated Ed Ratleff's coattails to a near-upset of defending champ UCLA in a West Regional Final at the dawn of the 1970s, or sending the run-and-gun Rebels to all those Final Fours, or bringing his alma mater Fresno State back from the dead in his final coaching job, Tark knew the game and how to turn the kids no one else wanted to take a chance on into champions.
Or as former UCLA great Tracy Murray tweeted Wednesday: "RIP to 1 of the BEST Coaches, Mentors & Fathers in the World Coach Jerry Tarkanian. Thank u 4 giving Brothas a chance 2 better their lives."
That should never be lost. However he got them, Tark's teams were always perfect portraits of discipline, teamwork and chemistry.
And for those who distrusted and disliked the establishment, he really was a saint.
"He was a guy willing to go up against the system," said ESPN's Stephen A. Smith. "He didn't believe the system was fair to a bunch of kids who looked like me and came from the same neighborhoods I came from. He gave folks who needed a second chance a second chance. And as an African-American, you found yourself rooting for them, because they gave a community at large that had felt fairly voiceless a voice."
If there is a coach out there now who most mirrors Tarkanian it's Kentucky' John Calipari, who, much like Tark, is "happy to wear the black hat."
But chewing hand towels on the bench was never going to get Tark to a blueblood program like UK. So he swam off-shore, taking one giant bite out of the big boys in 1990 before it all came crashing down two years later, a photo surfacing of his players in a Vegas hot tub with a convicted game fixer.
And now it's permanently over, at least everything but his foggy legacy.
But even there, he may have been closer to Smith - or Smith closer to him - than anyone would ever have thought a decade ago.
As a possible nod to the Raleigh News and Observer's contention that North Carolina players were enrolled in 54 bogus classes during Smith's final four seasons at UNC, ESPN analyst Seth Greenberg said of Tark:
"He had a lot of the same traits Smith had, including a great attention to detail. Like Smith, Tark was demanding, but always had time for his players and coaches. Yes, Tark was vilified, though other coaches were doing similar things that we'd find out later were for sure in the gray area."
What's not in the gray area is his success on the court. It was real, and it was often overwhelming. And that mastery brought CBS's Dennis Dodd to write on Wednesday: "Is it possible to stage an exhibition on a cloud? Dean versus Tark."
But if Tark won, would the hoop gods place him in purgatory for two more years?
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com