Hansen's Top Teams, No. 4: Rugged, resilient Wildcats made history on way to winning 1997 title

A few forgotten items about Arizona’s 1997 NCAA men’s basketball champions:

• Neither Mike Bibby nor Miles Simon made the All-Pac-10 first team, but ASU’s Jeremy Veal did (the Sun Devils went 2-16 in the Pac-10).

• Arizona’s fifth-place finish in the Pac-10 was its lowest since Lute Olson’s first season, 1983-84.

• The Wildcats were swept in road series at Cal-Stanford, Oregon-OSU and USC-UCLA.

• Arizona lost four of its last six games before the NCAA Tournament began.

And yet the Wildcats completed the season in a historic way, sweeping No. 1 seeds Kentucky, Kansas and North Carolina — a feat not performed before or since.

It was the most unpredictable, unexpected and most unforgettable finish to a season in UA basketball history.

Now that it’s been a quarter-century since CBS’ Jim Nantz uttered the famous words "Simon says championship," my thoughts go back not to that cherished weekend at the RCA Dome in Indianapolis but to the Cow Palace in San Francisco.

In its final regular-season game of the season, Arizona played Cal on a Saturday afternoon in the antiquated Cow Palace because the Bears’ Harmon Gymnasium was in the process of being rebuilt into what is now Haas Pavilion.

I’ve always considered it "Chaos at the Cow Palace," which, in retrospect, was a glimpse of how talented the under-the-radar '97 Wildcats were.

On that day at the Cow Palace, Arizona was coming off an 81-80 loss at Stanford’s Maples Pavilion, which I considered the most difficult road venue in the Pac-10 from 1988-2005. Stanford won on a short jumper by Peter Sauer with 6 seconds remaining.

Olson saw through the loss, recognizing that any team good enough to play the soon-to-be Sweet 16 Cardinal to the wire had many positive variables.

"This was not a negative," Olson said that night at Maples. "We never gave an inch. This is the best we've played all year."

In the road finale at Cal two days later, a capacity crowd of 11,485 squeezed into an arena that had been abandoned by the NBA’s Golden State Warriors 26 years earlier. The shot clocks were placed on a wall behind the basket, not on top of the backboard. The crowd wanted blood. The old California State Livestock Pavilion was a good place to find out how the Wildcats would respond to adversity.

The answer: Very well.

Cal won 79-77 when Michael Dickerson missed a 3-point shot with 4 seconds remaining, but, just as at Stanford two days earlier, it took a talented club to stay close to a Cal team that finished tied for second in the Pac-10 and would reach the Sweet 16 before losing to top-seeded North Carolina.

As the game ended, the adversity multiplied.

Two fans confronted Olson as he walked to the locker room. Security? There was none. One fan got in Olson’s face and flipped him the bird. Another gave Olson a shoulder bump. To his credit, the coach did not punch either of the Cal fans in the nose.

Arizona athletic director Jim Livengood tracked down Cal AD John Kashner and complained about the breach in crowd control. The two ADs argued, face to face, surrounded by fans celebrating a rare victory over an Olson team.

And when the UA locker room was opened to the media, assistant coach Phil Johnson and reserve guard Quynn Tebbs were seen (and heard) in a loud shouting match.

After Tebbs and Johnson were separated, assistant coach Jim Rosborough put the day in perspective.

"This is as tough as it gets in college basketball," he said. "For us to hang in for the last shot in both of these games tells me we’re going to be a difficult matchup for anybody in the tournament. We’ve seen so much adversity this year. Frankly, I like our chances."

090122-tuc-spt-hansenproject-p3 — Arizona's Mike Bibby goes up against Kentucky's Jared Prickett, rear, and Nazr Mohammed during the first half of the championship game.
Eric Draper, Associated Press 1997

Rosborough saw elements that the casual fan did not. He knew that forward Bennett Davison was perhaps the best defensive player of the Olson years. He knew that sophomore center A.J. Bramlett, who averaged 8.1 points and 6.9 rebounds per game, could match up favorably with any center in the NCAA Tournament.

And he knew that Simon’s early-season suspension for academic reasons had allowed sophomore guard Jason Terry, who averaged 10.6 points per game, to develop into a bound-for-the-NBA player, the top sixth man in college basketball.

All of those elements became apparent in the harrowing ride to the Final Four as Arizona overcame down-to-the-wire finishes to beat South Alabama, College of Charleston, 35-1 Kansas and Providence.

090122-tuc-spt-hansenproject-p4 — Arizona's Eugene Edgerson battles Kentucky's Nazr Mohammed for a rebound during the national championship game.
David Sanders, Arizona Daily Star 1997

The weekend at Maples Pavilion and the Cow Palace were just as difficult, or more, than anything Arizona met in March Madness.

The '97 Wildcats weren't the highest-ranked, most talented or most respected of Olson’s many elite teams, but they remain the only UA basketball team to overcome all the obstacles, persevere and win The Big One.