The University of Arizona Alumnus / Winter 2009
Looking Back on 25 Years
by Tom Danehy
Arizona Athletics photos
For all his amazing accomplishments, there was a sameness about Coach Lute Olson. He pretty much always dressed the same way, he coached the same way, he won the same way. There was an icy, solid resoluteness to the way he approached his calling, the shaping of young male athletes into teammates, winners, and men.
He was one of the most important people at The University of Arizona during the past 25 years and certainly one of the most recognizable Tucsonans, both in the Old Pueblo and throughout the country. A great face to have out front, his is a legacy that will probably never be matched and may never be approached.
Many UA alumni from the past quarter century likely mark their time on campus by who was starting for the basketball team. An alumnus from the mid 1980s got to watch Lute Olson’s early teams take their first steps toward national prominence. Somebody from the mid 1990s watched the Khalid Reeves-Damon Stoudamire team reach the Final Four. And a grad from the mid 2000s suffered along with Channing Frye and Salim Stoudamire through the loss to Illinois that became an Instant Classic for ESPN and a recurring nightmare for ’Cat fans everywhere.
What’s interesting is that there is a sameness to the words that others apply to Lute Olson and what he has meant to the UA. People he coached against, like former North Carolina coach Dean Smith; players like Reggie Geary; and luminaries like former Governor (and now head of Homeland Security) Janet Napolitano all sound eerily similar when speaking of Olson.
His is a legacy of greatness, they all say. And they (and many others) all use the word “legend,” but struggle with it as though it’s not enough.
Lute Olson’s time at Arizona is marked by many, many highs, and not a few lows, spectacular victories, and painful defeats. Through it all, he remained somewhat aloof, and yet we all seemed to know him. It’s almost as if we were friends. And so, let’s look at some milestones as Friends would do. (I never actually watched that show, but I did read the episode titles in the TV Guide.)
A proper sampling of the 24 seasons of Lute Olson’s
Arizona career would include:
The One About the Game(s) the Year Before — Not many of us were there for those, but they were significant in their own way. Just four wins in 28 games. An ugly 3-6 start,
followed by 15 straight losses, including the first 14 Pac-10 games. Only a one-point win against a bad Stanford team in McKale kept them from having the only 0-18 record in conference history.
But it wasn’t just that they were bad; they were monumentally inept. Bad coaching, horrible execution, and perhaps worst of all, almost universally ignored by the local fans.
Ben Lindsey, who had won NAIA national championships at Grand Canyon College, was brought in to replace Fred Snowden, whose teams had packed the newly opened McKale Center in the 1970s. Snowden had several winning seasons and a couple trips to the NCAA Tournament, but then the wheels began to come off. After three straight losing seasons, Snowden was fired by Athletics Director Cedric Dempsey and replaced with Lindsey.
It bordered on the disturbing. I personally witnessed a time that Lindsey sent his squad back onto the floor with only four players. The “crowds” were generously listed in the range of 3,000. I wrote at the time that students would go to UA men’s games to do their homework because there was less noise in McKale than in the library.
All-American and all-time leading ’Cat scorer Sean Elliott, who was in high school during that Lindsey season, thinks it had an effect. “I think (that season) kind of forced Mr. Dempsey to go out and find a high-profile coach. I went to a couple of games that year and it was bad. If they had been OK, we might never have gotten Coach Olson.”
The One with His First Trip to the NCAAs — Olson’s first season at Arizona saw a seven-game improvement over the
previous year (Lindsey’s one and only). Not earthshaking, by any means, but intriguing. If there had been a derivatives market back then (well, obviously, we now know that there should never be a derivatives market), Lute Olson would have been a wise investment. With a cobbled-together lineup of castoffs and transfers, Olson’s squad stumbled out of the gate, losing 11 of its first 14 games, but then came the inflection point. A one-point win at Arizona State started a five-game win streak and propelled the ’Cats to a 6-2 mark down the stretch. All of a sudden, the future looked bright.
The next year, the ’Cats started 7-0, had another seven-game winning streak in mid-season, and reached the NCAAs. A first-round loss meant nothing; Lute Olson was a magician, taking the ’Cats from worst in the West (if not the entire country) to The Big Dance in two years.
“I knew we had something special when I first met him,” recalls super-fan George Kalil. “But when he took that team to the NCAAs in only his second season, I and a lot of other people starting dreaming big dreams.”
The One with the First Final Four — The Arizona Wildcats started off the 1987 basketball season by not losing a game until 1988. During that season-opening 12-game winning streak, the ’Cats beat powers Syracuse, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, and Duke.
After a sketchy two-point loss at New Mexico, the ’Cats reeled off another eight straight before suffering their only conference loss of the season at Stanford. Then it was another 15 straight to reach the NCAA Final Four. That’s the season that established Arizona as a powerhouse; all that had come before was a mere curiosity.
The campus and the town went nuts. The Arizona economy, which had been exemplified by the four C’s (copper, cattle, climate, and cotton), now added the two T’s (tourism and T-shirts). EVERYBODY had a Final Four shirt. Judges wore them under their robes and teachers wore them in front of their classes.
It wasn’t just that the team played an exciting style of basketball, with Steve Kerr bombing away from outside, Anthony Cook controlling the boards, Craig McMillan playing lockdown defense, the hyper-athletic Sean Elliott doing whatever he pleased, and spaceman Tom Tolbert communicating with the Mothership via telepathy; Olson ran things with a regal nature that was almost stunning.
Kerr remembers all the hoopla (pun sorta’ intended!) and how calmly Olson handled it all. “We knew that he had been to the Final Four before (with Iowa), but he never lost focus. He didn’t change the way he (or we) did things. It was a great help to us as we progressed through the tournament, knowing that he knew what was best for us and that he would do what was necessary. I’ve never forgotten how he maintained an even keel through everything.”
Due in some small part to a horrendous shooting night by Kerr, the ’Cats lost in the Final Four that year. The next year, after finishing the regular season ranked No. 1 in the nation, the ’Cats were upset in the Round of 16 by UNLV. Nevertheless, Arizona had arrived on the main stage and they weren’t going to relinquish their spot for the next two decades. Over that period of time, yet another “C” joined the Arizona economy — closet space for all of the NCAA and Final Four T-shirts to come.
The One with the Wildly Improbable National Championship — When I asked Lute Olson once if he thought that his 1997 team had a chance to win the national title, he smiled wryly and said, “I believe that all of my teams have that chance.”
When that year’s NCAA Tournament started, you could have held a meeting of everybody who agreed with Olson in a phone booth (which still existed at the time). The ’Cats stumbled into the tourney with back-to-back losses in the Bay Area, and then, in the first two rounds, struggled to beat South Alabama and College of Charleston. But then it began — this magical stretch that saw Arizona knock off three No. 1 seeds en route to the championship. Arizona won six straight games, two in overtime and none by more than eight points. It was so intense, it was almost impossible to enjoy.
It should be noted that that championship season was followed by The One That Should Have Been Another Championship, but Wasn’t. (That improbable stuff cuts both ways.)
The One No One Could Get Over — Arizona remained at a high level for years after the national championship season, but some strange things happened along the way. They reached the title game in 2001 (also known as The One Where the Refs Wanted Duke to Win) and came tantalizingly close to yet another Final Four in 2003.
But in 2005, the dream turned dark. All the clichés converged in a confluence of Oh, No! The higher your reach, the farther you can fall. You have to play the full 40 minutes. The NCAA doesn’t schedule home games in the Tournament.
Sadly, this season may be the one most remembered by ’Cat fans. Another preseason NIT championship game, another Pac-10 title, another 30-win season … and perhaps the worst collapse in NCAA Tournament history. The ’Cats blew a 15-point lead in the final four minutes against Illinois, and a psyche damaged is a psyche not easily repaired. What has followed are three straight disappointing (for ’Cat fans) seasons.
Meanwhile, Olson’s Arizona career ended with a whimper, then a bang, then another whimper. It’s all very confusing for a community that, for a generation, was able to draw strength and pride from an individual who personified style, purpose, and excellence. It remains to be seen whether a quarter-century of greatness has ratcheted Arizona’s basketball program into the rarified air occupied by a precious few, like North Carolina and Kansas, where teams can lose legendary coaches and just plug in a replacement, or if there will be a noticeable slide to a lower-energy electron shell in the cosmos of college basketball.
Even if it’s the latter, it was a great ride, a long ride, a fulfilling ride. There is no way to adequately describe what Lute Olson has meant to this university, this community, and this state. He personifies greatness and, somehow, “legend” is too small a word for him.
Someone who put it about as well as it could be put was long-time Arizona Daily Star columnist Greg Hansen, with whom Olson had several heated run-ins over the years. In a tribute to Olson’s 25th year as Wildcat coach (a season he was unable to coach due to still-undisclosed reasons), Hansen wrote, “No one in the history of this town, not Pancho Villa or John Wayne, has done more to make us feel better about ourselves than Lute Olson. His once-modest basketball program has become such a source of community pride that we, through him, have come to feel like winners.” Olson is indeed a special kind of person. He will be missed, yet will be with us forever.
LUTE OLSON’S ARIZONA CAREER HIGHLIGHTS
• A record of 589-187 at Arizona, making him by far the winningest coach in school history
• 327 Pac-10 victories, more than any other coach in history, including John Wooden
• An all-time record 312 consecutive weeks ranked in the AP national poll
• 23 consecutive NCAA Tournament berths while at Arizona and 28 overall
• A career record of 780-280
• 11 Pac-10 championships (seven-time Pac-10 Coach of the Year)
• Four Final Fours at Arizona and five overall
• Three 30-win seasons
• One national championship
• Member, Basketball Hall of Fame
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