Lute!: The Seasons of My Life - Softcover

Olson, Lute

Softcover

ISBN 10: 031235942X ISBN 13: 9780312359423

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2007

Synopsis

It was love at first sight . . . One day I picked up a basketball, and it never let me go.

For fifty seasons Lute Olson has been teaching young athletes the skills of basketball---and life. Starting as a high school coach, he worked his way to the top of the basketball world---winning more than a thousand games, a national championship and world championship, producing some of the NBA's biggest stars, and eventually being enshrined in the basketball Hall of Fame.

But Lute is far more than a basketball story. His partner for forty-seven years in building championship programs was his high school sweetheart; his story is also a love story of a couple who together built a sports legend. Lute and Bobbi Olson were a team. Their almost half-century love affair ended with Bobbi's death from cancer. Lute explores how he dealt with her death and how he moved forward to find a new love.

This is the chronicle of one American boy's dream to become a great basketball coach---his achievements, his coaching strategies, and how he dealt with his beloved wife's death---the wins and losses he faced as boy, man, and coach. But always with one constant in his life, the game of basketball. This is the story of fifty seasons in the life of Lute Olson.

Praise for Lute!

"Lute Olson's story is the true American dream. He is a legendary coach who has shared his vision of winning with all his players---now we are given the chance to learn too. It's inspirational and downright heartwarming." ---Jim Nantz, CBS Sports

". . . it is exactly what you would expect from Olson---intelligent, first-class, sprinkled with dry wit---personal in ways you might not anticipate."

---Tucson Citizen

"This is not a basketball book. It is not a book about a coach. It is the most unexpected of all things from the inscrutable Olson: the story of his personal life." ---Arizona Daily Star

About this title

About the Author:

Lute Olson has been a college head coach for the last thirty years. In 2002 he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.

David Fisher has collaborated on more than a dozen New York Times bestsellers.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One 
We lived so many unforgettable days and nights together. On March 27, 1988, at the Kingdome in Seattle, we defeated Dean Smith's North Carolina Tar Heels in the Elite Eight. For the first time, the University of Arizona Wildcats were going to the Final Four. When the buzzer sounded, the kids started celebrating at midcourt. But I stood in front of our bench, looking up into the stands, waiting for Bobbi to make her way down to the floor. This was our victory. I didn't know it at the time, but the network had focused its cameras on us. She finally made it through the cheering crowd and, for an instant, we just looked at each other. We knew what it had taken to get to this moment. I took her in my arms, lifted her off her feet, and kissed her. As millions of people watched, we danced round and round.
 
It would be almost another decade before we would finally win the national championship. This time we beat Rick Pitino's Kentucky squad in Indianapolis. The press conference after the game seemed to go on forever. As I answered question after question after question, Bobbi stood patiently on the side, occasionally leaning against the wall. If I close my eyes, I can still see her standing there. It was after one a.m. when I finally started to stand up, but a reporter asked one last question. I looked at Bobbi and asked her, "Will you wait one more second, dear?"
 
She smiled. "I've waited forty-five years for you," she said. "I'm surely not going to stop now."
 
We were blessed. I really believed we would be together forever.
 
It was love at first sight.
 
Or maybe love at first touch. I don't know how old I was the first time I touched a basketball. Certainly too young to remember, but once I picked it up, I never put it down again. I knew right away what I was supposed to do with it. Nobody had to tell me. That was obvious: throw it up in the air, try to throw it through that hoop. That's it, that's the essence of the game. Shoot the ball through the hoop. I don't know why it captured me so completely, but it was fun, it was a challenge, and it was something I could play by myself or with one friend or with many friends.
 
It's an irresistable game. It's fun to practice and even more fun to play games. Hand a basketball to a five-year-old or a sixty-five-year-old and if there's a basket nearby, they'll do exactly the same thing. They'll take a shot. And then they'll take another shot. It's a simple game. In fact, it's so simple I've spent my entire life trying to figure it out.
 
I don't really know how to explain my passion for basketball. But when I'm out recruiting, walking through the halls of a high school looking for the gym, and all of a sudden from somewhere in the distance I hear that rhythmic spat-spat-spat-spat, it's like a shot of adrenaline for me. I know this is where I should be. This is what I'm looking for. I'm home.
 
I've been a basketball player and a high school and college coach. I've been coaching for half a century. My teams have won more than a thousand games. We've won league championships, a national championship, even a world championship. I've been named Division I College Coach of the Year twice, and many of the players I've coached have had wonderful professional careers. I'm extremely proud to have been elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame. Basketball has been the Olson family business as well as its passion; my five kids grew up with my players, and my late wife, Bobbi, was so very much an equal part of my success that after her death in 2001 the University of Arizona named the home court after both of us: the Lute and Bobbi Olson Court. My grandson played for me at Arizona, and my granddaughter was a great player and is currently a WNBA coach. I've spent more hours of my life than it's possible to calculate, many tens of thousands of hours, teaching and coaching in gyms throughout the world, and after all that, after a lifetime of basketball, I've never lost my passion for the simple act of shooting the ball through the hoop. It is an amazing thing. One day I picked up a basketball and it never let me go.
 
The game of basketball has taken me around the world, several times. It's provided me with an unbelievable range of experiences, from coaches in gorilla costumes to psychics, from real tragedy to great triumphs. It's enabled me to form countless wonderful friendships, and do the one thing I wanted to do more than anything else, be a coach.
 
I learned how to play the game in the small town of Mayville, North Dakota. I also played football and baseball and even threw the discus and the shot put. I enjoyed them all, they were all fun, but mostly what those sports did was keep me occupied until basketball season started. I played basketball every chance I got. When two feet of snow covered the court, I'd sweep it off and start shooting. We'd play outside with gloves on when it was twenty below zero. Playing with gloves got to be easy. Mittens were tough, though.
 
At night my brother Marv and I would play in our bedroom. We made a round basket out of coat hangers and hung it over the door. Our room was on the second floor and we'd close the door, roll up a couple of pairs of socks, and play H-O-R-S-E. We usually got away with it as long as we only took set shots. That was the basic shot of the time; you keep your feet planted on the ground. But as soon as one of us took a jump shot--boom! The whole house shook, and next thing we heard was Mom coming upstairs pretty fast and pretty angry, warning us we'd better stop playing and get to bed.
 
Mayville was a fine place to grow up. The entire population seemed like it was on a first-name basis. My high school class had only forty-three students. But it was the kind of small town where people cared about their neighbors and willingly helped out without needing to be asked. The values I learned in Mayville haven't changed much throughout my life, no matter how far away I've gone.
 
My grandparents were Norwegian. When they immigrated to America they looked for a climate similar to the one they had come from: basically, cold weather and warmhearted people. They found it on the farms near Mayville. We once traced the genealogy of my family on my mother's side all the way back to the year 872. Appropriately, as I'm well known among basketball fans for my seemingly immovable, perfectly groomed full head of gray-white hair, we can trace our lineage to King Harald the Fair-Haired.
 
Norwegians are strong, stoic, hardworking people. We accept life as it comes to us, even when it gets hard, and usually we do it without complaint or great displays of emotion. That's probably an accurate description of my personality. Bobbi and I celebrated our four hundredth win at Arizona by warming up some leftover pizza in the oven. I'm also a product of the American Midwest. I believe the simple things of life are the most important: family, honor, integrity, teamwork, the open man gets the ball, and you win by defending well.
 
If I have a public image, it's that I'm taciturn. It's true that generally I don't show much emotion in public. I don't often yell at my players or officials--I've never once thrown a chair, the best I ever did was a clipboard--and I never curse. People like to joke that I once went on vacation to the Hoover Dang. But believe me, that emotion is there. I get just as excited and angry and tangled up inside as everyone else; the difference is that generally I show it through my facial expression. My wife for forty-seven years, Bobbi, used to say that I really did have a terrible temper; she'd call me a "very stubborn Norwegian." But as anyone who has ever played for me will confirm, I have a way of letting people know when I'm upset. I have a withering stare. Mike Gatens, who played for me at Iowa, once said, "I've never seen anyone get so upset and not curse. But he can say more with a stare than anyone else can with words." I admit it. There are times I just stand there glaring at officials. They feel it, too. I've had officials come over to the sidelines and ask, "Is there something you want to say to me?"
 
Usually I try to respond with a joke, "No, you've made all the right calls, so I was just looking at you so that you'd know I agree with every one of them."
 
Technically, the person who literally has put his body in front of mine numerous times to protect the team from being charged with a technical foul is my longtime assistant coach Jim Rosborough. In major college basketball the assistant's job is to know when the coach is truly upset and get between him and the official.
 
With my players I'm not one of those touchy-feely Jimmy Valvano-type coaches. I liked Jimmy Valvano a lot; he was a good coach and a good person. The difference between the two of us is the difference between Italians and Scandinavians. I don't believe in being a buddy to my players until after they graduate. Then often we become close. I don't know if that is the right way or the wrong way to coach a team, but I really didn't have a choice. I am who I am.
 
I remember that after we'd beaten Missouri in the Elite Eight in 1994 to get into the Final Four, we returned to our arena, the McKale Center, for a celebration. The place was completely packed. Our fans were elated. I asked each of our players to say a few words, then I made some comments. Bobbi told me later that, as I began speaking, one of our players, Joseph Blair, came to her and asked, "Do you think it would be okay if we messed up the coach's hair?" That was a big deal for the kids. My hair has always been a sort of symbol of my demeanor. It's always under control.
 
"Oh, of course it would be," she told him. When Joseph hesitated, she wondered, "What's the matter?"
 
He asked her sort of sheepishly, "Think you could come with us?"
 
I learned at a very young age how quickly life can change completely and forever. My family lived on a small farm outside Mayville. One Sunday morning just before my sixth birthday we were in the yard getting ready to go to church. My father, Albert Olson, had just finished trimming my hair. He brushed the hairs off the back of my neck and began walking toward the house. As he started going down the cellar steps he collapsed and died instantly of a massive stroke. He was forty-seven years old. He was a good, hardworking man. And in an instant he was dead.
 
My older brother, Amos, came home from college to run the farm. One afternoon eight months later, he was out plowing. It was a cold North Dakota day. Once you get a tractor moving in a furrow it'll pretty much stay on course, so my brother hopped out and was walking alongside, probably trying to stay warm. Nobody knows what happened, but somehow he tripped, and the plow blade cut open his leg. He died from gangrene. I never really got the chance to know him. I know he was a talented musician; he played the piano and sang in a quartet that was planning to go to Europe. I remember just staring at his picture in his high school yearbook. Within a year my father and my brother were dead. I have no doubt that if my father or my brother had lived I would have spent my life as a farmer.
 
I had terrible, terrible nightmares for a long time. Funerals have always been very hard for me.
 
I never heard my mother complain. Never. She just accepted tragedy and went on with her life. She did what was necessary. Alinda Olson was her name, and she was a beautiful woman. We sold the farm and moved into town. She worked as a short-order cook in the morning and cleaned rooms at the hotel in the afternoon. My first job was filling the salt and pepper shakers and stocking the soda cases for her at the restaurant. It was a good job for a second-grader.
 
It seems like I was always working somewhere. Hard work was also part of that Midwestern ethic. I've done some strange jobs in my life. By the summer of seventh grade I was flagging for crop dusters. My partner and I would get up at 3:30 in the morning so we could be at the field at sunrise. We'd stand at the corner of a field waving a white flag. That plane would fly right over our head and hit us with the DDT and everything else it was carrying. We didn't think anything about it. We never even wore masks. When the plane completed its first run, we'd pace off a certain number of feet and he'd make another pass. We'd probably do six fields a day.
 
In eighth grade I had a paper route. I know a lot of young people have paper routes, but it's a little tougher in North Dakota, where, at 5:30 in the morning, zero degrees would be considered a heat wave.
 
I spent several summers working on a farm. Cleaning out the barn was bad, but the worst job I ever had was banking grain inside the bins. The grain had been harvested before it was ripe, so it would "heat" inside these bins. I'd go in there first thing in the morning and move the grain so it would air out. The dust and the smell and the heat were just horrible. That was more than sixty years ago and I can still taste it. I was also a corn shocker. After corn had been cut it was wrapped in twine. Those bundles were about six feet tall and weighed as much as fifty pounds. My job was to stand up two of them at the same time and balance them up against each other, then start piling on additional bundles. Trying to hold up one of those suckers while lifting up a second bundle and balancing them was not for the weak or the poorly coordinated.
 
I was an egg checker for a little while. I was actually the overnight guy in a gas station, but it was the place farmers brought their fresh eggs. My job was to look at each egg under a light to make sure there wasn't a little chicken in it. If it didn't have a chicken, it went in the egg container.
 
The most embarrassing job I ever had was dressing dummies. I had a part-time job at a ladies' store called Buttery's in Grand Forks. My primary job was vacuuming the carpet, but I'd also have to change the clothing on the anatomically correct female dummies in the window. That may not sound tough, but just imagine being sixteen years old and standing in the window of a ladies' store on the main street trying to put the clothes on a naked female dummy. Sometimes it made me wish I was shocking corn.
 
So as a coach I never worried much about keeping my job. I did what I thought was right and was willing to live with the consequences. I knew if things got bad, I could always earn a living dressing dummies. Feel free to make your own joke right here.
 
No matter what job I was doing, as soon as I got some free time I would go to a court and shoot baskets. Whatever I was doing, there was never any question in my mind what I intended to do. When I was thirteen years old, my high school social studies class had a unit on occupations. We studied occupations that we thought would be of interest. Even then there was only one thing I wanted to do: I wanted to be a teacher and a basketball coach. And, truthfully, I didn't really want to be a teacher if I couldn't be a coach.
 
That decision became the driving force of my life. I continued my ...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 031235942X
• ISBN 13: 9780312359423
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336