As Tucson descended into another long basketball offseason with last week’s Sweet 16 loss to Houston, I was reminded of the biggest lesson I learned in my decade-plus of covering Arizona Wildcats sports.
Winning a championship is hard.
Title-winning teams must have the right mix of talent, attitude, coaching, smarts and luck to win it all. It helps to have supportive fans and an enthusiastic administration. Together, it creates an overused but important word — culture — that carries over from year to year, team to team, tournament to tournament.
The Arizona Wildcats won the national championship in men’s basketball 25 years ago today, in part because they had a little bit of everything. They weren’t a top seed, sure, but Mike Bibby and Jason Terry went on to become first-round NBA Draft picks and Miles Simon posted arguably the greatest scoring streak in program history.
There was a little fortune involved, too, as well as excellent strategy — how else do you beat three No. 1 seeds in a span of two weeks? — and an all-for-one attitude that was instilled from the beginning. The Wildcats had support back home, but were doubted by almost everyone else. That’s another trait that great teams have: motivation.
Our 12-page commemorative section celebrates not only the 1997 Wildcats but the great moments the Wildcats created for their fan base, conference and Tucson.
• On Page C3, Star columnist Greg Hansen recounts the Wildcats’ run through the NCAA Tournament, one that began near midnight in front of a half-empty area and a pair of nail-biting victories.
• On Page C4, Star contributor Jon Gold tells the stories behind the championship run — none bigger than Jason Terry’s decision to return to the bench so Miles Simon, the future Final Four star, could regain his starting job.
"Coach O tells me, 'I’ll bring Miles off the bench.' I said, 'No, I’m more comfortable being a spark,'” Terry told Gold. “I knew how much it meant to Miles to be a starter. For our team to be the best version, I would take a lesser role. But I didn’t view it as a lesser role.”
• Our national championship game coverage on Pages C5-8 is a trip back in time. Reissued stories from the Star’s Greg Hansen and Bruce Pascoe and former Star reporters Javier Morales, Jack Magruder and Doug Kreutz tell the story of the Wildcats’ overtime victory — and what it meant.
“The game never really ends now. It is in your heart forever, unceasing, a moment in time never to be forgotten,” Hansen wrote. “You will summon to mind the glow of a three-week crusade in which Arizona’s unprecedented run against the royal family of college basketball — Kansas, North Carolina and Kentucky — became one of the most remarkable testaments to heart and poise in the history of the game. If you live in Tucson, you will never have to say 'Damn, that should have been us.' Now you will know what it is to be No. 1, and now you know that the winning exceeds the wanting.”
• On Page C9, Gold lists the six factors — seeding, luck, attitude, chemistry, coaching and style — that made Arizona the last Pac-12 school to win it all … even though they may not have had the star power of other UA teams before and since.
“Every year we come to Tucson for the Lute Olson Fantasy Camp, with Reggie Geary and Joseph Blair and Pete (Williams), Iggy (Andre Iguodala), and it’s funny because I’ll start messing with people,” Bennett Davison told Gold. “The whole bus turns around — we know! We know! We weren’t the most talented team, but we ultimately won.”
• Pages C10 and C11 showcase Olson’s legacy — notably, how many players from the Wildcats’ 1997 team went into coaching. Longtime assistant coach Jim Rosborough remains in the game, serving as a coach for Pima College’s women’s basketball team. Josh Pastner is the head coach at Georgia Tech, while Miles Simon and Jason Terry are G League head coaches and Jason Stewart is fresh off a CIF-San Diego Section title.
All of them told Gold that they borrow heavily from their legendary college coach.
“Everything was about discipline, and coach was as disciplined as they came,” Pastner said. “His discipline and the attention to detail — excellence is not accidental. The level of success he had, you can’t do that by being lucky. It was a long time of discipline, of doing it the right way, and of holding those standards to the level of what he demanded.”
In other words, winning is hard. And when you win it all? It’s worth celebrating, even 25 years later.
