On the drive from Tucson to Tempe late Tuesday night, Arizona State baseball coach Tracy Smith tapped out this Twitter message:
“I think their bat boy was 2-for-3 tonight with 4 RBI”
As far as can be documented, it was the first time in the century-long UA-ASU rivalry that one of the coaches was daring enough to shed his game face and laugh at himself.
Good for him. The rivalry doesn’t always have to be Frank Kush keeping his starters on the field in a 55-19 game, or Lute Olson pointing to the scoreboard in Tempe.
Arizona walloped the Sun Devils 17-6 Tuesday but what did it really matter? The Sun Devils had already clinched the yearly Territorial Cup baseball point, and ASU is destined for the NCAA Tournament and perhaps a Pac-12 championship.
Besides, Smith had room to maneuver: Arizona’s baseball team is twisting in the wind.
This UA-ASU stuff isn’t often taken lightly. After Tuesday’s game, Arizona’s Hall of Fame softball coach Mike Candrea, a Sun Devil grad, tweeted: “Congrats for the smashing victory over ASU!”
Several weeks earlier, UA basketball coach Sean Miller famously suggested, via Twitter, that fans unhappy about Arizona’s Elite Eight loss to Wisconsin should “cheer for ASU.”
I always thought Utah-BYU would be the most fierce and everlasting rivalry I experienced in college sports, but this Territorial Cup business long ago lapped the Cougars and Utes.
Less than 24 hours after Smith’s bat-boy tweet, ASU clinched the 2014-15 Territorial Cup series (a compilation of all sports). It’s a competition that doesn’t get much public attention but one so heated inside the two athletic departments that the 2013 series continues to be a simmering feud.
The Wildcats insist they won. The Sun Devils list themselves as the ’13 champs. It is a contentious issue (swinging on a men’s indoor track result) that will never fully be decided, and ultimately that’s good for the fabric of the rivalry.
You wouldn’t want them to be friendly, would you?
The Sun Devils have changed their personality and platform over the last five years – the Greg Byrne years at Arizona — and are no longer the punching bag they were during the aimless reign of Lisa Love.
This week, for the first time I can remember, ASU chartered a luxury bus (impressively maroon and gold) and pulled into Tucson to celebrate its growing success.
The school’s athletic department Twitter feed declared “Tucson is Sun Devil Territory today.” New athletic director Ray Anderson, who has taken names and kicked butts in his first year on the job, told Tucson reporters “we will be back in Tucson because we don’t concede any territory to anyone.”
Byrne was the first to ambitiously tread in enemy territory, establishing a yearly caravan to Phoenix, buying outdoor billboard space to declare Phoenix as Wildcat turf, and making weekly appearances on Phoenix sports-talk programs. He has even scheduled a football game in Glendale.
That ate at ASU like never before, and not because Byrne is an ASU grad.
His visibility and aggressive nature forced ASU’s hand. Following Byrne’s template, the Sun Devils fought back and have become more visible and a force in social media. They even brought new basketball coach Bobby Hurley to Tucson this week, posing for cameras at Gap Ministries, doing community service in Tucson before he’s had time to introduce himself in Tempe.
The Sun Devil Caravan stopped Tuesday at the intersection of Prince and Campbell and staged a happy hour at El Saguarito, where they were greeted by about 60 or 70 boosters.
El Saguarito? Does that ring a bell? It’s the same caterer that regularly sells its wonderful Mexican food at Arizona Stadium, Hillenbrand Stadium, and for years catered meals for UA football teams.
El Saguarito is owned by Sunnyside High School grad Albert Vasquez; one of his restaurants is tucked on UA property behind the Law School.
A year ago, Byrne’s annual UA caravan to Tempe was marred when someone strongly suggested that doing business with the Wildcats wouldn’t be good for a bar-and-grill business in Tempe.
Capice?
The Tempe firm made an 11th-hour cancellation, forcing Arizona to scramble to find more neutral territory in the greater Phoenix area.
Part of the beauty (or is it grimness?) of the UA-ASU rivalry is that it rarely crosses boundaries, but Vasquez and El Saguarito proved it can be done.
His daughter, Jackie, a Catalina Foothills High School grad, was a third-team All-American softball outfielder at ASU in 2008, helping the Sun Devils win the national championship. She later married Tom Theodorakis, who was for four years Byrne’s associate athletic director for fundraising in Phoenix.
Tom and Jackie Theodorakis have since moved to neutral turf, Los Angeles; he is an associate AD at UCLA. It’s much safer that way.
Anyway, the kicker to this Territorial Cup business is that Smith, in his first year as ASU’s baseball coach, introduced himself to the rivalry in October. As he watched Arizona line up for a field goal attempt that would beat USC 29-28 at the buzzer, he activated his Twitter account and typed:
“Miss it!”
The kick missed. The rivalry remains dead center.
