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Last week Lute Olson retired after nearly three decades as the head coach at Arizona. It's my opinion that ALL college basketball fans should care. Cut out of the John Wooden mold (Wooden is Olson's friend and mentor) Lute is a legend, but only to half of the country. Since Arizona hasn't been to a Final Four since 2001 (the year his first wife, Bobbi, tragically died of cancer and Lute's 'Cats lost to Duke in Minneapolis) the Olson legacy has been confined largely to the West Coast; his recent problems were, too. I know this because I spent two years in Tucson covering Lute and his Arizona program from 2004 to 2006. So when much of the country was shocked to hear of his sudden retirement just week's before the season last week, I simply thought, "I can't believe it took that long." I haven't lived in Tucson since the Summer of '06, but I still have friends back there and I keep up with the program. Covering UA hoops was the biggest thing in my life for two years and its not easy to just let go of that stuff. Mostly I've been intrigued with how the whole Lute Olson situation was going to play out. I remember thinking not too long after my first Arizona basketball season started, "Wow, this program is going to collapse once Lute retires." He put way too much of the program's stock into himself. Arizona Basketball means NOTHING to the students, alumni, recruits or (and perhaps most importantly) the former players. LUTE is what they care about... LUTE is the reason the program is cool... LUTE is the reason the students and all of those mid-western transplants show up to games... LUTE is the reason recruits want to go there and former players-turned NBA stars want to come back. It's not like KU, where coaches come and go and each one embraces the history of the program and uses all of those traditions to continue the legacy. Imagine if Allen Fieldhouse burned down, Bill Self quit, Larry Brown and Roy Williams both died and every single former Jayhawk in the NBA all decided they were never going to come back to Lawrence or represent KU hoops again... all in the same day . That's basically what just happened to Arizona. With Lute gone they lost every single symbol of, connection to or future hope of WINNING. They could have avoided this. Lute could have pushed to upgrade the out-dated McKale Center years ago so he could leave behind a top-notch facility. He could have done a better job of grooming his assistants, helping them get better jobs elsewhere so they could get experience and then bring that back later in higher level positions so as to have a strong "succession plan". Instead, he kept assistants under his thumb by preaching loyalty to him and keeping them from ever leaving and expanding their resumes. Because of that, none of his long-time assistants were considered viable replacements when Lute started having health problems over a year ago. And in an effort to slap together some kind of back-up plan, UA was forced to hire experienced assistants without the proper backgrounds to deal with college kids who had no long-term connection to the Arizona tradition (i.e. Kevin O'Niell) Most importantly, Lute should have spent more time instilling loyalty to ARIZONA in his top stars so they would appreciate the PROGRAM as much as they appreciated their coach. Instead, he emphasized the importance of "making it to the NBA" above all else. UA has produced as many NBA players as any program I can think of (Steve Kerr, Sean Elliott, Mike Bibby, Richard Jefferson, Luke Walton, Damon and Salim Stoudemire, Channing Frye, Andre Igoudala, Hassan Adams, Jason Terry and Jerryd Bayless just to name a few) but none of those guys feel any real loyalty to Arizona or Tucson because they're loyal to Lute first. They view HIM as the reason that they're NBA millionaires right now, NOT the program. Imagine if that's how KU did things; the program would have never been able to achieve the longevity that it has. And now that Lute is gone, most of those guys will start showing up less and less (well, not Jason Terry... but he's basically the classiest NBA player I ever met). It's sad that things ended this way for Lute. I think he should have walked away a couple of years ago. Its been obvious that his health hasn't been great for years. There were always unconfirmed rumors that he was in the early stages of Parkinson's Disease when I was there (I can even remember an out of town reporter from another Pac 10 city asking me how long Lute had been suffering from the disease back in 2005 after simply watching him stand on the sidelines for an entire game). You could tell that something was wrong just from the way he would always shake, even during one-on-one interviews. Then there was the halting way he would speak and awkwardly fidget during news conferences. I would ask people who had been covering the program for years what was up and they'd mostly say, "that's just Lute" but would often lament that things had gotten worse in recent years. I just regret that things simply became too much for him to bear over the past year and that caused some odd and jarring behavior from this coaching legend. Olson and I certainly were not friends, but I talked to him a lot over two years. He's always at some civic function or out and about in Tucson, so even during the off-season I never went more than a month or so without talking to him. He was always pleasant and never turned me down for an interview. During my tenure in Tucson, he actually started remembering me from one encounter to the next and I enjoyed making small-talk with him about our favorite college basketball issues and the NBA. He really is a hall-of-famer and a gentleman and I hope his post-basketball life is filled with as much joy as the majority of his coaching career was. |
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Posted by: Jon
I feel bad for Lute, he seems like a good coach, but just stayed in the coaching game too long.
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