The Star columnist shares the story of Al Fleming's path from Indiana to Arizona, how Steve Kerr will honor the late Lute Olson this week and Adia Barnes' plan to recruit star players back to the UA.
Al Fleming’s journey to ring of honor began with a visit from Fred Snowden
Try to picture this setting on an April evening, 1972 in Michigan City, Indiana:
Newly-hired Arizona basketball coach Fred Snowden and his assistant, Jerry Holmes, knocked on the door of a modest home in an economically-challenged area, a working man’s town 60 miles southeast of Chicago.
Snowden had just become the first Black head coach of a major-college basketball team, inheriting a UA program that was coming off a 6-20 season.
Their knock was answered by 6-foot-8-inch Al Fleming, who had just finished No. 2 in the Mr. Indiana basketball balloting. Every power school in the Big Ten hoped Fleming would play for them: Indiana, Ohio State, Michigan, all of them. Fleming avenged 23 points and 14 rebounds for Elston High School, which finished 26-1, losing in overtime in the Indiana state semifinals.
Fleming led Snowden and Holmes to the living room. A portrait of Martin Luther King was on the wall behind a sofa.
“I looked and Fred and thought, ‘We’ve come to the right place,’” says Holmes, now 79, who has lived in Tucson since retiring from coaching 35 years ago.
Fleming was one of five children to an impoverished family who grew up without a father in their lives. His mother walked in the room.
“Al said, ‘This is my mother, Arizona,’” Holmes recalls. “I think we both said, ‘Pardon me? Did you say Arizona?’”
And indeed, the name of Al’s mother is Arizona Fleming.
What are the odds?
“I almost escalated out of my chair,” says Holmes, who began a dogged pursuit of Fleming, visiting Michigan City several times the next month.
A few weeks later, May 5, 1972, Fleming signed a commitment to play for Arizona. Snowden said: “He could be one of the best ever to play at Arizona. He can do everything — score, rebound, play defense, block shots. He’ll add leadership.”
Now, a half-century later, Holmes adds another key element: “What a quality person. Al was such a great kid. If Fred had not been a Black American, we wouldn’t have gotten in the front door, but I can look back and say we made the best of it and so did Al.”
It didn’t take Fleming long to do all the things Snowden said he would do. In his fourth college basketball game, Dec. 7, 1972 against No. 17 USC, he scored 21 points and grabbed 13 rebounds. Arizona won.
Al Fleming snatches a rebound from several other players on Oct. 6, 1977.
By the time Fleming was a senior, he scored 41 points and pulled down 11 rebounds in a victory of Dick Viale’s University of Detroit Tigers. When Fleming played his last game for the Wildcats he owned UA school records in career points, 1,765 and rebounds, 1,190. His rebounding total remains No. 1 to this day. He is the No. 10 scorer in UA history.
Yet it took the UA 45 years to at long last decide to include Fleming’s name in the Ring of Honor at McKale Center. To his credit, UA athletic director Dave Heeke recognized the error, stepped up and announced that Fleming and long-deserving Ernie McCray, Class of 1960, will be honored Feb. 27 at halftime of the Arizona-Washington game.
Sadly, Fleming died in 2003 of kidney cancer. He was just 49. On his gravestone at the Swan Lake Memorial Cemetery in Michigan City it says, simply:
Albert Fleming Jr.
Minister.
After playing for the Seattle SuperSonics and for multiple EuroLeague teams, Fleming opened a paving company in Seattle and ultimately returned to Michigan City, joining his brother, Robert G. Fleming, as pastor/minister at the Life Temple Church of God.
“If you look at the history of Arizona basketball, the Ring of Honor has been incomplete without Al,” says Holmes. “But Al’s the last guy who would complain. When you are privileged to coach a young man like that, you know you’re in the right business.”
Kerr will honor Lute in speech shown Tuesday
University of Arizona basketball coach Lute Olson with starting guard Steve Kerr in during a campus celebration of the team's 1988 NCAA Final Four appearance.
On Tuesday evening, Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr will be a special guest at the seventh annual Game Changer Awards ceremony in San Francisco. The organization pays tribute to the coaches who helped those such as Kerr achieve career goals.
Kerr will honor his former Arizona coach, Lute Olson. The other guest speaker is Alyssa Nakken, a San Francisco Giants assistant and the first female coach in MLB history. She will honor her softball travel club coach.
In previous years, the Game Changer ceremony has featured, among others, Heisman Trophy winner Charles Woodson, NFL head coach Jack Del Rio and Golden State all-star Klay Thompson.
The public is invited to watch the virtual ceremony online. There is no admission fee. The link to register is coachingcorps.org.
Kerr was part of Olson’s first recruiting class at Arizona in the summer of 1983. Kerr’s ties to Arizona go beyond his jersey No. 25, which hangs on the wall at McKale Center. When he and his wife Margot donated $1 million to help with a 2014 renovation of McKale, Kerr insisted that the discarded cactus-and-sunset logo be recovered and displayed somewhere for public viewing.
The school now displays the Kerr-era logo on both sides of the ticket office awning at the front entry to McKale.
Fisch scores again with message to recruits
TUCSON, ARIZ. -- Arizona Football Coach Jedd Fisch arrives to the University of Arizona. Dec. 28, 2020. Photo by Simon Asher / Arizona Athletics
New UA football coach Jedd Fisch scored again last week, and it’s still 6½ months until opening day. As he promised, Fisch meets with Arizona high school football coaches on Wednesday nights and his message last week was a winner: Do not let your players pay to have a so-called “recruiting firm” act as a promotional outlet. “I guarantee we do not use it,” said Fisch. He recommended that prospects (a) promote themselves with an organized highlight tape; (b) use Twitter and persistence to reach UA coaches and (c) ask their coaches for guidance in the recruiting process. Well done.
3 Sumlin assistants find new homes
Defensive coordinator Paul Rhoads gets his point across to his Wildcats as spring practice continues for the Arizona Wildcats, March 5, 2020, Tucson, Ariz.
After a college football coach is fired, you can usually tell the quality of his staff by who rehires his assistants, and how quickly they do so. So far, only three of Kevin Sumlin’s 10 assistants have been hired: Jeremy Springer is the new special teams coach at Marshall; Andy Buh is the linebackers coach at Illinois, and Paul Rhoads is a defensive analyst at Ohio State.
Whatever Rhoads is paid at Ohio State will be subtracted from the $850,000 Arizona owes him for the 2021 season. One former Sumlin assistant at Arizona who has persevered is Joe Gilbert, who was the Wildcats’ offensive line coach in 2018. He is the O-line coach of the Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Niners hire ex-Sabino center as OL coach
Four players from Tucson’s 1978 All-City football team reached the NFL — Amphitheater linebacker Sam Merriman and running back Jeff Colter, Sahuaro receiver Mark Mistler and Sabino center Chris Foerster. The longest-tenured of those is Foerster, who played at Colorado State and then coached at CSU, Stanford, Minnesota and has been coaching in the NFL for 28 years.
Foerster’s NFL career seemed to succumb to self-inflicted wounds in 2017 when he was shown on video snorting cocaine while earning $2.2 million as a Miami Dolphins assistant. But after going through a long rehabilitation process, Foerster, 59, was hired as the San Francisco 49ers’ offensive line coach last week. Since leaving Miami, Foerster told reporters he viewed being fired and getting sober was “divine intervention.”
Sahuaro grad Renfro emerges as sixth man for G League team
Sahuaro's Nate Renfro (15) goes airborne during the first quarter of the Salpointe vs. Sahuaro boys high school basketball game at the MLK Basketball Classic on Saturday, Jan. 18, 2014, at McKale Center in Tucson, Ariz. Salpointe won 63-49. Photo by Mike Christy / Arizona Daily Star
When the NBA G League began at Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom compound last week, Sahuaro High School grad Nate Renfro surfaced as the sixth man for the Austin Spurs. Renfro played 22 minutes in the Spurs’ first two games last week.
It has been a remarkable journey for Renfro, who began his high school career as a 5-foot 9-inch point guard and is now a 6-8 wing forward hoping to reach the NBA. Renfro was a four-year starter for the San Francisco Dons, setting a school record with 132 games played. He left Sahuaro in 2015 with a 16 points-per-game scoring average, a 4.0 GPA and ranked No. 1 academically in his class.
Four ex-Cats holding onto NBA aspirations in G League
Golden State Warriors guard Nico Mannion (2) dribbles against the Sacramento Kings during the second half of an NBA basketball game in San Francisco, Monday, Jan. 4, 2021. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
Four ex-Arizona Wildcats are in the G League this season: Santa Cruz guard Nico Mannion, Iowa Wolves guard Allonzo Trier, Greensboro Swarm guard Kobi Simmons and forward Brandon Ashley of the Ignite franchise. Ashley averaged 10.5 points in his first two games; he is trying to re-start a career that has stopped and started with stints in New Zealand, Cyprus and Germany. Ashley is 26. Ex-Wildcats Rawle Alkins and Kadeem Allen were waived by G League teams.
Steve Kerr told Phoenix radio 97.5 The Game that Mannion’s G League role will be significant.
“Nico has shown me he belongs on an NBA court,” Kerr said. “That guy can pass and he can defend. Now we need to see him shoot with volume in Orlando. I want him to shoot 12-15 shots a game. I want him to let it fly because that’s going to be the next step for him at this level.”
For Mannion, it’s sure better than running Sean Miller’s old “loop” offense and worrying about taking a bad shot.
Arizona's Hou sisters to play at Augusta
Yu-Sang Hou's return to the Wildcats is "going to make everybody work harder,” said coach Laura Ianello.
Arizona women’s golf standouts Vivian Hou and Yu-Sang Hou have been invited to play in the exclusive Augusta National Women’s Amateur, March 31-April 2, a three-day event whose final round will be televised by NBC.
The Hou sisters will play at the Masters course on Friday, April 2, before a cut is made. Coach Laura Ianello’s team will play its first full event in 11 months starting Monday in Scottsdale, the Sun Devil Winter Invitational. The Hou sisters, who spent most of the last 10 months home in Taiwan, have returned to Tucson and both are entered. They are both ranked in the top 25 in the women’s world amateur rankings.
Add another ex-Cat to the UA athletic department
Last week I listed 17 former top UA athletes now employed in the Arizona athletic department. I missed one: former UA softball standout Chrissy Gill Alexander is an assistant athletic director and the director of Alumni Letterwinners, which is a large job. Alexander played softball for Mike Candrea from 1997-2000 and was a huge part of teams that combined to go an astonishing 251-34. Gill started 171 games in her UA softball days.
Aari, Thomas back next year? Barnes will try to recruit stars
Arizona basketball players Aari McDonald, left, and Sam Thomas joke around during a press conference about their team’s postseason and Thursday night’s WNIT opener against Idaho State in McKale Center on March 19, 2019.
In No. 10 Arizona’s 60-51 victory over Washington State Friday at McKale Center, the Wildcats stole the ball 15 times from Cougar ball-handlers. That’s amazing.
Senior Sam Thomas had five steals. Senior Aari McDonald, the reigning Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Year, had three.
Said WSU coach Kamie Ethridge: “Arizona was awesome. They are so good defensively, clearly one of the best defensive teams we’ve faced. They had 15 steals, and I don’t think I’ve ever really heard of that in a game.”
Thomas and McDonald are surely two of the five or six leading defensive players in college basketball, men or women. A good comparison would be former Washington all-conference player Matisse Thybulle, who was in 2017 and 2018 the league’s male defensive player of the year.
Thybulle only averaged 9.5 points as a senior, yet was the 20th overall pick in the NBA draft and has since been a rotation player for the Philadelphia 76ers. He averaged 3.5 steals per game as a Washington senior, a difference-maker as the Huskies came out of nowhere to win the Pac-12 title.
Thomas and McDonald are at the Thybulle level. McDonald is averaging 3.3 steals, Thomas 3.1. On a UA team that isn’t adept at high shooting percentages, defense has allowed the Wildcats to remain in the top 10.
Thomas has the option to return as a fifth-year senior in 2021-22, at which time she’ll have a masters degree. UA coach Adia Barnes last week said she’ll try to “recruit” Thomas again, since this season doesn’t count against NCAA eligibility.
Barnes also said she’ll try to convince McDonald to come back as well. That would be a dream scenario. It would be McDonald’s sixth year of college basketball. She is projected as one of the three or four top picks in the 2021 WNBA draft.
But there are several big selling points: playing in front of sellout crowds at McKale Center, finally hosting the NCAA Tournament, and becoming an even stronger Final Four contender in 2021-22.
Wouldn’t that tempt you?
