Thanks, Lute, for all the wonderful memories

Thanks, Lute.

For the 589 wins at Arizona, 23 consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances, 11 Pacific-10 Conference championships, four trips to the Final Four and your amazing 43-7 record against Arizona State.

Thank you for turning McKale Center from a morgue to a madhouse.

Thanks especially for that one victory on March 31, 1997 in Indianapolis, 84-79 over Kentucky for the national championship.

The 74-year-old Hall of Fame basketball coach will be honored tomorrow night at halftime of the Arizona-California game on Lute and Bobbi Olson Court in McKale Center.

Another celebration on campus is planned in August.

Robert Luther Olson retired suddenly just before the start of the current season, due to health reasons including the detection of a prior stroke, probably a year or two earlier. He was replaced on an interim basis by Russ Pennell.

A search is underway for a permanent Wildcat coach.

A stroke killed Lute’s father on their North Dakota farm in 1939 when Lute was five. His brother, Amos, withdrew from nearby Mayville State College in his senior year and came home to run the farm. Less than a year later, the tractor Amos was operating turned over, he was pinned beneath the wreckage and was killed.

Alinda Olson, Lute’s mother, moved the family to Mayville, N.D., where she took a job at a small cafe and cleaned house for other people. Little Lute grew into a basketball star. After the family moved to Grand Forks, he led Central High to the 1952 state championship.

Then he starred in three sports at Augsburg College in Minneapolis. He and his Grand Forks sweetheart, Roberta Russell, were marred on Thanksgiving Day of Lute’s sophomore year at Augsburg. He and Bobbi were married 47 years, until her death from ovarian cancer, on New Year’s Day 2001.

“When the Wildcats lose,” Bobbi once told me, “I tell Lute, ‘You’ve got one hour to get over this ... and then we’re putting it behind us.”

That’s the only team rule the Coach’s coach insisted on.

In 1982-83, under Ben Lindsey, the Wildcats and their fans suffered through a 4-24 season. Their Pac-10 record was 1-17 and that lone win was by 74-73 against Stanford, in Tucson.

Cedric Dempsey then scored perhaps the greatest recruiting coup in Arizona history. The Wildcat athletic director went to the University of Iowa, where he somehow talked Olson into becoming the coach at Arizona.

In his first season, 1983-84, the Wildcat record was 11-17, but they won eight times more conference games than the year before, and beat Arizona State twice.

The following season, 1984-85, Lute took the Cats to the NCAA Tournament for the first of 23 straight appearances.

In 1988, led by Steve Kerr and Sean Elliott, Arizona made its first trip to the Final Four. The school returned in 1994, won the national championship in 1997 and lost to Duke in the title game in 2001.

Lute recruited excellence in basketball talent and character.

Fans over the years cheered such all-time favorites as Steve Kerr, Sean Elliott, Tom Tolbert, Craig McMillan, Anthony Cook, Matt Muehlebach, Matt Othick, Kenny Lofton, Sean Rooks, the late Brian Williams, Mike Bibby, Miles Simon, Reggie Geary, Ray Owes, Joseph Blair, Khalid Reeves, Damon Stoudamire, Salim Stoudamire, Jud Buechler, Richard Jefferson, Gilbert Arenas, Jason Gardner, Jason Terry, Luke Walton, Rick Anderson, Channing Frye, Andre Iguodala, Mustafa Shakur, Hassan Adams, and Ivan Radenovic, as well as Chase Budinger, Jordan Hill and Nic Wise on the current team.

Olson, inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame on June 5, 2002, sent a boatload of players to the National Basketball Association, and a lot more into business and other careers at which they’ve created their own success.

When they are old men and get together, they won’t remember the great runs, the shattering dunks or how each game was won or lost. What they’ll remember is the way they came together as a team, under a remarkable coach.

And they’ll remember the drive and tenacity that coach somehow inspired in them.

The rest of us will remember the tall, silver-haired miracle man who turned a desert school from a basketball loser into one of the elite powerhouses in the nation ... and did it will style and class.

Thanks, Lute.

Former Tucson Citizen columnist Corky Simpson writes a weekly commentary for the Green Valley News.