Allen Barra

Well, always is a long time, and apologists like Starnes do Tebow no good when they imply that all his critics are anti-Christian bigots. Indeed, on Salon last week, Andrew Leonard made the liberal case for loving Tebow. “Maybe this country would be better off if everyone, left or right, evangelical or atheist, pocket passer or option quarterback, occasionally found room in their hearts to cheer for those who are different,” he wrote.

But why do we need to change our opinions about Tebow at all, either as a person or a football player?

Tebow, after all, wouldn’t be a lightning rod for anything if he were not a football player. So how good is he? First, let’s dispose of the myth currently being taken as gospel by much of the sports press and nearly all Denver Broncos fans: that Tebow as a professional quarterback is simply a winner.  He was in college. In the interest of full disclosure, I wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2008 that “Tim Tebow is on track to become the greatest quarterback in college football history.” That was before I saw Cam Newton play. Still, Tebow was, if he’ll pardon the expression, damned good.

But as a pro, to cite chapter and verse, Tebow has been lousy, or not far north of mediocre at best. Going into this Sunday’s game with the New England Patriots, Tebow has thrown 280 passes, completing just under 49 percent. This season he is the 14th-ranked passer in the 32-team league, and though he has thrown 11 passes for touchdowns with just two interceptions, in the most important single passing stat, yards per throw, he ranks 27th.

Broncos fans, I hear you — the most important stat is winning, not yards per throw. But in only one game during the Broncos’ much publicized six-game winning streak have they scored more than 25 points, and in four of them they’ve scored 17 or less. The Denver defense, on the other hand, has been outstanding. Since their Nov. 6 victory over Oakland, they have given up an average of only 17 points per game, allowing 13 or less in four games. If Denver fans want to shout “Hallelujah,” they should start with the Broncos’ defensive unit.

The 13-10 victory over the Bears this past Sunday was more typical of the 2011 Denver Broncos than not. Tebow and the offensive unit failed to produce any kind of score during their first 11 possessions and survived only because Chicago played with astounding ineptitude. The only reason the Broncos got a chance to win was because Bears running back Marion Barber ran out of bounds near midfield with less than two minutes on the clock. This gave Denver time, when they got the ball on the ensuing punt, to move into field goal range (which, in Denver’s altitude-thinned air, is just any time you cross the 50-yard line). A smiling Tebow told reporters after the game, “I might have thanked the Lord when he [Barber] did that. [Otherwise] we might have only had about 10 seconds left on the game when we got the ball.”

For his part, the Lord tweeted, “Don’t thank me. I didn’t tell that putz to run out of bounds.” Presumably He also didn’t tell Barber to fumble the ball away at the Denver 36 in overtime, thus setting up the Broncos’ game-winning field goal.

I hated Tim Tebow before I knew anything about his religion. Specifically, I hated him from 2006 through 2009 when he was the quarterback for the Florida Gators. I hated him far less when Alabama finally stuffed Florida in the SEC championship game at the end of the 2009 season and he sat on the sidelines bawling like a baby. At first I laughed – “Ha, ha — how do you like it now, Timmy? Why don’t you go up in the stands and hold Mommy and Daddy’s hands?” I even clipped a newspaper photo of him, tears streaming down his cheeks, and hung it on my office wall.

The pros, however, are like the Army – my team right or wrong. If you want your team to win, you root for the guys who wear your uniform, regardless of where they come from or where they went to school. But nothing Tebow does on the football field or off it is going to make me feel any different about abortion — no matter how strongly he comes out against it. And if anything he does makes you feel different about abortion, then you’re neither a believer nor a bigot, you’re an idiot. And I wonder how much preaching Denver fans are going to stand for when the team loses three or four in a row.

I do admire him for his public stance on compensating college athletes for the money they generate for their schools, which reveals more guts than some of his coaches have shown. And I like that Tebow puts his money where his mouth is, helping his parents, who are missionaries, establish and maintain an orphanage in the Philippines.

But a role model? No way. Many of his values are not mine, and I wish he would understand that proclaiming them publicly could create divisions on his own team. As former Denver quarterback Jake Plummer told a reporter, “I wish he’d just shut up after a game and go hug his teammates.” A much stronger reaction occurred just before Tebow’s rookie season at an NFL scouting combine. Tebow suggested the group pray; a player suggested that he “shut the fuck up.”

The suggestion that Tebow tone it down in public seems to anger people like Todd Starnes, who asks rhetorically, “Should Christians enter restaurants through the back door and use separate drinking fountains?”

No, but when they’re in public they might follow the advice of Jesus in Matthew 6:5-7, who instructed that “when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret …”

Personally, I want my quarterback to have more of a Joe Namath-type swagger and a little less humility. But in the NFL, God is on the side of the best quarterback.

With the purpose of clarifying the issues, I’m going to do an instant replay on the questions and help Surma with the answers. (The following questions were taken right off the CNN telecast.)

Angry student:  You said Coach Paterno was fired “in the best interests of the university.” Can you define in the best interests of the university?

Surma: I…

Me (putting my hand over the mic): Hold it, John, I got this one.

You ask to define “the best interests of the university”? Let me tell you in as clear language as possible, you arrogant little jerk. Over the past 15 years there were at least eight boys raped by former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky — oh, sorry, even though the grand jury has met on this, we still have to say “allegedly raped.” Anyone connected with this, anyone who enabled Sandusky to continue doing what he was doing — oh, sorry, allegedly doing what he was doing — and doing it on the Penn State campus, and anyone who had knowledge of his activities and did not act to stop him deserves to be immediately dismissed.

Angry student: That doesn’t mean …

Me: Shut up. I’m not finished. You asked the question and I’m answering it.

It would have been “in the best interests of the university” if the firings were announced on Sunday morning, the day after the findings of the grand jury were released. That, at least, would have made it appear to the public that somebody at Penn State was treating this matter with the gravity it demands.

Since you don’t seem to get it, let me spell it out for you. On Saturday, March 2, 2002, a then-graduate assistant who is currently an assistant PSU football coach, Mike McQueary — you all remember him, he was also a quarterback here and the one with the shock of red hair that makes him look like Archie in the comics — told the grand jury he saw former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky naked in the shower, raping a young boy McQueary thought to be 10 years of age.

Now, let me be clear about this: I’m wondering why McQueary, a strapping young quarterback, didn’t do something right then and there and stop this boy from being assaulted? Instead, McQueary — who, for some unfathomable reason is not only still on the Penn State coaching staff, but will, as of this writing, be with the team this Saturday in full view of a national TV audience — called not the campus police or the university president, but his father, who didn’t tell his son to go to the campus police or the university president but to the head football coach.

According to testimony Joe Paterno gave the grand jury, Paterno said McQueary was “distraught” and he wasn’t “specific.” This leaves me wondering whether Paterno was, then or now, a liar or merely an idiot. Stop shouting, I’m not finished.

If McQueary was “distraught,” did Paterno not think that he had seen something terrible? And if he thought McQueary wasn’t “specific,” why did he not ask him to be specific?

Instead of calling the police or the university president, Paterno called athletic director Tim Curley, another former assistant coach. Curley brought in Gary Schultz, vice president of finance and business, whose duties included supervision of the campus police.  By the way, Paterno called Curley not the same day he met with McQueary, but waited at least 24 hours. Curley and Schultz met with McQueary eventually — eventually, as in no one is sure how many days passed, but estimates are that it might have been as late as March 27 — and promised to investigate.

No one knows exactly when president Spanier was informed, but it appears to have been after the March 27 meeting.

Are you getting all this? Is it making an impression?

What was done by the Penn State officials between March 2002 and the recent grand jury investigation was …  nothing!  No one went to legal authorities and no action was taken. Oh, I just remembered.  That’s not true.  According to the grand jury report, after the incident in 2002, someone — again, presumably Curley — told Sandusky “not to bring any boys on campus.” And Sandusky did have his keys taken away, though precisely what that means isn’t clear since Sandusky — who, you’ll be interested to know, is walking around today, free on $100,000 bail –  was still using the Penn State facilities as late as 2009, when the last sex abuse charge, the one that got a grand jury involved, was made by the mother of a 12-year old boy.

And do you know why in 2002 Jerry Sandusky was a former assistant coach?  “Officially” he resigned in 1999 after Paterno told him he would not be head football coach. But coincidentally, he resigned soon after a mother confronted him on campus twice and asked him not to shower with boys again. Sandusky refused, and campus police tapped into at least one of their conversations, but the authorities decided not to file charges. Happily for Sandusky, his resignation agreement included a clause that he continued to have an office and full access to the Penn State football facilities.

Even better for Sandusky, he was allowed to retain his position in the Second Mile, a charitable organization for at-risk children, which he helped found.

I should add that it appears that no one at Penn State bothered to inform anyone else associated with the Second Mile about either the 1998 or 2002 incidents involving Sandusky.

Finally, let me also add that there is no conceivable way Joe Paterno could not have known about what happened in 1998, and no way he could have misinterpreted what McQueary related to him in March 2002. Yet he continued to allow his longtime friend Sandusky free rein on campus.

To sum up, what would have been in “the best interests of the university” is for every person who knew about Sandusky and did not contact legal authorities to resign, allowing the university at least some measure of dignity in dealing with this horrible scandal.

Angry student: Why was Coach Paterno informed about his firing over the phone?

Me: Have you been listening to anything said, you air-headed jackass? Joe Paterno enabled Jerry Sandusky. He’s the one who could have stopped him, at least in 2002 and probably back in 1998. He did nothing. And if you don’t understand that, let me say it a different way:  Joe Paterno and his “boss,” Graham Spanier, were fired because they didn’t have the common sense or decency to resign.

Instead of resigning as soon as the grand jury report was made public, until Paterno’s apologies Wednesday night after he was fired, the Paterno family took an indignant and defiant stance. Scott Paterno, Joe’s son and also his attorney, angrily asked reporters: “Do you really think we’d let a rapist walk around on campus?” To which the reply should have been: That’s what you allegedly did.

Angry student:  Was any consideration given as to how his would affect the football program?

Me: The football program? The football program?? Are you serious? A former assistant coach was just indicted for over 40 counts related to sexual assault on a child, your football coach was fired in disgrace, your athletic director has been indicted for perjury, and a current assistant coach will, I’m sure, soon be fired. And the crimes against  humanity — against children — took place in the university’s athletic facilities. Do you think you will even have a football program when the full extent of this becomes known?

Do you even think you’re going to have a university?

What? You think I’m guilty of hyperbole?  Have any of you here tonight, the ones who are going to go out and overturn a news truck — because, of course, it’s all the news media’s fault –  and tear down light posts thought about what’s in Penn State’s future? I’m hearing guesses on CNN and MSNBC that this could cost the school — who knows? — as much as $100 million.  $100 million?  You should be so lucky. Don’t you understand that under no circumstances can Penn State allow any suit to go to court?  Can you imagine a long, protracted trial in which Joe Paterno and who knows how many victims would have to take the stand as witnesses and relate graphic details? There is no way any suit will go to court.  The university will have to settle out of court and will hardly be in any position to negotiate. When legal fees and settlements are all added up, Penn State will be lucky if every building on this campus isn’t rented out to a community college.

So don’t worry about the football team.  Worry about the fact that from now on, whenever the name of Penn State is mentioned, people all over the country — make that all over the world — will be sneering, snickering or spitting. Worry that a long period of penance and healing must begin, and that your actions are delaying this process.

People from Texas understood what he meant; it was like when the University of Texas played Texas A&M or Oklahoma. To Oklahomans, it was like when their Sooners play Texas or Nebraska. People from Michigan and Ohio understood — it was like when Michigan played Ohio State, and they had to pass out fliers to fans of the visiting team advising “Wear jackets over your team colors and don’t take them off until seated.” (The same flier suggested driving across the state line in a rental car with neutral-state license plates.)

In New Jersey, though, there were no ready comparisons, nor, for that matter, in New York, where most fans think college football is something played somewhere west of the Hudson River and most sportswriters see college football as a mere appendage to the pro game. What a shock they would have should they ever cross the river and find out that for the vast majority of Americans, college football is football.

My Jersey cousins would ask, “You mean like when the Eagles and Giants  play?” Not quite, I’d reply. Nobody dies at Eagles-Giants games. The year doesn’t hinge on Eagles-Giants games. People in Philadelphia and New York still get married on the day of Eagles-Giants games.

This Saturday, nobody in Alabama or Louisiana is going to get married, and somebody is going to die.

This year’s Alabama-LSU game is the latest in a college football tradition that falls under the category of the “Game of the Century.” Occasionally you’ll hear football fans argue over which game is superior, college or pro. This is really not a debate to be taken seriously. The only people who think professional football is better than college football are people who don’t follow college football. Put it this way: Pro football exists because of college  football; the college game is the dog — or dawg, as they spell it down South — to which the pro game is the tail.

Don’t tell me about the ratings for this or that Super Bowl. That’s all pro football is to most Americans: a long-running television show. Ask the fans of any major college program in the country — Penn State, Southern Cal, Notre Dame, Arizona State, Florida, Oregon, Boise State, Michigan State or any of four or five other dozen schools –  if they’d rather see their team win their Big Game or have their favorite pro football team win the Super Bowl. You’ll discover very quickly that the pro game takes a seat in the back corner of the end zone. The dean of college football writers, Dan Jenkins, nailed down what makes college football the greater game in his 1970 book “Saturday’s America”: “Tradition and rivalry, words that belong almost exclusively  to the vernacular of college football — old as the two words are, they are irreplaceable, for it is what they suggest that specifically separates the college game from that of the pros. Sophisticates … may not like it, but college football is Michigan playing Minnesota for the Little Brown Jug, a street brawl in downtown Dallas the night before the Texas-Oklahoma game, a thousand white Annapolis caps spraying into the air above Philadelphia’s John F. Kennedy Stadium, and that annual Wall Street Block Party and Raccoon Coat Parade known as the  Yale-Harvard game.” In pro football, tradition means that some fans can still remember the score of the last Super Bowl.

Rivalry? In the pros, rivalry means whatever teams happen to be winning this season.  If you want to learn the real meaning of the word, watch Alabama and LSU this Saturday night; you’ll experience firsthand the kind of real enthusiasm, a barbaric yawp of the kind that Whitman would have recognized. It’s the lifeblood of college football, a feeling that can only be imitated in pro football stadiums. In the NFL, football players are mercenaries; in college football, they are folk heroes.

The heart of football is college football, and the heart of college football is the Southeastern Conference. Since it was first established in 1933, an SEC team has claimed all or at least part of the national championship 34 times in 77 seasons. An SEC team has the title outright for the last five seasons and almost certainly will take it again this year. Going into this game, LSU is 7-0 and ranked No. 1 while Alabama is also 7-0 and ranked No. 2 (though the Crimson Tide is a five-point betting favorite). The winner will be heavily favored to finish the regular season unbeaten, win the conference championship and then walk over whoever – Stanford, Boise State, Oklahoma or anyone else unlucky enough to have to face them – in the BCS title game in January.

Games of the Century come in several varieties. Some fans like intersectional rivalries that involve the two best teams in the  country. These almost always happen in postseason bowl games such as the Miami-Nebraska Orange Bowl classic on Jan. 2, 1984, in which the once-beaten Miami Hurricanes held off the Nebraska Cornhuskers 31-30, sealing the victory, literally, by stopping Nebraska on the last play of the game.

For some purists, though, The Game must be between undefeated teams, like the Nov. 9, 1946, Army-Notre Dame game at Yankee Stadium in which three Heisman Trophy winners – Glenn Davis and Doc Blanchard for Army and Johnny Lujack for Notre Dame – failed to produce a single point as the game ended in a 0-0 tie. Twenty seasons later, in 1966, on Nov. 19, 1966, No. 1 Notre Dame and No. 2 Michigan State played to a hugely controversial 10-10 tie at East Lansing, Mich. — controversial because onlookers thought the Fighting Irish should have tried harder near the end of the game to win instead of settling for a tie.

But for the purists of purists, such as myself, the only true Game of the Century can be between teams that are, first, unbeaten; second, ranked No. 1 and 2; third, are traditional rivals; and four, are out to settle the issue in a regular season clash. By those criteria, only the legendary Thanksgiving Day 1971 match between No. 1 Nebraska and No. 2 Oklahoma, won by the Cornhuskers in the final minute, 35-31, qualifies as the real thing. Until this Saturday night, that is. Whatever definition one gives the Game of the Century, though, it must meet one golden standard: It has to be a college game.

Everyone knows that Buckner lost the 1986 World Series for the Red Sox. But what everyone knows is wrong.

At the time, the Red Sox were burdened with 68 years of frustration; their last championship was in 1918. Leading three games to two against the New York Mets, Boston was ahead by a score of 5-3 in the bottom of the 10th inning. Red Sox pitcher Calvin Schiraldi got two quick outs. In the Sox locker room the champagne was iced, and the scoreboard flashed “Congratulations Red Sox.”

Gary Carter, Kevin Mitchell and Ray Knight all singled, and the score was 5-4 with Mitchell on third. Reliever Bob Stanley came into the game to pitch to Mookie Wilson and threw a wild pitch that brought Mitchell home and tied the score. But it’s the next play that still has Red Sox fans screaming in the middle of the night.

Stanley threw a sinker-ball, designed to produce ground balls to infielders. What was supposed to happen did happen—Mookie Wilson tapped a slow grounder at Buckner at first base. But the ball rolled between Buckner’s legs, and the Mets won in the most incredible finish to a World Series game ever. (See it with commentary by the inimitable Vin Scully.)

Buckner’s career changed in an instant. Up to that moment, he was one of the game’s great unsung hitters. He’d batted better than .300 seven times in his career, winning the 1980 American League batting title. He led the league four times in assists. During that crucial September 1986 playoff run, he carried the team, hitting .340 with eight home runs. All that was soon to be forgotten.

The scholar Stephen Jay Gould (in Natural History magazine) called him “a gallant first baseman and a veteran with a long and distinguished career.”

“For weeks,” wrote Gould, “manager John McNamara had been benching Buckner for defensive purposes during the last few innings of games with substantial Red Sox leads, but after a long and hard season, Buckner’s legs were shot … he could hardly bend down.”

Plagued with chronic ankle soreness—he was the first player to wear high-top baseball cleats to ease the pain— Buckner had been relieved in three previous series games by Dave Stapleton. Why was he still playing when Wilson hit the ground ball? Because McNamara was sentimental; he wanted his regulars on the field when the Red Sox won the series.

But Buckner’s error did not lose the championship for the Red Sox; it didn’t even lose Game 6 for them — the Red Sox had already blown their two-run lead. Two nights later, with another chance at the ring, Boston lost 8-5.

(Buckner, incidentally, had two hits in four at-bats and scored a run in Game 7.)

Red Sox fans cried “Curse of the Bambino”—the punishment Boston supposedly merited for selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1919—but the focus of the curse that season was Buckner. Yet Buckner did not put the tying runs on base. He didn’t throw the wild pitch that made it 5-5. He did not make the decision to keep his defensive replacement on the bench. Had he made the play, the Red Sox could have lost the game anyway.

When so many others contributed as much or more to the Red Sox defeat, why has history made Buckner the goat? Perhaps Gould said it best when he suggested that in the collective minds of Red Sox fans, “If Buckner fields the ball properly, the Sox win their first World Series since 1918 and eradicate the Curse of the Bambino. In this scenario, Buckner’s miscue marks the unkindest bounce of all, the most improbable trivial little error sustained by a good and admired man. What hath God wrought?”

What God wrought, perhaps, was a curse on both teams. The New York Mets have not won another World Series since; their greatest stars on that 1986 team —pitcher Dwight Gooden and slugging outfielder Darryl Strawberry—saw their careers cut short by drug abuse. In 2007 and 2008, the team crumbled down the stretch and missed the playoffs. And this year, the Red Sox, who seemingly broke the Curse by winning the World Series in 2004 and 2007, suffered the all-time worst collapse in baseball history, losing 20 of their last 27 games.

But that was kid’s play for what God had in mind for Donnie Moore. Red Sox fans were quick to forget that they never would have had a crack at their own little tragedy had it not been for Donnie Moore. Boston made it to the World Series by beating the then-Anaheim Angels in the American League Championship Series. After four games, they were in better shape against the Red Sox than the Red Sox ever were against the Mets.

On Oct. 12, 1986, playing in Anaheim, the Angels were up three games to one with a 5-2 lead going into the top of the ninth. Then, a real curse revealed itself. Don Baylor hit a two-run homer to make it 5-4. Moore had been a fine relief pitcher that season, tallying 21 saves. With two outs and the tying run at second, Moore got two strikes on Dave Henderson, then tried to slip a fastball by the Red Sox outfielder. The pitch changed his life. Henderson slammed it to deep left field for a two-run homer. On TV, Al Michaels screamed, “Unbelievable! Astonishing! With one strike away Anaheim Stadium was one strike away from turning into Fantasyland! You’re looking at one for the ages here!”

Like Buckner, Moore was damned for losing the big one. What was forgotten is that the Angels came back to tie it, and Moore, still in the game, induced Jim Rice to ground into a double play. But in the 11th, the Red Sox scored another run off Moore on a sac fly by – of course – Dave Henderson. The Angels lost 7-6.

But that still left them with two chances to win their first-ever pennant and trip to the World Series. The Sox blasted the Angels pitching for 19 runs over two games and went on to meet their destiny against the Mets, without the slightest thought that they owed a great big ugly debt to sheer luck – one that would soon be repaid with interest.

Still, to Angels fans, it had all come down to the pitch that Donnie Moore threw to Dave Henderson. All the subsequent chances that they lost were the evil spawn of that one pitch.

For the next two years, Moore couldn’t walk out on the field without being booed, crushed and heckled. When he left the ballpark, fans were lineup to scream insults, even when he won. Moore began to drink heavily and his talents eroded. On July 18, 1989, Moore got into a shouting fight with his wife at their home in Anaheim Hills. He went to his closet, got an automatic pistol and, in front of his children, shot his wife and one of his daughters. The daughter drove herself and her mother to the hospital; they survived. Moore did not. Back in the house, with his son pleading for him to drop the gun, Moore shot and killed himself.

Now that is tragedy. That puts Bill Buckner’s error in perspective. It’s only a game, unless you choose to regard it as something more.

Meanwhile, the infamous Buckner ball, once owned by Charlie Sheen, is up for auction on eBay, asking price $1 million. The bid will close at the exact minute of the 25th anniversary of the play.

Now a successful businessman, Buckner has lived down the error by turning the joke on himself. On “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” he won the cheers of a New York crowd by catching a baby dropped from a burning building.

In 2008, he threw out the first pitch of the Red Sox home opener and got a standing ovation from the sell-out crowd. Somewhere, one has to feel, the Bambino himself was applauding.

“In the late 1970s,” says comedian and talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, who grew up in Las Vegas, “I was in seventh or eighth grade and the Rebels were in the top 10 in the nation, and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is unbelievable.’ We didn’t have anything like that. We didn’t have an athlete to rally around.

“The Rebels were showtime before the Lakers were showtime.”

The unlikely creator of the hottest ticket in Vegas for nearly 20 years, Jerry Tarkanian was born of Armenian immigrants in 1930 and had made a name for himself as a basketball coach at several colleges, particularly Long Beach State. When approached about taking the job at UNLV, which was derisively referred to as Tumbleweed Tech, he shrewdly perceived that though the program was unheralded, “They had the resources and they had the potential. I told my wife, ‘Lois, this is gonna be like a college town.’ She said, ‘Are you crazy? How could Las Vegas be a college town?’” Within a few short years, says Tarkanian, “It was harder to get a ticket to an UNLV game than it was to get in to see Frank Sinatra.”

His philosophy was simple: Find the best players, whip them into peak condition, and inspire them into near fanatical intensity on both sides of the ball. Often the Runnin’ Rebels used no more than eight players in a game — “The Hard Way Eight,” as they were called — and yet ran opponents into the floorboards. As former UNLV star Reggie Theus put it, “Coach Tark’s motto was: ‘We’re gonna play 40 minutes of nonstop pressure basketball.’ We’d sometimes scored 110 points a game — and that was before they invented the three-point shot.” Tark’s game wasn’t just offense: “A lot of our points were set up by mistakes our defense forced. We were intense on both sides of the ball.”

In his first season, Tarkanian turned a moribund program around, winning 20 of 26 games. Bald and bespectacled, chewing a hand towel, he became perhaps the most recognizable coach in college hoops. UNLV games were Vegas-style events with the theme from “Jaws” greeting the team as they ran out onto the court with an enormous shark — “Tark the Shark” — hanging from the ceiling (with, of course, a towel clenched in its jaws). Wayne Newton, Don Rickles, Suzanne Somers and every celebrity who played the town was welcome courtside. Sinatra made calls to help Tarkanian recruit.

“Runnin’ Rebels of UNLV,” narrated by Liev Schreiber, revives Tarkanian’s greatest teams in all their glory. The 1989-90 Rebels won the NCAA championship in a stunning 30-point drubbing of the Duke Blue Devils, the largest winning margin in Final Four history. The next season they became the first team in 12 years to go unbeaten but lost in the Final Four in a rematch with Duke.

Tarkanian’s greatest battles, however, were fought in the postseason with the National Collegiate Athletic Association, with whom he waged a fierce run-and-shoot war for nearly three decades. Before the start of the 1976-77 season, the NCAA put the Runnin’ Rebels on two years’ probation for what they called “questionable practices,” which occurred in 1971 before Tarkanian even came to UNLV. Nonetheless, the NCAA strong-armed the university into suspending the coach for two years. The feisty Armenian sued and won an injunction that reinstated him; the case went to the Supreme Court, which upheld the Nevada court’s decision.

The Rebels were slam dunked, though, in 1987 when prize recruit Lloyd Daniels was busted for buying crack cocaine. The incident ruined what might have been Tarkanian’s best team: The Runnin’ Rebels won 26 of 28 games, but were banned from postseason play. Tarkanian fanned the fires by writing articles blasting the NCAA. “You can’t beat the NCAA,” says sportswriter Don Yaeger, author of “Shark Attack,” about Tarkanian’s battles with the NCAA, “but you’ve got to hand it to Tark. He came closer than anyone else to fighting them to a standstill.”

Tarkanian sued the NCAA for “trying to drive me out of college basketball.” In 1998, while coaching for his alma mater, Fresno State, Tarkanian received $2.5 million in an out-of-court settlement.

“The Dynasty in the Desert,” as it came to be known, ended in sensational fashion in 1992 after a photo of two UNLV players relaxing in hot tub with a notorious gambler known as “The Fixer” appeared in a local paper. UNLV president Maxson had had enough.

After a breathtaking 509-105 record under Tarkanian, the Runnin’ Rebels have never made it to the Elite Eight again. But Tark’s teams lit up college basketball with a neon pulse that still shines. Las Vegas historian Mike Green sums it up, “This is part of our image. It was a perfect match and a perfect storm.”

(“Runnin’ Rebels of UNLV” airs on HBO and HBO2 through March 31. The show is also available On Demand through April 11.)

The image was reinforced by his work as the founder of Black Lizard Press in Berkeley, Calif., where he reprinted dozens of crime novels by 1950s drugstore book-rack legends such as Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Charles Willeford. More than two decades later, Gifford has succeeded in shedding the reputation of crime writer — something he never aspired to in the first place — without acquiring a new one.

Over the last 20 years, Gifford’s output has doubled — that is, if you count all seven of his “Sailor and Lula” novels as one volume (as they are in the recent edition from Seven Stories Press); his three plays, “The Hotel Room Trilogy,” as one; and each of his 13 volumes of poetry separately. Gifford’s vast and diverse body of work has frustrated critics by defying easy categorization. Among my fictional favorites in his oeuvre are “Port Tropique” (1980, reprinted in 2009), a stylish thriller that reveals Gifford’s crime novel roots; “Landscape With Traveler” (1980, regrettably out of print), about a gay Naval officer, written in short, lyrical chapters that owe much to the influence of classical Japanese writers Sei Shonagon and Lady Murasaki; and “Wyoming” (2000, a Los Angeles Times novel of the year), a novel about a woman and her young son on a car trip through the South and West told entirely in dialogue.

What stands out most about these and other of Gifford’s fictions is how original they are without in the least smacking of the experimental; mastering a subject and then moving on has been the story of Gifford’s life. His enormous body of work reflects a lifetime of experience and influences. With Lawrence Lee, he is the co-writer of two biographies, “Saroyan: A Biography” (of William Saroyan, 1984) and “Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac” (1978). He is the author of “A Day at the Races: The Education of a Racetracker” (1988), a book about the delights of horse racing that would have brought a smile to the face of A.J. Liebling; “The Neighborhood of Baseball: A Personal History of the Chicago Cubs” (1981, about the joys and many woes of growing up near Wrigley Field); and “Out of the Past: Adventures in Film Noir” (2001, and currently available from the University Press of Mississippi).

The latter is Gifford’s homage to his favorite heroes and heroines from the world of dark cinema. The book has earned him a large cult following from readers only vaguely aware of Gifford’s fiction and biography. Sample from the entry on “Devil Thumbs a Ride,” a grimy 1947 crime film starring Lawrence Tierney: “I got up at 3:30 in the morning to watch this movie on TV — the perfect time for it.” On Tierney: “There is no daylight in that face.” On “The Asphalt Jungle”: “Jungle reflects two shades, dark and darker.”

Perhaps the best book for checking into Gifford’s neon-noir lit sensibility is “The Cavalry Charges: Writings on Books, Film and Music” (2007), a collection of essays dedicated to his friend Matt Dillon, for whom he wrote the screenplay for “City of Ghosts,” the 2003 film that Dillon directed. Gifford indulges in reveries on favorite TV shows, including “City Confidential,” the A&E true crime series that ran from 1998-2005; musicians such as Artie Shaw; and writers whose work made an impression on his own sensibility, ranging from B. Traven, the mysterious author of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” and, most unlikely of all, Clair Bee, author of the Chip Hilton novels for boys written between 1948 and 1965 in which the hero, Chip, leads his teammates to success by conveying the virtues of self sacrifice, discipline and honesty.

“I imagine,” writes Gifford, “that I must have learned something from reading these books, and that I’m probably still operating according to some of the same principles and under those same delusions.” No easy task for the son of a small-time Chicago racketeer. He recalled his childhood in 1992 in “A Good Man to Know,” subtitled “A Semi-Documentary Fictional Memoir.” (The book is out of print, but Gifford incorporated much of the material into the 2009 novel “Memories From a Sinking Ship.”) The point of view of his long-suffering mother was covered in a 1984 novel, “An Unforgettable Woman.”

Gifford spent his early years working at a variety of jobs, from merchant seaman to rock musician. He attended the University of Missouri on a baseball scholarship but found the environment a little stuffy. “I didn’t have any friends,” he told me, “except for the six beatniks on campus, and two of them were from New York.” After a year at Missouri he hit the road for Manhattan and kept going all the way to London, where he enrolled at Cambridge on a non-degree basis. The few months he spent there were enjoyable but proved to him once and for all that “I’d never be a scholar.”

Once, when I asked Gifford about whether an incident he wrote about was part of his personal experience or invented, he shrugged and answered, “You spend a lot of time observing life, then you make things up.”

In interviews and profiles over the years, Gifford has often engaged in myth mongering, sometimes being deliberately fuzzy as to whether material in his books is autobiographical or fictional. “Barry likes the tough guy image,” says Michael Swindle, a New Orleans-based poet/writer. “He used to drive around Berkeley in his ‘pimpmobile’” — a white 1975 Cadillac Eldorado — “but that was just for show. It was sort of like he was the Rick Blaine of novelists — you know, the character with a mysterious past Bogart played in ‘Casablanca.’ That’s kind of what he is, the Bogart of novelists.”

Swindle cautions that “You’ve got to be careful around him. You might wind up in one of his books.” Swindle found that out a year after a car trip with Gifford across the Southern states, when he opened a copy of “Sailor’s Holiday,” one of the Sailor and Lula novels, and found a character named Mississippi Mike Swindle.

The Sailor and Lula novels have proven to be Gifford’s most popular works, and not just because of the film starring Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern, which was not a box office success. (“Wild at Heart,” which takes its title from Tennessee Williams, is a much better book than Lynch’s film is a movie. Many aficionados of both men’s work prefer Lynch’s film “Lost Highway,” from Gifford’s screenplay, and “Perdita Durango,” Gifford’s second Sailor and Lula novel made into a film by Spanish director Álex de la Iglesia in 1997.)

The characters Sailor Ripley — Sailor’s name was a tribute to a free-spirited poet Gifford drank sake with on a visit to Japan — and Lula Pace Fortune were inspired by people he observed in a hotel in Southport, N.C., where he overheard part of a conversation going on in the next room. His notes became the genesis of a road novel, “Wild at Heart,” about two young people fleeing across the South. Sailor and Lula’s story is told largely in a combination of dialogue and inner monologue; not the undernourished patter of most thrillers but an unsettling torch blast of language that uses the characters’ inarticulateness to express their yearnings. Through seven novels, most of them set on the roads of the American South, life reveals itself pretty much to be what Lula thought in the first book, “The world is wild at heart and weird on top.”

By the final book, “The Imagination of the Heart,” Lula, now 80 and living in the wasteland of post-Katrina New Orleans, tells us, “I am ready for an answer why theres [sic] endless madness and suffering on the planet. All I know is everything’s been out of control from the beginning.”

Taken together, the Sailor and Lula stories form one of the most amazing love tales in American literature, one that continues to evolve even after Sailor’s death. (In true rock-star fashion, he flames out in a car wreck.) Like a trailer-park Tristan and Isolde, their love survives all obstacles — including car chases, holdups, drug deals gone wrong, Satanic parents, sociopath enemies, and even a lengthy prison stretch for Sailor.

The novels take place in towns with such names as Big Tuna, Texas; Divine Water, Okla.; Candido Aguilar, Mexico; and even the Pee Dee River Correctional Facility, involving characters with names like O-Boy Wilson, Perdita Durango, Pea Ridge Day, Consuelo Whynot and Coot Veal. (The last, I happen to know, is stolen from a light-hitting shortstop who spent six years in the majors from 1958 through 1963.) As I wrote for the Los Angeles Times in a piece about Gifford’s story collection “Night People,” “The characters in ‘Night People,’ like those in ‘Wild at Heart’ and Gifford’s other Sailor and Lula stories, seem like the kinds of people you glimpsed once briefly when you were stuck in a bus station late at night in a small town or on a subway train when it was stalled and let you off in a part of town you’d never seen before.” I might have added, or when your tire blew and left you stranded in a border town.

Gifford writes about men and women of whom you ask, “Where do they go during the day?” And the answer is that they are the kind of people who always seem to show up after dark because they carry their own private night with them. You’ll be glad that you went along for the ride, but also glad that you have a kinder, saner world to return to.