Greg Hansen: Over 50 magical years, McKale Center's 'personality' has shone again and again

On the morning of the first basketball game played at McKale Center, UA coach Fred Snowden and his staff still occupied their cramped offices at Bear Down Gym. In a chaotic rush to complete the new arena before the 1972-73 season ended, the coaches’ phones at McKale had not yet been installed.

“I had to get out of the office because people kept showing up, asking if I had any tickets,” remembers UA assistant coach Jerry Holmes, who has lived in Tucson for most of the 50 years since McKale Center opened on Feb. 1, 1973. “The demand for tickets was just crazy.”

Unknown to the 13,652 who did have tickets, there was a question if the game would be played.

Metal braces supporting about 8,500 chairback seats had not been installed. Scores of construction workers began installing the braces at dawn and didn’t finish until the UA freshman team played a Wildcat alumni team in the first-ever basketball game played at McKale.

And then everything clicked. Arizona routed Wyoming 87-69.

“I think I’m going to like this place,” Snowden said.

After the Wildcats played for 47 years at 3,200-seat Bear Down Gym, Tucson’s like for McKale soon turned into love.

“The old girl has given way to McKale Center, a mod, suave, slick and shiny monument to the latest in basketball arena construction,” the Arizona Republic reported. “McKale lacks only one thing Bear Down had – a personality.”

Personality? Oh, did it grow.

On the night of Jan. 28, 1999, as Arizona attempted to upset No. 3 Stanford, hundreds of pumped-up students pushed their way to the edge of the court. The ZonaZoo was officially still a few years away, yet security personnel were nonetheless overwhelmed.

I was sitting at center court, front row, in my press seat. The No. 1 swimmer in the NCAA, Arizona’s nine-time NCAA champion Ryk Neethling, put his hands on my shoulders and eagerly asked if I could get out of the way. At that moment, Arizona All-American Jason Terry hit a short jumper to beat the buzzer and the Cardinal, 78-76.

Neethling and more than 1,000 of his friends stormed the court, lifting Terry to their shoulders.

“It was a beautiful sight,” said UA center Gene Edgerson.

It was one of four times students have rushed the court in McKale’s 50 years. The first was on March 6, 1976, when the Wildcats won their first conference championship since 1951, beating ASU 77-72 in the home finale.

“A thousand people gathered around Snowden and my dad for the coaches show after that game,” remembers Tucson businessman Evan Adelstein, whose father, Gene Adelstein, was the UA’s longtime radio and TV basketball analyst.

“Snowden broke down when answering the first question about the game and said, ‘I want to express my gratitude to (athletic director) Dave Strack for having the courage to hire a Black assistant coach from Michigan to come out to Arizona to coach at this great university.”

Personality?

After his last game for the No. 5 Wildcats in 2015, point guard T.J. McConnell knelt and kissed the giant A logo at midcourt. McConnell and his teammates went 67-9 and to back-to-back Elite Eights. We luv, ya, man.

Personality?

McKale is the place where Khalid Reeves scored 40 points in the old Fiesta Bowl Classic to pulverize No. 4 Michigan’s Fab Four, 119-95. By then, Arizona’s success at McKale had become so routine that rushing the court after every notable victory would’ve worn everyone out.

Personality?

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For 35 years, 1978-2013, the “Ooh Aah Man,” Joe Caveleri, walked to midcourt during stressful, late-game timeouts, tore off his warmup pants and spelled out A-R-I-Z-O-N-A with his arms as sellout crowds roared, creating a home-court advantage like none in Pac-12 history.

Personality?

Actor Bill Murray once sat in the front row, wearing an Arizona cap. In 1990, future president Donald Trump sat a few rows behind the Arizona bench. A year later, LSU’s Shaquille O’Neal was outscored by Arizona’s Sean Rooks in a 20-point Tiger loss. In 2009, BYU’s Jimmer Fredette scored an arena-record 49 points, the only time BYU has won at McKale. Two decades earlier, UCLA’s heavily booed Reggie Miller got a technical foul at McKale, rubbing his fingers together in the face of referee Booker Turner, as if to accuse him of favoritism, another of UCLA’s 24 losses at McKale since 1985.

Dick Vitale not only sat on press row and raved about the No. 1 Wildcats on ESPN, he also coached there, as his Detroit Mercy team was routed by the 1976 Wildcats on a night Al Fleming scored an arena-record 41 points.

Personality?

Three weeks after his wife, Bobbi, died of ovarian cancer, Lute Olson returned from a leave of absence to coach the Wildcats to a weekend sweep of UCLA and USC. When Olson walked onto the court, which had a newly painted logo — Lute and Bobbi Olson Court — the ovation could be heard all the way to Mexico. “Looking across the court and seeing her empty seat was the hardest thing,” Olson said.

Two months later Olson coached Arizona to the 2001 Final Four championship game.

Personality?

The NCAA Tournament has been staged at McKale Center 12 times — that’s 11 on the men’s side, and with Arizona hosting part of the 2022 women’s bracket. In 1991, two of college basketball’s legendary coaches, UNLV’s Jerry Tarkanian and Georgetown’s John Thompson, engaged in a “40 minutes of hell” match, won by Tark and his Rebels.

Twenty-seven coaches who have been inducted into either the NABC or Naismith basketball halls of fame have coached at McKale, from Tara VanDerveer and John Wooden to Bob Knight, Jud Heathcote, Mike Krzyzewski, Tom Izzo, Bill Self and Don Haskins.

And don’t forget Mark Few, who is 1-2 against the Wildcats at McKale (Few’s Gonzaga team also lost to Knight and Texas Tech by a bucket in Tucson in the 2005 NCAA tournament).

Personality?

Damon Stoudamire became an All-American at Point Guard U in 1995, and his cousin, Salim, beat UCLA with a last-second 25-footer — the “Joyful Jumper” — 10 years later. Bob Elliott and Sean Elliott — no relation — combined to score 4,868 points in their McKale days, the biggest personalities of the ‘70s and ‘80s, the only two Wildcat men’s players to exceed 2,000 points..

Adia Barnes, the player, and Aari McDonald, whom Barnes coached 20 years later, became the only two UA women’s basketball players to score 600 points in a season. Together, they hung a Final Four banner at McKale in 2021, two years after Arizona set a Pac-12 record by selling 14,644 tickets for its WNIT championship victory.

McKale Center was the site of a 71-game winning streak, the place where Steve Kerr came of age, a sacred piece of ground where Olson became the most popular figure in Tucson history, a place of distinction where Arizona has spent 37 weeks ranked No. 1.

Personality?

For the last 50 years McKale Center has been the center of the Pac-12 basketball universe, a place where the Wildcats won just the second-ever Pac-10 Tournament, 17 conference championships and have led the league in attendance for 37 consecutive seasons.

At 50, the “mod, suave, slick and shiny monument” of 1973 has become the center of college basketball success in the American West. The phones work, there’s still a crazy demand for tickets and the giant A logo at midcourt is awaiting its next kiss.

Photos: 50 years of McKale Center at the University of Arizona