Freeing minds, Gonzalez and Self

Jerry Tarkanian

Monday, Dec. 8, 2008 | 2:21 p.m.

I hear a lot of people talking about how poorly UNLV has been shooting lately, and I think it just comes down to confidence and freedom.

I can only talk about when I was coaching and the players I had, and I always thought to be a good shooter you had to have a certain amount of freedom.

You have to free up their minds.

I remember Freddie Banks. He was such a great, great person. Now and then, he’d take bad shots. I’d much rather he took one or two bad shots and free up his mind. He has such a great mind.

One time, he was in a big slump and an assistant was yelling at him. Freddie took it so personal. For five or six games, he didn’t shoot it well.

I took him aside and talked to him. And I told my assistant coaches, NOBODY says anything to Freddie from now on, except me. That drove up his confidence.

He was the most clutch shooter I had. I called him Fearless Freddie. He was fearless. He took more tough shots than anyone I’ve been around. I think, I hope, it happens – he should be in the Hall of Fame at UNLV.

He’s a local kid who played four great years for us. He’s a super person.

I just think so many coaches hurt their teams. These are good coaches, but their team doesn’t shoot the ball well. Well, you don’t shoot the ball well if you’re running plays all the time.

We did that until 1976. Then we never did. We freed up their minds, offensively. That’s when you start to shoot the ball well.

I remember when I was coaching junior college teams. We ran a passing game. It was very popular in those days. We were harder than hell to defend.

But rarely did you see a team that ran a passing game shoot well. Coaches would get it in the heads of their players – pass four times, do this and do that before you shoot.

I don’t think those teams shoot well. One of the best coaches in junior college, Gene Victor, always ran a passing game. No one ran it better than he did. But I don’t think they ever shot very well.

I had Bobby Gonzalez, one of the up-and-coming coaches in the country, on my Fresno radio show recently.

He has Seton Hall at 6-1 and people should watch him. He did well at Manhattan College and was an assistant on the U.S. 22-and-under gold-medal team at the World University Games in Turkey in 2005.

We taped him the other day for a future show. He used to come out to work our UNLV camps for a couple years. I said, Bobby, we don’t have money. But he came out anyway. He didn’t care.

He wanted to be there with our coaches. I think he’s one of the top young coaches.

We also had Bill Self of Kansas on the show recently. We talked about him winning his first national championship last season, and how and why he turned down Oklahoma State to stay at Kansas.

He just said that the future at Kansas was better. T. Boone Pickens, the wealthy Oklahoma State benefactor, tried to get him so bad.

Bill’s a great guy. He was at Tulsa when I first came back here to Fresno. They finished that season 29-4 and they beat UNLV in the first round of the 2000 NCAA tournament.

That season, Fresno State beat Tulsa three times, by two, one and then three points. But my Bulldogs lost by 10 to Wisconsin in the NCAAs in Salt Lake City.

Tulsa beat the Rebels, 89-62, in Nashville in the first round of the NCAA tournament, then defeated Cincinnati and Miami.

In an Elite Eight game, to go to the Final Four in Indianapolis, Self’s Tulsa team lost to North Carolina in a tight one, 59-55.

That was when everyone found out that Self is such a good coach.