Bill Nelson's team felt sting of Arizona's 1980 NCAA scandal

Funeral services for former Arizona wrestling coach Bill Nelson were held Friday at a church on north Craycroft Road. He was 90.

The three-time NCAA wrestling champion, a member of the United States’ 1948 Olympic team, was Arizona’s wrestling coach from 1963-81, and, he once told me, a collateral victim to the biggest scandal in school history.

In 1980, UA football coach Tony Mason was forced to resign after a slush fund, illegal payments to players, and scores of fraudulent travel receipts were discovered. Nelson believed the wrestling program was eliminated – with the men’s gymnastics program – because of declining football revenues related to the scandal.

Here’s what Nelson told the Star about the day athletic director Dave Strack eliminated wrestling:

“He called me into his office, and Strack never called me into his office for anything positive. When he talked to me it was only for negative reasons,” he said.

“Wrestling was dropped because of a lack of management and fiscal responsibility. What’s another word for it? Ineptness.”

Or scandal.

Nelson was hardly inept. He coached six All-Americans at Arizona, and led the Wildcats to seven top-20 finishes at the NCAA finals. Impressively, he brought the NCAA Championship meet to McKale Center in 1976.

To the credit of the voters on the UA Sports Hall of Fame committee 20 years ago, Nelson was inducted into the UA Sports Hall of Fame in 1997.

Nelson lived in the Phoenix at the end of his life; a memorial service will be held in Nelson’s native Eagle Grove, Iowa, on Monday.