It was dictated long ago that Jerry Tarkanian would be remembered as more than a basketball coach who won a lot of games.

He was collegiate sport’s champion of lost causes and hard-luck cases, an underdog fighting the alleged hypocrisies of the “Big Brother” establishment.

The man dubbed “Tark the Shark,” who famously chomped a wet towel on the basketball bench, transformed the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, into a glitzy powerhouse as he waged a decades-long war against the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

It was a war, many could conclude, that Tarkanian ultimately won.

He died Wednesday at 84, feeling vindicated by an NCAA court settlement, while also living long enough to savor his belated 2013 enshrinement into basketball’s hall of fame.

He had been fighting an infection since he was hospitalized Monday in Las Vegas.

Tarkanian never had a losing record in 38 seasons, finishing 988-228 overall, with a major-college mark of 778-202. He won four California junior college state championships and four times led UNLV to the Final Four of the NCAA tournament.

He claimed one NCAA title victory on the basketball court, with his run-and-fun UNLV team of 1990. And he split two in-court cases with the NCAA, losing a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision but later gaining a $2.5 million settlement.

Tarkanian’s coaching talents, particularly his brilliance as a defensive tactician, were overshadowed by off-court controversies surrounding alleged recruiting violations and a host of other infractions.

In 1991, at the height of his success, Tarkanian abruptly announced his retirement after a Las Vegas newspaper published a photo of three of his UNLV players in a hot tub with a convicted bookmaker.

He left three major-college schools - Long Beach State, UNLV and Fresno State - in varying states of infractions disarray, but he maintained that NCAA charges were trumped up by a governing body out to get him.

He once told the Los Angeles Times: “I’ll resent them forever.”