In a Cat fight that went into overtime, youthful Arizona upset Kentucky to win the NCAA title

Issue date: April 7, 1997

No tub of Gatorade could have done the moment justice. It took young fingers to do the honors properly, digits belonging to 21-year-old Arizona forward Bennett Davison. Wildcats coach Lute Olson-the man from Glad, the man off the wedding cake, the man with a North Dakota upbringing marked by bitter winters and stern moral stricture-was striding up the sideline in Indianapolis's RCA Dome just before midnight on Monday with every bit of his notorious stoicism intact. He was a fresh claimant of a national championship, his and his school's first, but he was absolutely stone-faced as he made his way to congratulate Kentucky coach Rick Pitino following Arizona's 84-79 overtime victory.

Though only 6' 1", Bibby led Arizona to victory in the battle of the boards with nine rebounds.    (John W. McDonough)

That's when Davison caught up with his coach and began massaging that famously perfect white coif. Olson's face cleaved into a smile, and the world knew for sure what it must have momentarily doubted: that Arizona had indeed just won an NCAA title. "Coach can relax now," Davison would say later. "He can finally let his hair down."

In winning, Arizona had taken out three of the game's hoariest programs, Kansas, North Carolina and Kentucky, with no muss. The fourth-seeded Wildcats had beaten those three, each a No. 1 seed, with no fuss. Now it was time for some serious dishevelment. After his team beat North Carolina 66-58 on Saturday to gain a berth in his first final in four tries, Olson said, "As long as we've come this far, we might as well win it on Monday." Say it with an upper Midwest inflection, and that line could have been lifted straight from the script of the movie Fargo.

Arizona, a team that had muddled through the season as 65% free throw shooters, sank 82% of its foul shots in the title game. A team that had played 12 games decided by five points or less beat a team that had won only one close game all year and ended its season 0-3 when pushed to overtime. How loose was Arizona? Miles Simon, the Wildcats' imperturbable junior guard, played more than a minute of the extra session with the laces of one shoe untied.

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Arizona's Wildcats beat Kentucky's Wildcats in a game with the same narrow contours as a catwalk. A sloppy first half gave way to a magnificent second half and then five minutes more. Twenty times the score was tied; 18 times the lead changed hands. Not until 13.8 seconds remained in OT, and Kentucky's only hope rested with desperate fouls, did either team seize a lead of more than six points.

Such a game would be won in the backcourt, and two of Arizona's guards, Simon and freshman point man Mike Bibby, made the decisive plays. Again and again Simon danced into the lane, either to squeeze off gentle floaters or to draw fouls from late-arriving Kentucky defenders. As he paraded to the line for 17 free throws, Simon could think only of the film he had seen on Sunday of South Carolina shooting 44 free throws in beating Kentucky on March 2. "They can't stop me," he told his teammates in the huddle at one point during the first half. In the end Simon was named the Final Four's Most Outstanding Player for his 30 points on Monday, 14 from the free throw line, where he spent much of the night, thanks to his shoulder-dipping up-and-under moves. "I can't believe they kept falling for the same trick," said Arizona's small forward, Michael Dickerson. For his part Bibby contributed three three-pointers, three steals and 19 points while routinely busting out of double teams that often included Kentucky's 6'7" All-America, Ron Mercer. Bibby is believed to be the first freshman point guard ever to pilot a team to a national championship.

Both Simon and Bibby have athletic relatives who kept up with the weekend's drama. Moments after the game ended Simon found his sister, Charisse, in the stands. She handed him a cellular phone so he could speak to her husband, a certain Yankee outfielder who was on the line from Seattle, awaiting the defending World Series champs' Opening Day game with the Mariners. "What's up?" Simon asked Darryl Strawberry.

"Now we have two championships to celebrate," Charisse said.

Bibby's personal drama is still a work in progress. He's estranged from his father, Henry, who is now the coach at Southern Cal. But on Friday, Henry tracked his son down in the lobby of the team's hotel. What Henry said, his son wouldn't say; Mike spent the week robotically repeating, "I'm not answering any questions about my father," each time one was posed. But his mother, Virginia, wasn't so reticent-though it must be noted that she is in the midst of an acrimonious divorce proceeding with Mike's father. "[Henry] was hiding in the hotel," she said on Monday night. "He just popped out and said, Can I talk to you for a second?' He spoke, not Mike. Then he talked to a TV station and said he had a meeting with Mike. He should have left the kid alone. He just wanted the stage. I wish it was for the right reason, to be a father. Unfortunately, I know it wasn't."

Bibby nonetheless did nothing to dishonor his dad, who was one of the college game's great open-court guards when he played on three national championship teams at UCLA. And at the foul line Bibby showed the same sangfroid as Simon, sinking all six of his shots.

Arizona's victory closes one of college basketball's longest running stand-up acts. The roll call has been an easy laugh line: East Tennessee State. Santa Clara. Miami of Ohio. Since 1992 each had taken out heavily favored Arizona in the first round of an NCAA tournament. It's a legacy that helps explain why last week, in an Indianapolis Star poll of 20 sportswriters, none picked the Wildcats to win the national title, and why several years ago one pundit did pick Arizona to win-the Iditarod, such dogs did he consider the Cats.

Kentucky, which had vainly hoped to avoid using its own traps, occasionally fell prey to Arizona's    (Rich Clarkson/NCAA Photos)

If South Alabama swingman Toby Madison hadn't launched an imprudently quick shot with his team up eight on Arizona and barely six minutes to play in their first-round game on March 13, another ignominious loss might have been added to Arizona's list. But since coming back to win that game 65-57, the Wildcats have played like a team from Carefree, Ariz., instead of Tucson. They defeated 12th-seeded College of Charleston, top-seeded Kansas and 10th-seeded Providence by a total of 11 points to win the Southeast Regional. And after the Wildcats beat North Carolina in the first of Saturday's semifinals, Olson told his players, "The ghosts are gone now." Suddenly, instead of being a chesty second or third seed from the pantywaist Pac-10 embarrassed by some loose and hungry 15th or 14th seed, the Wildcats were the plucky and aggressive ones.

Arizona had fallen behind North Carolina 15-4 after the Tar Heels converted a series of breakaways and dunks off alley-oop passes. Olson interrupted that run with a 20-second timeout and ordered his guards not to go to the offensive boards so heedlessly. "Once we made them set up in a half-court offense, our defense was pretty stingy," Simon would say later.

Indeed, the Wildcats soon pulled even at 24 and then began to stage an eerily similar reprise of their upset of Kansas. The team that had made the Jayhawks' 6'11" center, Raef LaFrentz, appear slow now made 7'2" Serge Zwikker of North Carolina look downright inert. A tag team of Davison, A.J. Bramlett, Eugene Edgerson and Donnell Harris forced North Carolina forward Antawn Jamison to struggle for each of his 18 points. Soon Zwikker, Ed Cota, Ademola Okulaja and Shammond Williams were short-arming and bricking open shots, and for more than eight minutes the Tar Heels failed to score at all. North Carolina coach Dean Smith had spent much of the week providing exculpatory spin on the elimination of the Jayhawks, who are coached by his former assistant, Roy Williams; here, going down to the same team the same way, Smith seemed to be suffering a sympathy defeat.

Hitting only 33% from the floor, Arizona had suffered through its worst-shooting game of the year, yet won comfortably. The Wildcats' great advantage against the Tar Heels was that they did most of their missing where it mattered least. Arizona shot better from outside the three-point arc (37.9%) than inside it (33.3%), sinking 11 treys overall, including four in a row in the second half by Bibby. One of Bibby's bombs, banked in from the top of the key, caused North Carolina assistant Phil Ford to execute a full pirouette in exasperation.

Setting aside the first four minutes and change, Arizona wound up outscoring North Carolina 62-43. The Tar Heels' nondunk shooting percentage was just 25%. With the Wildcats quicker across both the front and back lines, only Carolina's midsized sophomore swingman, Vince Carter, who scored 21 often spectacular points, was able to roam free.

"The experts have been picking against us all year," said Davison. "They didn't pick us [in an exhibition] against the Melbourne Magic. When we played our Red-Blue game, they couldn't pick a winner in that."

One of the few people to foresee Arizona's title was UCLA coach Steve Lavin. When guard Jason Terry plays alongside Bibby, Simon and forward Dickerson, Lavin said before the Wildcats beat North Carolina, "they've got four guys who can pass, catch and make decisions at high speed. They stretch defenses because they can all shoot threes, and then they break you down with dribble penetration. Plus, psychologically, they're tailor-made for this Final Four.

All the other teams are Number 1 seeds for whom anything less than a national championship would be a disappointment. They've already beaten Kansas. They're young, so they're going to play loose and relaxed. They're a fifth-place Pac-10 team just having fun."

On Thursday four Wildcats jawboned a security guard into letting them into the RCA Dome just to case the joint. "Are you sure you're Arizona players?" the rent-a-cop wanted to know before letting them pass.

The next day, before diving into a meal at the Milano Inn, an Italian restaurant in downtown Indianapolis, the Wildcats were so loose that they started a food fight as soon as their appetizers arrived, pelting each other with ice, breadsticks and sundry antipasti. When they noticed that Jaleel White, the actor who plays the geeky Steve Urkel on Family Matters, was dining in the same joint, they hurled calamari projectiles at him in true haze-the-nerd fashion. "I thought maybe we should have clamped down on that a little, especially when that green pea almost hit Lute," said assistant coach Jessie Evans.

By Sunday they were loitering in the hotel lobby, ranking the Pac-10 cheerleaders, and that night Terry actually slept in his jersey, socks and sneakers. It's hard to get uptight at the prospect of playing for the collegiate championship when you act like you're still in junior high. "You can't make this larger than life," said Olson. "Keep them cooped up in a hotel room, and they'll come out so tight they can't do anything right."

Their coach has a reputation for being like the principal who sends truants to detention. Instead he spent the weekend reproaching unreconstructed "negativists" who still dwelled on Arizona's various early tournament exits.

But he did so gently. "If I talk about respect, then I become a whiner," Olson said. "All I've tried to do is say, Look at the facts. Over the past 10 years Arizona has the best winning percentage of any team in America." He's right. The Wildcats' .812 mark is the nation's best over that span.

In the March 27, 1952, edition of the Purple and White, the student newspaper at St. Leo's High in Minot, N.Dak., a columnist named Dale Brown chose one Luke Olson, then a forward at Grand Forks Central, as St. Leo's "Best Opponent Player." For the record, that's the same Dale Brown who just retired as coach at LSU, and that was no typo-Lute went by Luke in those days, thanks to a baseball coach who thought he played with a style reminiscent of Luke Easter. Brown, a master of stream-of-consciousness even then, listed Olson's virtues as "rugged rebounder, plenty of scrap and good team man."

If you thought Brown's retirement meant you'd never hear another college-coach-growing-up-in-North Dakota story, you're out of luck. Born on a farm, Olson was five when his father suffered a stroke and died. Lute would help his mother at the café where she worked, and he'd get a free breakfast for filling napkin holders. While this isn't quite as hardscrabble as Brown's tale of using popcorn boxes from the local movie house to cover the holes in the soles of his shoes, "it wasn't," Olson says, "a silver spoon existence." After his team beat North Carolina, Olson found himself at the wheel of a vehicle that bespeaks prosperity, a golf cart. He was driving Simon, Bibby and Dickerson through the catacombs of the RCA Dome to the postgame press conference when he turned to Simon in the backseat and asked, "Do you feel safe, Miles?"

"What have I got to fear?" Simon replied.

Olson, locks finally shielded from tousling hands, and his young team capped off a miraculous March.    (John W. McDonough)

Well, there was the Kentucky press. It had so frustrated Minnesota in Saturday's other semifinal-a 78-69 Kentucky victory-that the Gophers coughed the ball up on their first four possessions and reached their goal of turnovers for the game, 15, by halftime. But Arizona's profile is much like that of the three teams that beat Kentucky this season-Clemson, Mississippi and South Carolina. None has an All-America, and all are amply deep, balanced and quick.

Pitino knew that, and thus he hadn't intended to press Arizona. "I looked at the film and knew they would handle the pressure," he would say. "We wanted to make sure of our half-court man-to-man defense." But Kentucky shot so poorly at the game's outset that Pitino decided his Wildcats needed the press to generate some offense, so four minutes into the game he ordered up a full-court trap. From that point on, Arizona turned the ball over only twice while trying to advance it into the forecourt.

Meanwhile Olson's Wildcats showed that they had some defensive tricks of their own. They ran two defenders at any Kentucky perimeter player who had the ball, with Mercer getting particular attention. He could get off only nine shots, and he committed five turnovers. Dickerson, Arizona's leading scorer on the season, ended up shooting 2 for 18 in the two games in Indianapolis, but he was the man most responsible for frustrating Mercer. "I figured if I couldn't hit anything," Dickerson said, "he wasn't going to hit anything, either."

"I've never seen anybody shut down Ron like that," said Kentucky forward Scott Padgett. "They smothered him. It's hard to score if you can't catch the ball." "We've never had a height or weight advantage over anybody," said Bramlett. "But when you have speed and quickness, you can use it to offset other things. And most of our big guys are as quick as other people's guards."

The all-feline final-no lumbering canines allowed-only reinforced the overriding impression of this season. The success of such teams as South Carolina and Colorado, and the struggles of such others as Indiana and Villanova, suggest that speed now trumps size. The Final Four confirmed that notion, as did another result from last weekend: At the McDonald's High School All-America Game in Colorado Springs, the East beat the West 94-81, even though the West suited up six players 6'9" or larger. "They were much taller," said Elton Brand, a 6'9", Duke-bound recruit from Peekskill (N.Y.) High, who led the East squad with 16 points. "But we were faster."

Just as Miami's spate of national titles in college football caused a rush to recruit speed at places like Nebraska and Washington, so are the light feet of the two basketball finalists and other teams built for speed touching off a new wave of thinking-and, surely, recruiting. "The days of the 6'11" or 7-foot slow guys are numbered," says Olson. "Right now the toughest people to contend with are the 6'7", 6'8", 6'9" athletes because they don't restrict what you do defensively or offensively."

Well, some restrictions still applied. After Davison finished the mussing, Olson reflexively patted his hair back into place. Other players took their turns-and just as resolutely Olson donned a national champs cap before matters could get out of hand. But there has been progress. "When I was a freshman, in practice nobody could bounce the ball when coach was talking," says Dickerson, who's now a junior. "Now he doesn't say anything when Mike Bibby is bouncing the ball all over the place."

The possibilities are intriguing: Kevin Costner, making his usual Final Four appearance, showed particular interest in Arizona because lately he has been in Tucson working on a futuristic western that recently put out a casting call for bald cowboys.

Hey, Lute: Interested in being an extra?