First Big Dance was best for Coach Tark

By Ron Kantowski

Friday, March 20, 2009 | 2 a.m.

One of the most fascinating facts about the North Dakota State men’s basketball team is that it is the first school in nearly 40 years to qualify for the NCAA Tournament in its first year of eligibility.

The last to do it was Long Beach State in 1970.

Jerry Tarkanian coached that Long Beach team. And the next three after that, which also made it to the Big Dance, or at least the Dance, because that was in the days when it wasn’t so big; when they didn’t take mediocre teams from the Pac-10 — er, 8 — that couldn’t finish better than .500 in league play; when the one shining moment of the season occurred when a guy named McGuire (Al or Frank) saw his shadow on Groundhog Day.

They took only 25 teams in 1970, so it was a big deal just to qualify.

“I really think what we did at Long Beach State was greater than what we did at UNLV,” said Tarkanian, who took a $3,900 pay cut to leave Pasadena City College for Long Beach, which was moving up from Division II.

Tark said Long Beach was a state college with no money. (Sound familiar?) There was only one secretary and only one office for the entire athletic department — and it was a small office.

“We didn’t even have a fight song,” he said. “They’d play ‘On, Wisconsin’ or the Notre Dame fight song. I said, ‘We’ve gotta get our own fight song.’ ”

Tark said the 49ers received 72 pairs of basketball shoes from the athletic department. They kept 48 and sold the other 24 so he’d have a scouting budget.

He had a 26-year-old assistant named Ivan Duncan who worked for free and sometimes would drive the players to the games. Once when he had a flat tire, the athletic department wouldn’t reimburse him for having it fixed.

Sports Illustrated described Tark’s Long Beach teams as “a bunch of high-strung, volatile beings.” Well, you’d be high-strung and volatile, too, if you had to ride in the back of an old Buick with your chin resting on your knees just so you could dunk on Cal State Fullerton.

Those 49ers teams, led by future NBA players such as George Trapp, Leonard Gray and Ed Ratleff, didn’t just dunk on Fullerton. They dunked on just about everybody who would play them. They dunked on UCLA, too, at least until J.D. Morgan, the Bruins’ athletic director, came down to the scorer’s table during the 1971 West Regional final to complain about the officiating.

Remember the Rebels’ suffocating 1-2-2 amoeba defense? That’s what Long Beach played against John Wooden’s mighty Bruins, led by stalwarts Sidney Wicks, Curtis Rowe and Henry Bibby. The 49ers led the low-scoring game by eight points when Morgan interceded.

“They could not stop Ed Ratleff,” Tark recalled.

“Art White — I will never forget the SOB,” he said of his not-so-favorite zebra. “Ratleff fouled out of the game. That was the only game he ever fouled out of. We lost in the last 23 seconds. It was the most heartbreaking loss I’ve ever had.

“Years later, I talked to Henry Bibby. He said that was the toughest zone he had ever played against.”

Were it not for UCLA, Tark’s first national championship might have come at Long Beach. That was in the days when teams played in their geographic regions, which meant that all roads to the Final Four for a team out west had to go through UCLA. Tark had four consecutive NCAA qualifiers at Long Beach; the first three were eliminated by national championship Bruin teams.

“What we did there was an absolute miracle,” said Tarkanian, who built his Long Beach program around the junior college players he knew from Pasadena — all five starters from the 1970 team were JC products — before Ratleff arrived from Ohio and put the 49ers over the top.

Tark’s record in five seasons at Long Beach was 122-20. He never lost a home game.

Sadly, Gray and Trapp are deceased, but Tark said he still hears from Ratleff, who is a State Farm Insurance agent and “living well” in Garden Grove, Calif.

“We had a reunion this year,” Tark said. “I just loved those Long Beach kids so much.”

Tark said if you want to discuss those Long Beach teams — or even the San Antonio Spurs, whom he coached for 20 games in 1992, come on down to the Palazzo sports book this weekend, where he will host an NCAA Tournament party. He’ll sign an autograph and tell you all about “Easy” Ed Ratleff. And Vinny Del Negro, if you insist.

I have an Ed Ratleff anecdote of my own. I was 13 when I received my first subscription to Sports Illustrated as a birthday present and a couple of months later, Ratleff was pictured on the cover. Inside, there was a photo of Ratleff on the Long Beach campus. I think he was wearing a Long Beach letterman’s jacket (when that was still considered cool), but I vividly recall him wearing these blue suede athletic shoes.

A couple of weeks later I had a pair of blue suede shoes, too. If I could have grown an Afro like Ratleff’s, I would have done it.

Not too long ago, I found a pair of “retro” blue suede shoes on the Internet that looked like the ones I wore in high school, so I placed an order. When they arrived, they were a half-size small. I wore them anyway. The next day, my feet hurt like crazy.

When my wife came home and noticed the lawn hadn’t been mowed, I blamed it on Ed Ratleff.