Giving Props to an Amazing Arizona Basketball Team

by Ernie McCray

Oh, how about those Wildcats,
the way they get after it,
winning both the
Pac-12 regular season
and the Pac-12 Tournament
basketball championships
looking, to me, better
than any Arizona team I’ve ever seen
and I’ve watched Wildcat teams
going back to the 40’s and 50’s,
the old “Bear Down Gym” days,
the days
of Roger and Leo Johnson
and Linc Richmond, et al,
members of teams
that could really ball,
then my era came along
at the end of the 50’s
and Arizona basketball
kind of began
to crumble and fall,
behind the times,
dying on the vine,
struggling to rise above mediocrity
throughout the 60’s
and then Fred Snowden,
an African American coach referred to as
“The Fox,”
arrived on the campus
and pulled up his socks
and got Arizona basketball
up on its feet again,
making the program rock
with a bit of swag
and a whole lot
of “red and blue” pride
that Lute Olson later
glommed on to
and managed to ride all the way
to the 1997 championship of the NCAA,
and years later
along comes Sean Miller
bringing a new chapter
to the school’s winning ways,
leading teams
to conference and tournament titles
before the school and him
parted ways,
leaving, in his wake,
a team ready to do whatever
it needed to do
to make its mark in the school’s history too
and Tommy Lloyd,
the new coach with a winner’s attitude,
has had them scratching and crawling
and shaking-and-baking
and winning
in a fashion
that’s a sheer delight.

And now they’re a number one seed
at the big dance
with as good a chance
as any team
to live out a college basketball team’s
big dream
of coming out on top
at the end of March Madness.

However, no matter how it all turns out
this Arizona team and this season
has been a beautiful sight
to this old Wildcat’s eyes.

But, hey, winning it all
would be awfully nice.