The campus of the University of Arizona with the football field directly west of Bear Down Gym. On Feb. 14, 1929, an unknown photographer and/or pilot took aerial pictures of the Tucson area. Arizona Daily Star file photo
Jan. 21, 1927: Bear Down Gymnasium opens
Mostly, Pop McKale wrote letters to communicate. That’s how he “met” and interviewed Fred Enke in 1924.
In many of the letters McKale mailed to the University of Louisville’s football and basketball coach, McKale would tell Enke of a vision to build a new basketball gymnasium at Arizona.
“This gymnasium will cost in the neighborhood of $130,000,” McKale told Enke. “We would like you to be our first coach in the new building.”
Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne had told McKale about the young coach at Louisville. Incredibly, Arizona had an athletic program superior to that of Louisville in the 1920s.
Enke, who grew up in Minnesota, had traveled only as far west at South Dakota State, where he had been an assistant football coach in 1922. His son, Fred W. Enke, told me that “Pappy” was fully skeptical of the small school in the middle of the desert.
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At the time, Arizona’s athletic department had no full-blown athletic plant. The baseball diamond and football field were essentially sandlot structures around which automobiles and horse-drawn wagons could watch ballgames.
Arizona played basketball at the City Armory from 1921 to 1926, but when McKale arranged home-and-home basketball series with UCLA and USC in 1923, fewer than 400 fans could squeeze into the old building.
McKale’s vision was that Arizona could become one of the West’s leading athletic departments if it could build the $130,000 “Men’s Gymnasium” and become regular opponents of the Los Angeles schools.
It could help change the reputation of the UA from a dusty frontier school to that of a progressive, modern university.
Enke finally agreed to be Arizona’s basketball coach, in part because its former coach, James. H. Pierce, a former All-America football player at Indiana, moved to Hollywood in an attempt to be a movie star. (Pierce would became the fourth actor to portray Tarzan.)
“We drove from Louisville to Tucson in an old Model T Ford, just like the Beverly Hillbillies,” Fred W. Enke told me. “There was no direct route, no paved roads in some areas, and few reliable maps. I was just a little baby then, but Pappy would often talk about how amazing it was they survived the long drive.”
When Enke arrived in Tucson in the late summer of 1925, construction on the Men’s Gymnasium began. It was scheduled to be ready for basketball and about 3,000 spectators just after New Year’s Day, 1927.
The Star’s newspaper headline on the morning of Jan. 21, 1927, said:
IMMENSE CROWD
EXPECTED
TO WATCH
CATS TONIGHT
Welcome to big time college basketball. The opponent was TSTC — Tempe State Teachers College, now Arizona State.
The school distributed 1,500 tickets to students without charge; it sold the other 1,500 before tipoff. The Men’s Gymnasium was said to be among the top two or three basketball arenas in the West.
Arizona defeated TSTC 29-18 that night, and 32-25 a day later.
A week before the game, UA football standout Martin Gentry proposed the adoption of the slogan “Bear Down” at a student body assembly. The motion was passed unanimously.
Almost overnight, the new arena was called “Bear Down Gym” in honor of ex-UA quarterback and baseball catcher John “Button” Salmon, who had been killed three months earlier in an automobile crash.
Enke coached at Bear Down Gym until he retired, in 1961, at which time the school began preliminary plans for a new gymnasium. McKale Center, which would cost $8 million, was completed in 1973.
Where are they now? Enke, who periodically attended games at McKale Center, died in 1985. He coached Arizona to its first NCAA Tournament, in 1951.
How they did it: Even with the modern basketball facility, Arizona didn’t begin to play an out-of-region schedule until 1934, when Enke’s team played at Drake, Purdue, Oklahoma City, Notre Dame and St. Louis, losing all five. The first national-level teams to play at Bear Down Gym didn’t begin until 1951.
Greatest game at Bear Down Gym: Arizona beat No. 2 LIU 62-61 on Jan. 29, 1951. Newspaper reports estimated the attendance at “almost 5,000,” a gymnasium record.
Photo: The campus of the University of Arizona with the football field directly west of Bear Down Gym. On Feb. 14, 1929, an unknown photographer and/or pilot took aerial pictures of the Tucson area. Arizona Daily Star file photo
