Before Pac-10 newcomer Arizona became nationally prominent in basketball or softball, its most consistently successful endeavor was coach Dave Murray’s men’s cross country team.
The Wildcats finished No. 7 in the NCAA finals in 1976, 1978 and 1981 and began the fall of ‘84 ranked ahead of the league’s traditional distance running powers Oregon and Stanford.
Arizona won the 1984 Pac-10 cross country title, the school’s first outright conference championship since being admitted to the league six years earlier; Arizona’s 1980 NCAA championship baseball team tied for the league’s regular season title.
The appeal of Arizona’s rise to national prominence was that its leading performer was a 5-foot, 9-inch, 130-pound senior from Santa Rita High School, Tom Ansberry. Local boy makes good, right?
Ansberry, who had set a national age-group record by running the mile in 5 minutes, 3 seconds as a 12-year-old, won the 1984 Pac-10 cross country championships by eight seconds.
“Tom took the lead at the two-mile mark and was never headed,” said Murray. “He was cruising. No one was going to catch him.”
Two weeks later, Ansberry was No. 1 again as Arizona won the NCAA West Regionals on the grass at the El Conquistador golf resort, and for the first time Arizona was mentioned as a national championship contender. This was fully unexpected because Murray’s starting unit consisted of freshman Matt Giusto, Chris Morgan and Jeff Cannada. That’s 60% of the five-man starting group.
The Pac-10 of the mid-’80s bowed to no conference as a distance-running league. Oregon’s Steve Prefontaine dominated college distance running in the first half of the 1970s, followed in the late ‘70s by Washington State’s almost unbeatable Henry Rono.
But at the 1984 Pac-10 finals, Ansberry and Arizona easily beat the Cougars and Ducks as Ansberry, Morgan and Andre Woods finished in the top 10; Giusto, suffering from a back injury, rallied to finish 21st.
“We can compete with any team in the nation,” said Murray, who was named the national coach of the year a month later.
When the NCAA finals were held Nov. 19 at Penn State, Wisconsin was a strong favorite. That’s not how it worked out, but then the Wildcats encountered their worst misfortune of the season. UA senior Keith Morrison was jostled in a pack of runners early in the race, was knocked to the ground and shaken up. He lost about 60 places in the race. He finished 84th.
“If Keith had finished where he normally would, we would have won the national championship,” said Murray. Instead, Arkansas won with 101 points, followed by Arizona (111), Tennessee (144) and favored Wisconsin (159).
Murray understood what it meant to finish No. 2. Outside of Arizona’s national championship 1976 and 1980 baseball teams, it was the highest-ever finish by an Arizona team.
Ansberry led all Wildcats, finishing sixth. Cannada was 33rd and Guisto, who would go on to be an NCAA 5,000 meter champion and a UA Sports Hall of Famer after a distinguished career, finished 41st.
“I’m extremely elated,” said Murray.
The ‘84 national runner-up finish triggered Arizona’s rise as one of the nation’s leading distance-running schools over the next 30 years. The Wildcats produced national champions Giusto, Aaron Ramirez, Amy Skieresz, Tara Chaplin, Marc Davis, Robert Cheseret, Abdi Abdirahman and Lawi Lalang.
But in 1984, it was the slender and indefatigable Ansberry who became the face of UA distance running. After leading Santa Rita two a pair of state track championships, Ansberry’s career thrived. A four-time All-American who earned a degree in irrigation engineering, Ansberry almost made the 1992 Barcelona Olympics team, finishing fourth at the USA trials. He earlier finished No. 7 at the 1984 USA Olympic trials.
A year ago, Ansberry was inducted into the Pima County Sports Hall of Fame, at which time he said that finishing No. 2 at the 1984 NCAA finals was both a highlight and disappointment.
“We came so close, we had the talent to be national champions,” he said. “But having a teammate get knocked down in the race was the difference between first and second. All these years later, though, I look at finishing No.2 as a great accomplishment.”
