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LUTE OLSON BIOGRAPHY:

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How do you summarize the career of Lute Olson? Somehow, Hall of Fame just doesn't suffice.

In a career that spanned 49 seasons and included six decades, there have been treasure trove of moments that made Olson's career one to behold.

He burst into major college basketball consciousness in 1973-74 with 24 wins and a .923 winning percentage in his first season as a Division I coach at Long Beach State. Five years later, at Iowa, Olson's Hawkeyes won 20 games and a Big Ten championship, Iowa's first in nine years.

Hired at Arizona on March 29, 1983, Olson's efforts were immediately apparent. Just a season after a 4-24 record opened the door for him in Tucson, his Wildcats won six of its last eight games in 1983-84 to nearly triple the win total from the previous season.

An NCAA Tournament berth followed in the next year, beginning the longest active streak of tournament appearances in the nation, while the first of his 11 Pac-10 titles followed a season after that. Prior to Olson's arrival, Arizona had captured just one conference championship in the previous 29 seasons and earned three NCAA Tournament berths.

One of Olson's most underappreciated accomplishments occurred during the summer of 1986. It was then that Olson guided a collection of college players to the World Championship in Madrid, Spain. Olson is the last coach to win a major international men's basketball championship with a roster made completely of amateur athletes.

He guided Arizona to the top of the polls for the first time in school history on Dec. 21, 1987. In fact, Arizona has been the No. 1 team in the country for 30 different polling periods, with the last coming on five consecutive occasions in 2002-03. This ranking also occurred during the 1988-89, 1990-91, 1996-97, 1997-98 and 2000-01 seasons.

Olson led Arizona to the Final Four for the first time during that magical1988 season in which the program vaulted into the national conscience. Spurred by a 35-3 record, Arizona would hold the nation's best cumulative winning percentage for the next 18 seasons.

In that span, Arizona won 10 Pac-10 championships, averaged better than 25 wins per season, advanced to 10 Sweet 16s, including four Final Fours (1988, 1994, 1997, 2001), and won 71 straight games at McKale Center - the 10th longest homecourt streak in NCAA history.

Olson and the Cats reached the pinnacle of the college basketball world in 1997 when he turned a middle-of-the-pack Pac-10 squad into a champion. Along the way, UA polished off the three winningest programs in college basketball history and three No. 1 seeds to earn the school's first national championship.

To this day, the '97 Wildcats are the only squad in NCAA Tournament history to defeat three No. 1 seeds in the same tournament.

Dwelling on only the postseason would overlook a wealth of wonderful regular season moments. For any Wildcat fan, these are as memorable as any: Pete Williams downs Arizona State...twice; McClutch; the 1988 Fiesta Bowl Classic; the Duke double-OT win; Khalid goes coast to coast; Damon's double-OT effort in Pullman; Miles drains a 70-footer to give Lute his 500th win; Dickerson at UCLA; Michael Wright sinks No. 1 Stanford; Jason, Luke and Ricky erase two 20-point deficits in 2002; Andre's triple-doubles, Salim's three game-winners in 2005 and Radenovic's herculean effort at Stanford in 2007.

Those regular-season wins only spotlighted what was Olson's continuous effort to face only the best, no matter the location. True to his rugged North Dakota roots, Olson believed that the best way to challenge his team was to play the toughest opponents. No cupcakes. No games against Podunk State. He often said that you learn far more from a tough loss than you ever would from a blowout win.

So the Wildcats annually played the best in the nation. Since his arrival, Arizona played 49 non conference, regular-season games against teams that played in the Final Four later that same season. Further, the Wildcats matched wits with a team that played in the NCAA title game in 11 of his last 13 seasons.

Additionally, Olson amassed a 103-79 (.566) record in games against nationally raked opponents. In total, UA faced 74 ranked non-conference opponents during Olson's tenure in Tucson.

You may have admired Olson for his dogged determination to annually line up a tough schedule, but you could also relate to the work ethic that was as much a part of him as the blue collar on his game day sport coat. He was a guy who worked his way up the professional ladder. Olson coached for 12 years on the high school level in Minnesota and California, often working two jobs, while helping to raise five children.

Olson was 39 years old when he got the job at Long Beach State in 1973 with 283 career wins under his belt. And as he worked his way into the pantheon of college coaches, you cheered his successes, but also related to his failures. Of his 378 defeats, there were some tough ones - most of those in March. Nine times he lost in the NCAA Tournament first round. Three more came in regional finals and three others in the Final Four. Interestingly, Olson can claim to have finished first, second, third and fourth in the NCAA Tournament. One cannot approach greatness without experiencing failure along the way.

So now the man with a sideline demeanor that would make Rudyard Kipling proud has retired. Gone from the position he's occupied along the sideline and in our minds for the last quarter century.

However, one question still remains. What was his greatest accomplishment?

Simply put, he gave Wildcat fans something to be proud of. He turned a seemingly remote western outpost into a college basketball destination. He asked for our help when he was laying the foundation of his dynasty and his successes became ours as well. In the end, it was a wonderful partnership.

Perhaps Arizona Daily Star columnist Greg Hansen said it best in a piece he wrote in the 2007-08 UA media guide, commemorating Olson's 25th season as the UA head coach. A season, unfortunately, that never happened.

"No man in the history of this town, not Pancho Villa or John Wayne, has done more to make us feel better about ourselves than Lute Olson. His once-modest basketball program has become such a source of community pride that we, through him, have come to feel like winners."

LUTE OLSON CAREER RECORDS

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