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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Bulldog Approach May Need Tinkering

Mark Purdy San Jose Mercury News

Star Wars is back, and so is Jerry Tarkanian. The movie has aged better. Tark the Shark looks a little more like Tark The Wrinkled Sorrowfish. It’s hard to believe this was the man who elicited such fear and loathing from NCAA investigators. He used to have that vaguely menacing Boris Karloff edge to his countenance. Now he’s Ed Asner with a damp towel.

But bless the guy, he does still bring out the college basketball crowds, always a welcome sight in the Bay Area. The Event Center at San Jose State was sold out Thursday night for the first time since 1991 to heckle and hoot Tarkanian and his Fresno State Bulldogs. They ended up winning a tense 66-61 decision over the Spartans in a terrifically entertaining game that went right to the wire. Despite the SJS disappointment, a good time was had by all. Maybe even by Tark.

“I never thought one guy could beat us,” he said, looking at the 28 points beside Olivier Saint-Jean’s name on the SJS statistics sheet. “But he almost did it. … I thought I had a brilliant idea to (defense Saint-Jean), and he had their first eight points of the game.”

Tarkanian is 66 now and struggling to maintain his legend. It’s as plain as that. When the Bulldogs were ranked as high as 11th in some preseason polls last October, the expectation bar was raised very high in Fresno, where wintertime revolves around nights inside Selland Arena. But the Bulldogs are now 15-8 and having their troubles.

“We haven’t played hard all year, and that’s a big concern of mine,” said Tarkanian. “I like the guys personally, but I don’t go into games feeling as good as I should.”

Neither do the Fresno fans, the most loyal group in California sports. They are why Thursday’s game was a full house. An hour before the game, four chartered buses pulled up at the corner of San Salvador and Eighth to dispatch a 50/50 cotton/polyester herd of red windbreakers, hungry for success. And for all the basketball tradition built by Boyd Grant there, the Bulldogs have won just a single NCAA Tournament game since becoming a Division I basketball school in the 1970s - and they haven’t been invited to the tournament since 1984.

When Tark showed up in town last season, of course, he promised wins immediately and brought in his usual complement of interesting, er, characters. Last summer, starting FSU forward Daymond Forney and reserve Danyell Macklin were involved in an assault arrest where (you never know what can happen with wacky college kids) a baseball bat and stun guns were part of the police report. The case is still open, though the charges against them have been dropped to a misdemeanor. Oh, yes. Macklin also just became eligible for academic reasons and is at his sixth school in four years.

Before being too critical, though, remember it is the Fresno State administration that has decided Tarkanian is its guy. The school seems willing to put up with certain stuff in exchange for winning. The attitude in Fresno seems to be, well, fine, we will put up with a certain amount of this nonsense - but why isn’t the team winning? The Bulldogs fell out of the top 25 in late December after dropping two of three games at the Puerto Rico Holiday Classic. They’ve been underachieving since.

Tark gave it his best shot Thursday. Five minutes into the game, he’d taken off his suit coat. By 10 minutes, he’d undone his collar and loosened his tie. By 15 minutes, he was working with his trademark towel. But after taking a 40-31 halftime lead, the Bulldogs relaxed and nearly allowed San Jose State to score an upset.

Going on talent alone, the Spartans had no business being in the game with Fresno State, being overmatched physically from the start, especially on the backboards. Being outrebounded in the game was a given (the Bulldogs had a 42-32 advantage in that statistic), so the Spartans needed to shoot 60 percent from the field to have a chance. They only shot 38 percent but made it close, anyway.

With 8:25 remaining, SJS narrowed the lead to 53-51 and Tark waggled his arms for a 20-second timeout. Coming out of the huddle, the Bulldogs botched the called play so badly that it resulted in a fourth foul for FSU forward Darnell McCulloch. Saint-Jean then tied the score at the other end, and SJS went on to take a brief lead before blowing some chances to win - including a missed free throw that would have tied the score with 15 seconds left.

When it was over, Tark slowly shuffled off the floor to ponder what lies ahead.

“We’re not where we want to be,” he said. “We’ve got to be a lot better.”

Maybe by March, he can turn his team into a feared entity and make Fresno recall why it hired him.