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They say Jerry Tarkanian told a lot of tales, many of them tall. He won a lot of games, many of them convincingly and some of them at the expense of Utah, BYU and Utah State. He won one college title, by a landslide.

The basketball coach who died on Wednesday at the age of 84, who ran with the Rebels and renegades and rabble-rousers, did one other thing: He told a lot of loud truths, truths that others would only whisper, many of them straight into the grille of the NCAA, an organization he saw as pompous and hypocritical, unbalanced and unfair. He was a couple of decades before his time in that regard.

Battling with the ruling powers of college basketball became as much his calling card as chewing on his towel and helping players from all kinds of backgrounds and places and races who, in turn, helped him. Helped him win.

And win, he did, first in junior college in Southern California and then at the major level. In his combined 30 years at Long Beach State, UNLV and Fresno State, Tarkanian won 761 games, 509 of them at UNLV. He lost a total of 202, 105 at Vegas. He coached conference champions 18 times and went to the NCAA Tournament 18 times, making four Final Fours, taking the national championship once, in 1990.

What a team that title winner was, including Larry Johnson, Stacey Augmon and Greg Anthony.

The Aggies, Cougars and Utes had their fill of facing Tarkanian's outfits, playing against them numerous times in various settings. It was sometimes a circus because the coach's teams were typically talented and colorful, triggering big emotion around here. Everybody wanted to beat them and him. It was usually a tough thing to accomplish.

Two particularly memorable occasions came against Utah State, one in 1985, when UNLV beat the Ags in triple overtime, by the count of 142-140. The other was the infamous stunt pulled at the Spectrum, when that 1990 Rebels team was going up against the Aggies. Just before the start of the second half, a water bomb exploded behind the UNLV bench, drenching the coach — and others — with blue-green water. The water bomb was set with a timer rigged before the game began. USU security had expected trouble because of a brawl that had erupted in the teams' game in Vegas earlier that season.

There were actually two water bombs set to blow, but only one detonated.

"Whoever did it was sharp," a soaked-but-relieved Tarkanian said after the game, a two-point win for the Rebels.

The free throws that came from a technical assessed to the Aggies were converted by Johnson, as well as an earlier free throw made off a technical called after a fan threw toilet paper on the court.

"Obviously, [the free throws] helped," Tarkanian said.

So it went back then.

I once had the chance to sit and talk a while with the coach, after covering a game between UC Santa Barbara and UNLV in 1988, when the Rebels came in ranked No. 2 in the country, with a shot at ascending to the top spot after No. 1-ranked Arizona had lost to Stanford.

It didn't happen, though, when the Gauchos, led by former Utah coach Jerry Pimm, pulled the upset on their home floor.

Afterward, Tarkanian was angered by his team's performance, saying: "This is a big, big disappointment. We didn't play well on offense and had no spark defensively. Our shots just didn't drop, and some of our players got tired. I don't know how good we are. I know this — we've got a lot of unanswered questions right now."

Having said that, gotten it out of his system, he went into a state in which he seemed as gentle and genuine as any coach I've ever interviewed. We talked about all kinds of things — basketball philosophy, his sense of humor, the NCAA, accusations made against him, his overall career.

It was clear how he felt about the ruling powers, and I grinned thereafter when I read his infamous quote: "Nine out of 10 schools are cheating. The other one is in last place."

Never knew whether that was true or not, whether the underhandedness was quite that prevalent, and I loathe cheating, but Tarkanian himself was personally engaging, funny and charming. No wonder he recruited so effectively, with or without the added bennies that were doled out.

When Armen Gilliam, a former Tarkanian player at UNLV, played for the Jazz, he was asked whether the cheating was rampant in Vegas. His response: "All the schools do the same thing. It was no more like that at UNLV than anywhere else."

Despite the facts that Tarkanian's program got tangled up with Richard Perry — remember the photo of his players in the hot tub with the gambler? — and he eventually was forced out at UNLV and later helped land Fresno State on probation, Tarkanian did give a lot of players second and third chances. One of his recruits at Fresno, who had his ACT score challenged, told Sports Illustrated: "In this world, if you ain't got caught, you ain't cheating."

Well. Tark's teams did play thrilling basketball, running the floor on offense and pressuring opponents from baseline to baseline on D.

He was both fun and frustrating, because nobody knew with exactness what was going on behind the scenes to help facilitate his success. We all sort of thought we kind of knew. He likely knew that we sort of knew that he knew that we sort of knew, too.

One thing is certain: Most of his players loved the man. Whether he was one of a kind or one of the nine (cheaters), he stood out as a character, as a caricature, who will be remembered in college basketball circles for a long, long time.

GORDON MONSON hosts "The Big Show" with Spence Checketts weekdays from 3-7 p.m. on 97.5 FM and 1280 AM The Zone. Twitter: @GordonMonson.