Greg Hansen: Hard-charging Dave Heeke has Arizona Wildcats building something special

The three great builders of Pac-12 sports history are Washington athletic director Mike Lude, Oregon benefactor Phil Knight and Stanford mega-donor John Arrillaga.

They lit the fire and left it burning.

Now an athletic director like Arizona’s Dave Heeke might arrive at work and check the “OC report” before getting an update on ticket sales, basketball recruiting or the process of hiring another diving coach.

On Thursday, Suzy Mason, the UA’s associate athletic director for event management and facilities, stood at the Stadium Club overlooking more than 125 construction workers.

“We’ve got 35 masons down there today,” she said. “We’ve got tons of plumbers.”

The OC report? That’s construction lingo for owners and contractors. One of the latest OC reports revealed that scores of cement workers will begin pouring concrete overnight at Arizona Stadium in an attempt to finish a $25 million project before the Sept. 1 opener against BYU.

Heeke and the league’s other athletic directors have evolved from Lude’s inspiring work of the late-1980s, when he took command of the Pac-10’s biggest bankroll to rebuild Husky Stadium with suites, loges, new locker rooms and all sorts of unprecedented excess, basically daring the rest of the league to keep up.

Everybody wanted to be like Mike.

And now they are.

Heeke will pay $66 million over 25 years to remake Arizona’s football, softball, and swimming facilities. He is building an $18 million Indoor Sports Center that he says will become the “footprint” of the athletic department.

When all of this is done, Arizona will have athletic facilities to match those at Colorado and Utah, both of whom recently spent tens of millions of dollars to match those at Oregon and Stanford. And so on down the line.

After just 15 months in office — arriving with little fanfare from little ol’ Central Michigan — Heeke has proven to be the right man for the job at Arizona, surviving what he calls “a contentious, tough year” that “didn’t feel warm and fuzzy.”

He inherited a firestorm of trouble, from the unpleasant culture within the football program to the FBI’s investigation into Arizona’s basketball program. True to his baseball background, Heeke didn’t step out of the batter’s box or even take a few pitches.

He started swinging and he didn’t miss.

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Arizona couldn’t afford to wait another year to fix threadbare facilities first identified as needy by former athletic director Jim Livengood a decade ago. Livengood estimated it might cost $500 million for Arizona to someday stay competitive with its Pac-12 contemporaries.

Get this: it’s costing $15 million just to fix the plumbing at Hillenbrand Aquatic Center.

When all of this is done, perhaps by early February, you’d think Heeke might take a few breaths and go back to being an old-school AD, although there is no longer anything like an old-school AD.

“I think that’s when we’ll have to start again,” he said Thursday. He listed needed improvements to golf, tennis, track and soccer facilities.

“The big one,” he said, “is that we have to invest in the rest of the football stadium. That has to be a $100 million to $200 million effort. We have to somehow embark on that.”

The irony here is that Heeke was the No. 2 man in Oregon’s athletic department when the Ducks rose from a no-brand, no-name, nothing-much school to nationally-recognized power 20 years ago. Oregon has done a lot of nutty stuff, like putting a barber shop in its football facility and spending millions on colorful football helmets.

That’s not going to happen at Arizona.

“I try not to get caught up in what everybody else does,” he said. “My focus is ‘what else do we need?’ We’re not going to do any wild and crazy things. Those things don’t help you on the scoreboard.”

Heeke announced Thursday that Arizona will sell beer on game days at Arizona Stadium. That’s not a big money-maker, or anything novel, but it does add to fan engagement. He won’t be remembered for a few Coors Lights.

But he might be remembered as the man who introduced patio seating and a plaza-type festival atmosphere to college football stadiums. His master plan for the re-make of Arizona Stadium’s lower east side is to cut away hundreds of Zona Zoo seats and replace them with an open-air, field-level public area — a gazebo of football — that is unprecedented in the Pac-12 and elsewhere.

“We might also do that when we remodel the west side of the stadium,” Heeke said. “It’ll be like the plaza at a major-league baseball stadium, with tons of TVs, where you move around, never losing track of the game, not having to sit in the same seat for three hours. The students are really going to like it.”

Call it Heeke’s Peeke.

It is part of his a vision of a new way of sports in Tucson.