The Star's longtime columnist on Jack Nicklaus' premonition of pro golf making it to La Paloma, a McKale Center Pac-12 sendoff, three to-do- items for new Arizona athletic director Desireé Reed-Francois, Pima hoops playoff double, Kenny Lofton's champagne-like career and the ongoing battle over Randolph Golf Course's footprint.
Jack Nicklaus saw pro golf in La Paloma's future 4 decades ago
On a chilly and overcast February day in 1985, Jack Nicklaus played his first round of golf in Tucson since the 1963 Tucson Open at Forty Niner Country Club. The occasion? Nicklaus dedicated the glitzy La Paloma Country Club, a course he designed for $12 million.
Nicklaus’ hope was that someday the PGA Tour's Tucson Open would be played there.
This week, 39 years later, the PGA Tour Champions Cologuard Classic will make its debut at LaPaloma. Nicklaus isn’t expected to attend, but I still remember his words from that long-ago February day:
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“If the Conquistadores don’t have enough sense to come up here, they’re missing the boat,’’ he told me that day. “The guys will love it. I’ll play here, but not at Randolph.’’ Nicklaus said that the municipal course between Broadway and 22nd Street was not up to PGA Tour standards.
In ’85, the Randolph Golf Complex was in the middle of a seven-year run as the site of the Tucson Open and the Seiko World Match Play Championships. It was won by such golf legends as Tom Watson and Johnny Miller. Tucson’s PGA Tour events have since moved to Starr Pass, Tucson National, The Gallery and the Dove Mountain Country Club.
Nicklaus returned to Tucson in 2009 to christen his second Tucson golf course, Dove Mountain CC, which was the site of the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championships from 2009-14. I also followed Nicklaus when he played a debut round at Dove Mountain. I asked if he had ever played another round at La Paloma since its 1985 debut.
“No,’’ he said. “But I did stay at the (Westin) hotel there several times when I was designing this course.’’
This week, it all comes together for Jack. It only took 39 years.
Cats' Pac-12 run ends with Big 12 teaser
At 2:11 p.m. Saturday, the video board at McKale Center flashed a final message before shutting down for a basketball season that seemed to come and go as quickly as Arizonas’s 90.3 point scoring average:
Coming to the Big 12.
Well, not yet. As surefire Pac-12 player of the year Caleb Love said after Arizona thumped the Oregon Ducks 103-83, “We’re not finished. We’ve gotta win a national championship.’’
We’ve heard that before, right?
About the only thing we know of the uncertainty of March basketball is that Arizona’s final Pac-12 game at McKale was tension-free. Those two words are not expected to be part of the UA’s basketball dictionary the rest of this month and in the (gulp) Big 12.
Arizona ended its 45 years of Pac-12 basketball at McKale as the undisputed ruler of the land.
It has won 470 conference games in that period, which seems out of the reach of a historically bad UCLA team, which took 465 victories into Saturday’s game at Washington State. No other Pac-12 team reached 400 conference wins in those years.
Titles: Arizona 16, UCLA 12.
Who would’ve predicted that the Wildcats, not the mighty Bruins, would rule the league’s basketball kingdom until its end in 2024?
No one. Not a living soul.
I leave you with two facts:
One, the Pac-12 has averaged 6,776 fans per game this season. Arizona, which has led in attendance every season since 1984-85, averaged 14,373. The distant runner-up through Friday was Utah at 8,773. By comparison, the Big 12 averaged 10,107 per game through Friday, with sellout or near-sellout averages at Kansas, Iowa State, BYU, Texas Tech, West Virginia, Kansas State, Cincinnati and TCU.
Easy touches? None.
Two, the Pac-12 this year has a 65.3 winning percentage against nonconference teams. It has lost to Cal State-Northridge, Montana State, UTEP, Northern Iowa and Pacific. By comparison, the Big 12 has won 81.5% of its nonconference games. That’s beyond the all-time Pac-12 record of 76.8 set in 2007.
Coming to the Big 12?
Don't expect to sit back and enjoy as many sitting ducks as have passed through McKale the last 45 years.
Three things for new Arizona AD to put on to-do list
Can you imagine how busy new Arizona athletic director Desireé Reed-Francois will be when she moves into her McKale office this week? Where do you start? Finances, staffing, compliance, or just matching names with faces?
Either way, I’ve got three proposals to add to her to-do list.
1. Put the small, unimpressive, back-of-the-house statue of Lute Olson into storage and hire an artist to design an appropriate statue of the most significant figure in UA sports history (or No. 2 behind Pop McKale). A new, more appropriate statue of Olson should be more forceful, perhaps standing 6½ feet tall, with Olson’s arms folded across his chest, which was his normal pose at McKale Center. And place it in front of McKale Center, where people can actually see it.
2. Construct a visible memorial to Hall of Fame baseball coaches Jerry Kindall and Frank Sancet in front of the Davis Indoor Arena, where Kindall and Sancet coached before the school vacated Kindall/Sancet Field and moved to Hi Corbett Field. There is an obscure placard near the Davis arena that mentions Kindall and Sancet coached there, but unless you’ve got a large microscope, it’s difficult to locate. Future MLB Hall of Famer Terry Francona played there. Hall of Famer Trevor Hoffman led Arizona to a Pac-10 championship there. The UA won three national titles in 11 years there. Why not celebrate the program’s lineage instead of hiding it?
3. Spend whatever it takes to erect a statue of Mike Candrea at Hillenbrand Stadium. Yes, his name is on the stadium wall. But, c’mon, the man won eight NCAA championships and an Olympic gold medal. He is the one person most responsible for the growth and visibility of college and high school softball in America.
As Arizona moves to the Big 12, it will notice that its rival schools have put more priority into remembering their leading sports figures.
TCU has four sports statues on campus: football coaches Gary Patterson and Dutch Meyers, Heisman trophy winner Davey O’Brien and James Cook, its first black athlete. Kansas’ athletic campus includes statues of former basketball coaches James Naismith and Phog Allen, and football greats Gale Sayers and John Hadl.
One more proposal: How about a statue of Sean Elliott, who in 1989 was the college basketball Player of the Year, equivalent to the Heisman Trophy? Future Big 12 rival Baylor recently unveiled a statue of 2011 Heisman winner Robert Griffin III. Is a statue of Elliott too much to expect?
Short stuff: Pima hoops teams, both No. 1, host playoff double Thursday
• LaTanya Sheffield, a former assistant track coach at Canyon del Oro High School, last week was named the head women’s coach for Team USA at this summer’s 2024 Paris Olympics. Sheffield, a former U.S. record holder in the 400 meter hurdles, coached at CDO from 2006-12, helping the Dorados win the 2010 girls state championships under head coach Rick Glider. She is now the head men’s and women’s track coach at Long Beach State.
• The late Rich Alday, who coached Pima College to 517 baseball victories from 1974-89, was honored in Albuquerque last week when the New Mexico Lobos debuted their new baseball plant and named it the 'Rich and Ambrose Alday Hitting Facility.’ Alday was UNM’s head coach from 1990-2007 before returning to Tucson to coach Ironwood Ridge’s softball team to two state championships. Ambrose Alday, the only child of Rich and Norma Alday, died of cancer in 1995 when he was 16. Norma was in Albuquerque for last week’s dedication; she threw out the first pitch. Well done, UNM.
• Pima College has been a national contender in men’s and women’s college basketball dating back 15 years, when Todd Holthaus, followed by Brian Peabody, were hired as the women’s and men’s coaches, respectively. This year, they’ll take it a step beyond. For the first time, both have earned No. 1 seeds, getting the right to host home games when the Region playoffs begin Thursday. Holthaus' club, 22-6 and on a 10-game winning streak, will play at 5:30 p.m. Peabody’s team, 25-3 and on an 11-game winning streak, will play at 7:30 p.m.
Lofton had a champagne-type career
In 1985, Kenny Lofton, whose name was added to the Ring of Honor at McKale on Saturday, was overlooked nationally. He was the last person Lute Olson added to his recruiting Class of 1985, one that included Sean Elliott and future NBA first-round draft pick Anthony Cook.
From East Chicago, Indiana, Lofton’s only other recruiting visit was to Butler. At Arizona, Lofton was an indispensable point guard , a defensive force on the UA’s No. 1-ranked teams of 1988 and 1989 clubs.
Honors? There have been a few. After his Hall of Fame-type 17-year MLB career, Lofton was inducted into the Cleveland Indians Hall of Fame in 2015, but more importantly, was honored by his hometown a few years ago. The street where he built his grandmother, Rosie Person a new home, was renamed from Butler Street to Kenny Lofton Lane. At that ceremony, Lofton broke into tears and wept.
Lofton grew up in poverty, raised by his grandmother, living in a basement apartment with seven relatives. He went on to earn $61 million in baseball, but more importantly, he earned the respect of those who knew and watched him play.
My favorite Kenny Lofton memory: His ninth-inning double in the Tucson Toros’ 1991 PCL championship game keyed the Toros’ come-from-behind, walk-off victory, one of the top four or five athletic events I’ve seen in Tucson. A sellout crowd of more than 10,000 filled Hi Corbett Field that memorable September night.
I approached Kenny for an interview in the wild Toros locker room. He shook a bottle of champagne and sprayed the bubbles all over me and my notebook. He handed me the bottle of champagne and grabbed another. I’ve still got that champagne bottle. Welcome home, Kenny.
My two cents: Suggested Randolph walking path idea excessively costlyÂ
The Tucson City Council is scheduled to stage further discussions this week on the absurd proposal to spend about $40 million to build a pedestrian walking path (and attendant golf course projects) between the Randolph North and Dell Urich golf courses this week.
Last week, a videographer and a photographer hired by the city spent the day examining the golf course. What a colossal waste of money.
To build a public walking path through the golf complex would require the Randolph course to be almost totally rebuilt. Last week, I counted 747 trees on the Randolph North course. It's conceivable almost all of them would have to be cut down to build a walking path.
What’s more, shutting down Randolph for two years or more would forfeit a small fortune in revenue. On Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday last week (it rained Wednesday), the Randolph golf complex averaged close to 420 players per day, at an average of about $55 per golfer. That’s more than $20,000 per day.
Mayor Regina Romero has long talked about planting “a million trees’’ in Tucson. Now she’s talking about a project that might cut down hundreds of treasured 40-to-60 year-old trees in perhaps the shadiest place in Southern Arizona, at a cost of $40 million.
Here’s a better idea: Spend that time and money fixing potholes, strengthening Tucson’s law enforcement roster and concentrating on something that isn’t so inessential.