Elsewhere, he described U.N.L.V.’s style as “ghetto run-and-shoot basketball” with little concern for defense. He added that Tarkanian won games in the regular season but that “in tournaments, facing well coached and disciplined teams he gets beaten.” Besides being demonstrably wrong, Byers’s remarks have the unmistakable whiff of racism.

Not that it mattered. Byers’s view of Tarkanian as a rogue coach became conventional wisdom. And Tark the Shark could sometimes be his own worst enemy. In 1991, after a photograph emerged showing several of his players in a hot tub with a well-known gambler, Tarkanian announced that he would resign after the 1991-92 season.

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It was not until 2013 that Tarkanian finally got his due, when he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. He was old and sick, using a wheelchair, but it was one of the happiest moments of his life. When his name was announced during the induction ceremony, the cheers were the loudest of the day.

The year before, I visited Tarkanian at his home in Las Vegas. He could barely speak, and his wife, Lois, a Las Vegas city councilwoman, along with his son Danny — who played for his father at U.N.L.V. — and daughter Jodie Diamant, did most of the talking. They reflected not only on how difficult the ordeal had been for their father, but also on how hard it had been for the entire family, especially when Danny and Jodie were kids. Their enduring frustration was that the voluminous evidence of N.C.A.A. wrongdoing uncovered over the years — from the U.N.L.V. investigation, the Tarkanian lawsuit and even a series of congressional hearings in the late 1970s — had made no difference to how Tarkanian was perceived. His reputation had been destroyed by the N.C.A.A.

One night during my visit, Lois Tarkanian took me to her daughter’s house. There was a small barnlike structure in the back yard. Using a flashlight to unlock the door, she opened it and turned on the light. Everywhere I looked I saw boxes of documents, piled six and seven feet high, each one stuffed with dusty deposition transcripts, legal filings and newspaper clippings. Lois had saved every piece of paper from her husband’s 25-year war with the N.C.A.A. Here was the proof that her husband had been wronged, and she was never going to throw it away.

As for Byers, by the end of his time as executive director he came to believe that the N.C.A.A. was badly in need of reform. In 1984, he gave a short interview to Jack McCallum at Sports Illustrated, in which he said: “We’re in a situation where we, the colleges, say it’s improper for athletes to get, for example, a new car. Well, is that morally wrong? Or is it wrong because we say it’s wrong?”