Tark’s daughters jog memory lane on Father’s Day

It was Wednesday, a few days before former UNLV basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian would celebrate Father's Day for the 55th time. The woman responsible for his first one - his daughter, Pam Tarkanian - was sitting alongside me in a cozy booth in the back room of an old Las Vegas watering hole called Four Kegs.

Tark's other daughter, 52-year-old Jodie Diamant, was sitting across the table. Next to her was her niece, Pam's 22-year-old daughter, Audra, who recently graduated from Penn State. Audra is one of Jerry and Lois Tarkanian's 11 grandchildren.

A staggering amount of food was on the table. One of everything, it seemed, and two strombolis: one regular, one with turkey and swiss. Chicken wings, thick-cut french fries with spicy Cajun seasoning, frosty goblets of beer - if a sports writer ever committed a heinous crime and was sentenced to the electric chair, this could have been his last meal.

The meeting was my idea. I had told Jodie and she had told Pam that for some time I had wanted to write about what it was like growing up female in the male-dominated world of Jerry Tarkanian.

The meats and cheeses and chicken wings were Jodie's idea. I guess we were going to be there awhile.

We were there for four hours, during which some of my preconceptions were confirmed.

There were times, said his daughters, when Tark was so absorbed with breaking Georgetown's press that he didn't always notice things at home.

Such as when Jodie's friend Susan McDaniel gave her a pet rabbit, which she kept for two years - unbeknownst to her father. Or the family cat, which would run into the house when someone left the door open and Tark thought was a stray.

"Once I had a friend who had stayed with us," Jodie said, "and when she left, she thanked dad for being so nice. And he said, 'What's she thanking me for?' And I said, 'Dad, she's been here for four days.' "

Everybody at the table laughed long and hard at that one. But when the merriment subsided, Jodie smiled softly and said, "Maybe dad was out of town a lot, but I always felt and knew he loved me."

During the early days in Las Vegas, when the Tarkanians rented a house on 17th Street, the Rebels sometimes would go on the road for weeks at a time. Pam was starting her senior year in high school and had been none too pleased about leaving behind her friends when her dad took the UNLV job after a successful run at Long Beach State.

She would wait until her dad, and the team, hit the road.

Then she'd do the same.

"I wouldn't dare do it when he was home," Pam said about her covert trips back to Huntington Beach, Calif., to see her friends. "I'd call from Barstow to tell Mom I was OK. She'd tell me to come back. I'd say, 'Come back? I'm halfway there.' "

She said Tark could be stern, but then she was his first. His first-born girl. That's why Pam's boyfriends had to dive behind the sofa when they saw the whites of her old man's headlights coming up the driveway.

"He was pretty hard on me - when the streetlights come on, you're home," said Pam, director of student support services for the Clark County School District.

To which Jodie, a registered nurse, said: "I got away with a lot of stuff."

To which Pam said: "I got grounded a lot."

Pam had played basketball and other sports in middle school but lost interest in high school. Jodie didn't play, but by then it didn't matter. She had a little brother who would go on to play sports, and play them well, and this made Tark happy and proud.

"When Danny was born, the story goes that dad ran down the hall saying, 'It's a boy! It's a boy! It's a boy!' " Pam said.

Two years after Danny Tarkanian was born, a second boy, George, completed the family. The girls told stories about six Tarkanians cramming into a Volkswagen bus and going on camping trips to Flathead Lake in Montana, where it was beautiful and they had loads of fun - just like kids who didn't have a soon-to-be famous basketball coach for a father.

And though Tark wasn't much of a fisherman, he tried, and when he couldn't catch anything, he'd pull off at one of those trout farms along the way so his kids - even the girls - got to catch one.

As Tark's stature continued to grow and summer vacations became harder to plan, he would haul his offspring to the Nike meetings at exotic locales such as Bermuda and Hawaii and Sun Valley in Idaho. And when guys such as Gene Keady saw that Tark had brought his kids - and they seemed to have such a good time - he starting bringing his kids to the Nike meetings, too.

Tark wasn't much for telling bedtime stories or going to recitals, his daughters said. But when he came home after practice, he'd make popcorn, and the kids would join him on the couch and watch "Columbo" or "The Untouchables" or some John Wayne movie. And Tark would have a glass of wine with his popcorn.

When the girls got a little older, he'd give them a sip of wine, too.

Oh, the stories we could tell you, Tark's daughters said. And then they did. For four hours. Until there was only one slice of stromboli left.

They reminisced and told stories about their old man that mean even more now, what with today being Father's Day, what with Tark having turned 81 and his health having taken a turn for the worse.

And even when the girls were starting families of their own, and the dreaded telephone would ring, and it would be about the NCAA - and it fouled up Christmas or a birthday or some other special occasion - it could never take away from those camping trips, from those nights spent on the couch watching "Columbo" and eating popcorn with their dad.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.