Two Years After His Death, Lute Olson Remains Important Figure To Former Players

August 26, 2022 Cronkite News
Lute Olson was voted Pac-10 Coach of the Year seven times, made 5 Final Four appearances and won the 1997 NCAA championship with Arizona, where his team accomplished the feat of defeating three #1 seeds in the same tournament. [Photo via University of Arizona]

By Hayden Cilley

TUCSON – Lute Olson is viewed as one of college basketball’s greatest coaches, and in Tucson, where he built his legacy at the University of Arizona, there was no bigger celebrity. His former players, though, view him as the patriarch of a family bigger than basketball.

For Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, the basketball court became home and Olson became a mentor after Kerr’s father was killed during his freshman year at Arizona by Islamic extremists in Beirut.

“The thing that kept me going was playing basketball,” Kerr said. “The team became a second family and he really looked after me.”

Memories of Olson’s accomplished journey remain vivid. Saturday marks the two-year anniversary of his death.

Olson’s attentiveness and tough-love shepherding of his players from adolescence to adulthood were evident long before he arrived in Tucson. At the University of Iowa, where he spent nine seasons before being hired by Arizona, he lifted the program from mediocrity to prominence.

Before he arrived, the Hawkeyes suffered four consecutive losing seasons. Olson inherited a team that went 8-16 and finished 10th in the Big Ten. In his second season there, in 1975-76, the Hawkeyes went 19-10 and finished fifth in the Big Ten. They improved every season under Olson, but 1980 was their breakout year.

Iowa finished 23-10 and fourth in the Big Ten and advanced to the Final Four, where it lost to the eventual champion, the University of Louisville.

Iowa would play in the next three NCAA men’s basketball tournaments, but Olson felt stymied, his daughter Jody Brase said.

“He felt like he was in a fishbowl while he was coaching there,” Brase said. “After my mother lived in Minnesota and my dad lived in North Dakota, they knew the cold too well.”