Larry Smith never tried to hide his dislike for ASU’s football team. A bulletin board outside his McKale Center office listed Smith’s four goals of Wildcat football. They were:
Have fun
Graduate
Win the Rose Bowl
Beat ASU
Beating the Sun Devils covered up a bunch of football sins at Arizona in the 1980s, no more so than in 1986. The Wildcats rose to No. 11 in the AP poll after opening 4-0 but blew an 18-0 lead at UCLA and lost 32-25 in the last minute.
A few weeks later, Arizona struggled and lost to a non-vintage USC team in Tucson, 20-13. The Trojans would fire their coach a month later and hand-pick Smith as his replacement.
In what had initially looked like a season in which an Arizona team with all-conference standouts Chuck Cecil, Joe Tofflemire, David Adams and Byron Evans would break through and go to the Rose Bowl, the Wildcats entered the Territorial Cup against 9-0-1 ASU as a clear underdog.
The Sun Devils had already clinched a spot in Pasadena.
A record crowd of 58,267 packed Arizona Stadium for a noon kickoff, televised nationally by CBS. Let’s just say it wasn’t a good day for the No. 4 Sun Devils.
Cecil forced a fumble on the game’s first possession, blowing up an almost-certain ASU touchdown at the UA 3-yard line. Arizona then drove 97 yards for a touchdown. The Sun Devils never recovered.
In the fourth quarter, with Arizona leading 24-10, Cecil stepped in front of an ASU pass and ran 106 yards for a touchdown, surely the most memorable play in UA history. The Wildcats won 34-17 as hundreds of fans stormed the field to celebrate with Smith, Cecil and the hometown Wildcats.
“I think the beautiful thing about it is that it was played in front of the whole country, God and everybody,” said a tearful Smith in the UA locker room. “Today was the greatest game of the season. It makes up for a lot of things that happened.”
Cecil, who intercepted five passes and blocked three punts in 1986, refused to use a victory over the ASU Rose Bowl team as a cure for a what-might-have-been season.
“We knocked ’em out of the Rose Bowl (in 1985) and we’re 4-0 against them since I’ve been here,” he said. “But our goal this year was to go to the Rose Bowl, not just beat ASU.”
ASU would go on to beat Michigan at the Rose Bowl. Arizona would beat North Carolina in the Aloha Bowl in Hawaii, finishing 9-3.
But the defining story of Arizona’s 1986 football season wouldn’t be the Territorial Cup or those regrettable losses to USC and UCLA. It would be Smith’s painful departure to coach USC.
Upon arriving in Honolulu, news leaked that Smith had talked with USC athletic director Mike McGee. Smith declined to speak about it, but everyone suspected that the man who built Arizona’s football program out of a three-year NCAA probation to Top-25 status would be coaching his last UA game at the Aloha Bowl.
Larry Smith coached his last game with the Wildcats at the 1986 Aloha Bowl, where UA beat North Carolina 30-21.
A night before the game, Smith’s wife, Cheryl, walked into a media hospitality room at the team hotel. A few writers from Tucson chanted the USC “Fight On” theme. She laughed and repeated the “Fight On” chant.
“Oh, you guys are always wrong,” she said.
But after beating North Carolina a day later, Smith and his wife got off the UA’s return flight when it stopped in Los Angeles. Smith met with Trojan officials and, although he didn’t accept the job that day — he told McGee he would first talk to Arizona athletic director Cedric Dempsey before making a decision — it was destiny,.
How could any Arizona coach turn down an opportunity to coach the Trojans, double his salary and get a multi-year, guaranteed contract? At Arizona, he worked on a year-to-year deal.
Dempsey later told me that Smith wept when they met to discuss the USC job. “Larry basically said he didn’t want to go, but that he couldn’t turn it down,” said Dempsey.
A day after ASU beat Michigan in the Rose Bowl, Smith was in Los Angeles, center stage at a press conference introducing him as the new USC coach.
“I’m proud of what we built at Arizona,” he said. “I’m proud of our (five-year) winning streak against ASU. We did just about everything we set out to do except go to the Rose Bowl.”
A year later, Smith coached USC to the first of three consecutive Rose Bowls.
