Jerry Tarkanian: Unique, a fighter

— -- As card-carrying mavericks go, Jerry Tarkanian was George Steinbrenner times Al Davis. He would never bow before the establishment or those he felt were protected by its double standards, John Wooden included.

No other college basketball coach would dare criticize the game's most revered statesman, not for public consumption anyway. Tarkanian? Long after he was done fighting what he called the N-C-Two-A at UNLV, he was still wondering aloud why the sport's governing body investigated his first Division I program, Long Beach State, while a booster named Sam Gilbert was acting as an ATM for Wooden's mighty UCLA Bruins.

"You could've made every booster at Long Beach dish over every cent they had," Tarkanian once told me, "and it wouldn't have covered Sam Gilbert's expenses."