No Quiet Exit for Tarkanian : College basketball: Relationship between coach and university continues to deteriorate in his final season at Nevada Las Vegas.

In the land of the longshot, this was the best bet of them all. You can wager on halftime scores here, on golf tournaments, too. You can crank all night a slot machine arm as big as a flagpole and you can double down on eight or seven or six, if you like. But if you wanted to relieve the house edge, the place to pile your chips was on the bald man with the baggy eyes.

Bet that he would not go quietly.

This is University of Nevada at Las Vegas. He is Jerry Tarkanian. What did we expect? A Tark Over the Desert Tour and the commissioning of a bust in his honor at the center of campus? Tarkanian and UNLV President Robert Maxson frozen together at midcourt, sharing some memento of their time together? Please. Tarkanian will exit this stage as he played on it: embattled, angry, convinced of a purity that others fail to see.

The relationship between Tarkanian and the university (i.e., Maxson) has, in the 61-year-old coach’s twilight autumn, become an unseemly tempest, as bad as any NCAA transgression in his previous 18 years. The coach, with a little help from his friends, is convinced now that he was publicly sacrificed and tricked into retiring last June 7.

Why there he was just last week, rattling about inside the opulent Thomas and Mack Center, the scarlet and gray spaceship in the desert built because his basketball teams became so good and so popular. “Every problem we ever had, they came from within the university,” Tarkanian said, and this from a man who has fought the NCAA as if it threatened his family. “Right in this building.”

Freddie Glusman, a local businessman and the most vocal of Tarkanian’s supporters, said, “Maxson lowered Jerry’s esteem in the community, and then he buried the whole program. Maxson brought down Jerry Tarkanian. Jerry knows that now.”

The university, as expressed by counsel Brad Booke, is happy to be rid of the coach and his two-decade trail of problems. “When the current basketball administration departs,” Booke said, “it represents the best real opportunity that this university has had to capture institutional control in its truest sense, to place basketball in its proper perspective.”

Maxson continues to fear damage to the academic reputation he has tried carefully to build. And the ongoing madness claimed a victim last week when interim Athletic Director Dennis Finfrock resigned.

It was only a year ago that Tarkanian was coach of maybe the best team ever. Sure, there had been problems. NCAA sanctions dissuaded two star recruits from enrolling to restock the program, but a team built around Larry Johnson, Stacey Augmon and Greg Anthony was given a reprieve (allowed to participate in the NCAA Tournament) and won 34 consecutive games. These were good times. Emotional times. All three players chose to wear No. 2 in the NBA because that was Tarkanian’s number in college. He gets misty talking about them. “So unselfish, so loyal, not just great players, but good friends,” he said.

Then, last March 30, UNLV was beaten by Duke in the NCAA semifinals. It was a loss that seemed to trigger some incomprehensible slide . Maxson, UNLV’s aggressive, highly political chief executive officer, had been pressing to clean up the school’s image. The NCAA was unwavering in its pursuit of its own form of truth and justice. On May 26, both seemed to hit the jackpot.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal published pictures of three then-UNLV players sitting in a hot tub with Richie “The Fixer” Perry, who was convicted of point-shaving in connection with the Boston College scandal of 1978-79. Twelve days later, Tarkanian resigned, effective at the finish of the 1991-92 season.

And that might have been it, except that nothing is so simple as that in Las Vegas.

Led by Glusman, a successful shop owner and restaurateur, Tarkanian’s supporters (a loyal and influential group that lends itself better than most to the word “cronies”) began systematically trying to prove that Maxson, Booke and Finfrock had been part of a conspiracy to unseat Tarkanian.

Glusman and company fed a series of damaging documents to reporter Jeff German of the Las Vegas Sun, each suggesting that members of UNLV’s administration and athletic department had acted unethically. Among the charges:

--Women’s basketball Coach Jim Bolla and his wife, Assistant Athletic Director Sheila Strike-Bolla, had committed recruiting violations. Affidavits from four former women’s players were produced. While Strike-Bolla denies being part of a conspiracy, Glusman and company feel that Bolla and Strike-Bolla helped contribute to Tarkanian’s demise by leaking information about possible NCAA violations to the media.

--Maxson had altered official season-ticket lists to make it appear that he controlled fewer tickets than he did.

--That many of the picayune NCAA violations lodged against the UNLV

could only have been leaked to the NCAA by UNLV administrators.

Tarkanian’s supporters have provided not a shred of prima facie evidence to prove conspiracy. Still, their theory took wing on Oct. 29, when Booke admitted to secretly videotaping a conditioning class conducted by UNLV assistant coach Tim Grgurich. The class involved 13 Vegas basketball players and, Booke alleges, included “at least four NCAA violations” for conducting offseason basketball drills.

The videotaping incident convinced Tarkanian that he had been hung out by Maxson, Finfrock, Booke and others. “Things have come to light,” he said. And because he has agreed, in writing as part of of his resignation, not to criticize Maxson, he can say little more. “Whenever we used to have a problem, Maxson would call me and say ‘We’ve got to be seen together to clear this up, Jerry,’ ” Tarkanian said. “I always thought he was with me. Now, you can just say we won’t be having Christmas dinner together.”

Glusman said, “Until the videotaping, Jerry didn’t know he got railroaded. Maxson was jealous of Jerry’s power. You’ve got to realize, Jerry is very gullible. He wants to like people.”

That, Booke suggested, is one of the problems here. “Someone like Freddie Glusman has a special position in the community by virtue of his relationship to Jerry,” Booke said. “When Jerry leaves, Freddie no longer has someone to whom he can attach his wagon.”

Tarkanian has other friends of the same ilk, most notably Mike Toney, a casino executive and gambler. Nevada regent Carolyn Sparks, in a letter to Tarkanian’s son, Danny, said that it was Tarkanian’s associations with Glusman, Toney, and others, that abetted his downfall.

Maxson, meanwhile, gives the impression of a man under considerable pressure. He is in his ninth year as UNLV’s president, during which the university has grown from barely 10,000 students to nearly 20,000. Recession aside, the university will hire 150 new faculty members next year.

“It’s amazing the talent this university has attracted,” said former President Donald Baepler, now the director of the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Natural History on the campus.

No matter. The school retains a reputation for athletic lawlessness (owing in large part to Tarkanian’s image) that overwhelms Maxson’s gains. “That place sounds like an academic sewer,” one Midwestern professor said. Things like that. But Maxson vehemently denies involvement in any conspiracy.

“The latest incident (Booke’s videotaping) was a mistake, and an apology was made,” Maxson said. “I abhor any type of electronic activity. But what more has to be done? The man apologized. Publicly. There’s not been one bit of evidence of anything else.

“The people who keep this alive, they’re just fanning the flames. It’s like burning Kuwait behind them.”

suggest that the damning hot-tub pictures were provided to the Review Journal by some agent of Maxson’s, even though the Review Journal has said the photos did not come from within the university.

“I heard those pictures were around the athletic department three weeks before the end of the season,” Tarkanian said.

“The lowest single moment in my tenure at this university was when I saw those pictures,” Maxson said. “There’s nobody, outside of coach Tarkanian, who was as distressed as I was. I did not know they were coming. I’m out here, beating the bushes, selling this university, and something like those pictures ... I knew I was staring at a disaster.”

As for the videotaping, Tarkanian suggested that it was done to discredit Grgurich, who would have applied for Tarkanian’s job (and been endorsed strongly by Tarkanian).

Grgurich has since said that he will leave at the end of the year.