• Tucson baseball icon Rich Alday, who died here in 2021, was inducted to the ABCA Hall of Fame Friday in Washington D.C. The former Tucson High state championship quarterback coached Pima College’s baseball team from 1974-89 and again for two years, 2016-17. Alday was also the head coach at New Mexico, where he won 515 games. He also coached Ironwood Ridge to two state softball championships, winning more than 1,000 games in his remarkable career. Talk about a well-deserved and overdue honor.
Rich Alday led Pima College to the 1985 Junior College World Series.
• Sad news: Don Saffer, patriarch of perhaps the top sports family in Tucson’s last half-century, died last week at age 78. I treasure the times that Don told me, in detail, about his experiences playing on John Wooden’s 1967 and 1969 NCAA championship teams with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He played in 58 games for Wooden’s Bruins before moving to Tucson in 1979.
Three of Saffer’s sons, Jon, Jeff and Mike, were all-city stars and beyond. Jon, a Tucson attorney, played linebacker and outfield at Amphitheater during the Vern Friedli years, went on to play six years of minor-league baseball in the Montreal system. Jeff, also a Tucson attorney, was the quarterback on Sabino’s 14-0 state championship team of 1992, and went on to play three years in the New York Yankees system. Mike, a former radio executive in Tucson, was a first-team Parade All-American football player in 1997 at Sabino. He became a first-team All-Pac-10 tackle at UCLA.
• In my annual Tucson’s Top 100 Sports Figures (of 2024) last week, I mistakenly omitted Pusch Ridge Christian Academy boys soccer coach Geoff Neale, who had been on my master list from the beginning. Neale coached the Lions to a 20-4 record and the state Class 3A championship. What made Pusch Ridge’s season so impressive was that its only losses were to 6A schools Mesa Mountain View and Sunnyside, and to 4A state champion Salpointe Catholic and 4A runner-up Mica Mountain.
