When Arizona forward Bennett Davison raced along the sidelines to mess up Lute Olson’s hair as the final buzzer sounded in the 1997 NCAA championship game, it was a comical form of sacrilege.
Nobody messed with Olson’s hair back then, and nothing messed with him, period.
He was the boss. They were the players. The invisible line between them was palpable.
Things are different now. Olson is 20 seasons removed from his national championship team, and 10 seasons from the last game he coached.
He’s 82 years old. Semi-retired. A huge University of Arizona supporter, and a huge Arizona basketball fan.
And his players? They’re his friends now.
Proof arrived again earlier this month when UA honored members of the 1997 team during the Red-Blue Game, then hosted them at the UA-USC football game the following afternoon.
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After all that was over, Olson and his wife, Kelly, invited the whole gang to their house for a Saturday night dinner party. No boosters attended, no administrators, past or present.
Just Olson and his guys. Plus, of course, their families.
“It was just the players and their wives and kids, so we really had a great time,” Olson said. “Just the team, the coaches and the trainers and manager. It was really a lot of fun.”
So it was, too, when Olson turned 80 two years ago. Even though he told the Star then that he “stopped having birthdays a long time ago,” a number of his former players plotted a surprise party and showed up in September 2014.
Among them: Steve Kerr, Sean Elliott, Kenny Lofton, Anthony Cook, Joe Turner, A.J. Bramlett, Channing Frye, Jason Terry, Miles Simon and Luke Walton.
That’s a lot of what it’s all about for Olson these days. Guys who kept their distance from him during their playing days, and maybe even during Olson’s final years of coaching, now show up or call regularly.
They want to talk. He wants to talk.
“They keep in touch really well,” Olson said. “I think now that I’m not coaching, why, they know I have more time on my hands so they call even more often.”
Actually, Olson doesn’t have that much time. With the health issues he cited after his 2007-08 leave of absence and subsequent retirement now long in the past, Olson has kept up a moderate pace.
Simon saw it firsthand again this month, when he arrived for the 20-year reunion and jersey recognition ceremony for the No. 34 he wore as the 1997 Final Four’s Most Outstanding Player.
“It seems like he’s in a good place,” Simon said.
Reached just three days after that dinner party, Olson said he was already in Denver on his way to Boston to help generate support the UA Foundation’s Arizona NOW campaign to raise $1.5 billion.
“The main thing is it brings people there who are interested in athletics,” Olson said. “It’s not a case of speaking but of doing a lot of Q&A. But I enjoy doing that. It keeps me connected, and the money raised goes to (academic programs). Very little of it is for athletics.”
Of course, Olson also keeps connected by regularly attending the Wildcats’ home basketball games and making occasional road trips with the team. The past two seasons, he and Kelly have traveled in for the Bay Area trip because Kerr’s Golden State Warriors played in between the Stanford and Cal games.
This season, Olson is planning to make the USC-UCLA trip and stop over to see Luke Walton, another former UA player turned NBA coach, who is now taking over the Lakers.
But before then, you can bet Olson will have plenty of phone calls to take.
