Keidel: Reflecting On The Special Soul That Was Jerry Tarkanian

By Jason Keidel
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About five years ago, Sports Illustrated commissioned me to write a feature on Lloyd Daniels. Other than Lew Alcindor, Daniels was arguably the best high school hardwood talent in the history of our beloved city, the most fertile basketball soil on earth.

It took a month just to find him. Not even his high school coach, Ron Naclerio, had his number. But Naclerio made the search all the more compelling by calling Daniels the most gifted player he'd ever seen, a hybrid of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. The conflicting stories of talent and torment, of greatness and galling life choices, made Daniels a writer's dream.

Through a maze of social media and endless phone calls, I found the mysterious basketball savant. We agreed to meet at Dallas BBQ in Chelsea. During my second sip on a Coke, an incredibly large man ambled in, shook my hand and ordered a colorful drink in a glass larger than a jacuzzi.

HALL OF FAME COACH JERRY TARKANIAN, WHO BUILT A DYNASTY AT UNLV, DEAD AT 84

Daniels had a hoarse but booming voice, summoned from his soul, trumping the obnoxious noises in a bar/restaurant. He talked to the bartender, to me, to everyone as though he knew us. There was a resonant, inclusive charm to Daniels. You could see why he seduced sagacious basketball men despite his haunted bio. At least before the first drink.

As is the case with most humans, once he got well-lubed he felt well-liked, so he started calling people. The call that spiked my antennae was to Las Vegas, and his coach during his microscopic tenure at UNLV. He handed me the phone and it was indeed Jerry Tarkanian, who talked to me like a son, despite having spent all of 10 minutes with me 25 years earlier.

I'd met Tarkanian in Las Vegas during their spellbinding run led by Larry Johnson. Two hours earlier, my father and I sat in utter awe while the fireworks spewed from the court and that animated shark crawled across the top rung of the arena. I've been to at least 50 events at Madison Square Garden, and none of them approached the pyrotechnic splendor of just one game at the Thomas & Mack Center. Not to mention the conga line of luminaries who played in that particular game, from Johnson to Greg Anthony to Stacey Augman. Even the lower-tier players, like Anderson Hunt and Moses Scurry, were borderline NBA ballers.

You recall his tense refrain during a game, squirming on the bench and chomping on towels before finally easing back in his seat as UNLV wrecked another team in Sin City. The game I saw was against New Mexico, and it was like watching the New England Patriots play Fordham.

So when my dad made the intro I expected to be big-timed by some elitist basketball czar who had every important person in the sport on speed dial. Instead, he was as nice to me as he was to his own kid, who was also on the team. He invited me to practices, future games and offered autographs from his de facto All-Star team.

It was hard to hear a bad word about Tarkanian, at least publicly, from his peers. No doubt there were some haters who abhorred the yearly obliteration their team suffered at the hands of the Runnin' Rebels. But the only ones who had a crusade against Tarkanian were the badge-wielding bureaucrats who wrote the rules and then selectively wielded them.

Tarkanian was constantly hounded by the big dogs of the NCAA. They turned over every rock to find some chargeable act, including wrongful lunches, long-distance calls made from hotels and other such petty offenses.

There are no virgins in college basketball. Maybe Coach K is indeed flawless, but it's hard to imagine that even the sainted Duke coach didn't bend a rule here or there to land a top recruit. Even John Wooden had Sam Gilbert roaming the regal campus of UCLA. We have no proof that Wooden dealt with Gilbert personally, but surely he had to know the man was around and was unsavory. Coach K and Coach Wooden are monoliths, the best ambassadors any enterprise could want. But it seemed like Tarkanian paid just because he wasn't them.

Did he push it too far by recruiting Daniels? Obviously. Daniels had a dubious past and there was a reason that teams stood arm's length from a first-ballot Hall of Fame talent. And, true to form, he was bounced from UNLV after he was arrested in a Vegas drug den. He made it to the NBA, where his bullet-addled body would still somehow score 25 points on occasion. But to say his life was a parable of squandered talent is an understatement.

Then the picture of Richard Perry went viral. Perry, a known, gambling, game-fixing miscreant, was captured in a hip-hop pose, in a hot tub with his arms lapped around several UNLV players. Game over for Tark. Death by proximity.

But even after Daniels bought crack cocaine from an undercover cop and humiliated Tarkanian, the iconic coach still kept in touch with the 6-foot-7 sharpshooter. He even signed him to a contract when he ran the San Antonio Spurs. Forgive the cliche, but once you were Tarkanian's friend, you were his friend forever.

Not even a call from Manhattan at midnight, a quarter-century since Daniels was relevant, put Tark in a tizzy. With his sleepy voice slurring salutations to me, Tark sounded more like your grandpa than a Hall of Famer. He was again very kind, offering to chat with me at length about Lloyd, and then he told Lloyd he loved him.

After the fifth time Daniels asked me for absurd sums of cash to do his story -- including $100 just to get back to Queens (subway fare was $2) -- I knew this feature would never be written. He kept telling me about the bricks of cash I was being paid to write it, and I assured him the money I made would barely pay the bar tab.

There was more. A lot more. Enough to fill 10 pages. Between the liquor, paranoia and lost potential, Daniels was a profile in decay and regret, an amalgam of every public and private mistake he made. There were threatening phone calls and I had to file a police report. Sports Illustrated asked if I wanted to chat with its legal team. I said no, that this would probably go away after the cops got wind of it.

And that's exactly what happened. When I mentioned his name to detectives, they didn't even ask me to spell it, as though they had either gotten this kind of call about him before or the NYPD at large was an echo chamber of his malfeasance. They implied that Lloyd was something of a legend in this regard, which was rather sad to hear.

Why am I telling you this? Because it speaks less to Daniels and more to Tarkanian, who, with lots lost and nothing more to gain from Daniels, remained a friend and confidant, an avuncular voice when the violence left the one-time prodigy in tatters.

Maybe Jerry Tarkanian can't be fit for halos. But if there's a heaven, he's in it.

Follow Jason on Twitter @JasonKeidel.