A Grip on Sports: Tark made tough D mandatory

Thursday:  It’s been a bad stretch recently. Many of our sports icons from the last half of the 20th Century have passed on.

There seems to have been more sports-related obituaries than news recently and that’s too bad. Billy Casper, Dean Smith, Charlie Sifford, Ernie Banks and now Jerry Tarkanian.

Of all of the above, the only one I ever spoke with personally was Tark and I did it twice. Once as a child, when he was coaching at Pasadena City College. The other as an adult, when I was covering UC Irvine.

Both times Tarkanian was memorable, the first because he looked and sounded so, well, different than most adults I had been around. The second because he wasn’t anything like I expected. Tarkanian was always known as an offensive force, a guy who let his teams explode down the court. But the Tark I watched run a UNLV practice in the early 1980s didn’t talk much offense. It was all about pressure defense and competition.

His teams had always been about pressure man defense. If you didn’t want to guard people, he didn’t want you. And he found out quickly if you did because his practices were tougher than most games.

People rave these days about Pete Carroll’s culture of competition. Tark’s teams were doing that years ago. It was a treat to watch athletic young men, known mainly for their open-court skills, do drills that forced them to either succeed or be embarrassed.

He was a well-rounded basketball coach whose labels as a rabble-rouser, a recruiter, a Father Flanagan in sweats and, yes, as an offensive guru, distracted us from seeing the real man.

That’s too bad. Much of what basketball has become, defensively, can trace its roots to Tark at Long Beach State and UNLV. Physical, attacking, pressure-filled defense. The guy could coach it.

Friday: When the Little League parents in Chicago began hiring lawyers, it pushed me over the edge. They want to keep a title they cheated to win? Are you kidding?

The adults who run the league gerrymandered the league boundaries – against Little League’s rules – to draw in, as far as I can determine, at least three players for their all-star team. That’s a violation. No one seems to be disputing that.

The trio of arguments I’ve heard for letting the league keep the U.S. title are: The adults did it, so the kids shouldn’t be punished; everyone does it so why the selective prosecution; and it didn’t really matter anyway.

The middle one makes no sense at all. No, not everyone does it. And, really, if everyone is going 25 miles over the speed limit and the state patrolman pulls you over, how often has that worked to get you out of a ticket?

As for the other two, they sort of work together. How many kids are on a Little League all-star team? There usually is about a dozen, so if three or four kids are from outside of the prescribed area, that’s about a quarter to a third of a roster.

Some of the parents on the team admit to living outside of the attendance area, though none say they were recruited to play. It was just where they decided their boys, some of the best players in the nation, decided to compete. Fine. Except it is against Little League’s rules and every parent should have known that. If the kids who live out of the prescribed area hadn’t played with the JRW group, then there is no chance the league wins the national title. It’s that simple.

Did the kids know they were breaking rules? Maybe not. But they knew their friends and neighbors were playing in another Little League so they probably knew something had to be up.

Sorry. The excuses don’t wash. If they were using ineligible players, and it sure looks as if they were, then they have to forfeit. It should be the end of the story. But it probably won’t be.