University of Arizona vs USC

Arizona wide receiver Tayvian Cunningham (11) beats USC safety Greg Johnson (9) and hauls in the bomb for a Wildcat touchdown in the third quarter of their Pac 12 game at Arizona Stadium, Tucson, Ariz., November 14, 2020.

 Kelly Presnell / Arizona Daily Star

The week began with a solemn notification.

“Allistaire Heartfield died,” my friend Delano Price said. “Complications from COVID-19.”

No way, I thought.

Those who watched Heartfield play football at Tucson High School in 1970 viewed him as indestructible. The two times I had the opportunity to meet and talk with Heartfield — even in his 40s and 50s — he looked like he could put on a football uniform and rush for 100 yards.

“He was as good as I’ve seen,” said former state championship coach Todd Mayfield, whose father, Ollie Mayfield, was blessed to have Heartfield rush for 1,396 yards on the Badgers’ historic, undefeated state championship team of 1970, earning a scholarship to Arizona.

“Allistaire was a beast,” said Price, a classmate who was part of Tucson High’s 1969 state championship basketball team.

Heartfield was the second Badger from Mayfield’s celebrated Tucson High years to die of COVID-19 this year. A few months earlier, Richard Dodson, a force of a man, a former prison guard who had been a starting linebacker at Arizona, died in Bullhead City.

Heartfield and Dodson were my age. They were two of the least likely people on this planet that I thought would be affected in this relentless pandemic.

If they were vulnerable, what about me? Why would I risk my life to go to a football game?

I knew then that I would not be willing to get on the elevator at Arizona Stadium and sit in the press box for Saturday’s Arizona-USC game. My two sons living in Tucson have pre-existing heart conditions. I couldn’t take the chance to become infected, for my health and for theirs.

So as the Trojans made an improbable comeback to beat the Wildcats 34-30, I sat in my living room, watching Fox’s telecast of the game — the only time I’ve done so since covering my first Arizona home game in the fall of 1981. I looked at the numbers and tried to gain some perspective in a year that has run roughshod over perspective.

I missed the 1991 Oregon State-Arizona game to cover the Breeders’ Cup at Churchill Downs, watching Festin, a thoroughbred owned by Tucson attorney Burt Kinerk, run against the world’s best horses.

And I missed the 2001 USC-Arizona game to cover Game 1 of the World Series, Yankees vs. Diamondbacks, at Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix. That’s it.

Of the last 251 UA games at Arizona Stadium, I had taken that elevator to the press box and written about 249 of them.

I reconsidered Saturday morning. There are few things I’ve enjoyed more than a day or night in the press box at Arizona Stadium. A lot of it is the ability to engage some treasured friends, like longtime UA sports information director Tom Duddleston or Tucson attorney Chip Plowman, who has been on the football statistics crew for 35 years, game after game after game, whose insight into football and UA history was always a welcome conversation.

But Plowman wasn’t at Arizona Stadium on Saturday, either. In an attempt to reduce health risks, the UA eliminated half of its football statistics crew just like it delegated the “Pride of Arizona” Marching Band to play its music outside the stadium, from the field adjacent to the Lowell-Stevens Football Facility.

Plowman opened an email from a fellow statistician last week and read that after 35 years he would not be admitted to the press box.

I had a choice; Plowman did not. He didn’t like it, but the pandemic has done a lot of things we don’t like, and it seems to be gaining steam, not losing it.

And there were more faces missing inside the press box. Francisco Romero, the UA’s Spanish language play-by-play voice for football and basketball, created his broadcast from the den in his home, watching, as I did, Fox’s telecast. NFL scouts were moved outside the press box, isolated and safely distanced high in the west bleachers.

That’s life in 2020. It isn’t anything new or unexpected.

What was new and unexpected Saturday was that the Wildcats played smarter and with more heart and energy than USC. Unfortunately, its fuel tank hit empty in the final minute. Given the talent on the field, you’d have thought the Trojans would have rolled 41-20 or something close to that.

But as it turned out, UA quarterback Grant Gunnell was as good as USC’s much-ballyhooed Kedon Slovis. Arizona running back Gary Brightwell was superior to any USC running back.

When is the last time Arizona won the battle of QBs and RBs against the Trojans? When is the last time Arizona lost a game and yet gave hope to its long-suffering fans?

When was the last time a Kevin Sumlin team seemed prepared to open the season?

As Fox analyst Joel Klatt — who is outstanding and insightful at his craft — consistently pointed out, Arizona seemed to be more prepared and more well-coached than the big-name Trojans.

The Trojans couldn’t run when they needed to run — couldn’t “get big,” as Klatt said — and Arizona’s pieced-together defense, manned by transfers from New Mexico State and New Mexico and by walk-ons like Rourke Freeburg, had benefited from the coaching and organizational ability of new Arizona defensive coordinator Paul Rhoads.

“We’re not a laughingstock,” Freeburg said in a post-game Zoom conference.

Arizona defensive coordinator Paul Rhoads reacts after learning USC got a time out in time to avoid losing ground on a fourth and short play that went nowhere in the red zone in the fourth quarter of their Pac 12 game at Arizona Stadium, Tucson, Ariz., November 14, 2020.

Rhoads wore a 1990s, old-school cactus-and-sunset Arizona cap. It was stained by sweat from what must’ve been 24/7 labor to re-make an Arizona defense that for 10 years has statistically been the worst in the Pac-12.

On Saturday he was probably the most capable coach on the field, and you didn’t need to be sitting in the press box to see it.

If this is the new way of football at Arizona — outsmarting the other guy and getting the most out of your personnel, even in a defeat — it’s a welcome development in a year of mostly bad news in college football.

“We’re optimistic and driven,” said Gunnell. “We’re going to bring some wins.”

Whether watching from the press box or in your living room, Gunnell’s performance and his postgame pledge carries some long-needed credibility in Tucson.

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Contact sports columnist Greg Hansen at 520-573-4362 or ghansen@tucson.com. On Twitter: @ghansen711