03/17/2021
“Papa Lute”
Feature film.
I will not be the sole-credited screenwriter nor its director. Likely “Story-by” and one of several “Screenplay-by”.
WGA rules; contingent on the acquisition of my screenplay property “Remedial English” by a producer associated with Will Smith. My agent remains in ongoing talks.
I consider myself Coach Lute Olson’s most devout long distance student. I never played a single game for him nor worked a single hour for his teams cleaning up locker rooms nor managing equipment. But I got to thank him for being a hero in my life, and my words fell short of saying that I loved him, as much as any student can love a coach or teacher. He knew.
I never got a chance to call the man whom John Wooden called, “The greatest teacher the game of basketball ever had,” Papa Lute. I wasn’t family, nor would I ever be. But I was determined to tell his story with the zest and imagination through which I saw it as his words and deeds on and off the courts and fields of dreams in his lifetime touched my life, during a time when Tucson was enduring its darkest hour.
And I don’t merely mean the basketball team’s 4-24 record in 1982. I mean drug, human trafficking, the Prime Time Ra**st and other nightmares plagued the city at every turn. We needed Hope. We got it in the form of a TV sport. Larry Smith’s Notre Dame-upsetting football team was still being shown on a 2-hour delay, on a pre-Fox Network locale KZAZ (later Fox 11), with George Borazon as the news anchor. Most of the players who would go onto win multiple national championships in softball hadn’t been born yet. The suburbs were just-getting basic cable TV.
Few people remember with despondent accuracy what Tucson was like before Coach Bobbi Olson agreed to drag her husband Lute, whose heart and commitment to winning the 1983 National Championship for the Iowa Hawkeyes, was distracted by a tearful pleading of Cedric Dempsey to please, please, please come to Tucson and rescue Arizona Basketball. Ben Lindsey was a good high school coach, cut loose after a new athletic director fixed the mistake of the prior AD in hiring him at all, despite his titles at a Grand Canyon College program that was at best, a community college-like program, but Lindsey was not fit to lead at the NCAA’s top-brass levels. Lindsey should not have been hired in the first place. Even Greg Hanson would give that an Amen.
The story takes a turn for the humorous, whereby one can imagine any number of A-list actors reading through this Oscar-caliber character, credited to two Oscar-Nominated writers whose chaperoning of my Story shall determine its credibility as a major studio sports-biography sometime before 2030), each actor learning the mannerisms of a man, who like Jimmy Stewart, reacted in shock and then adulation when he was acknowledged as the new head coach of the Arizona Wildcats.
Wildcat Men’s basketball would have been cheaper to simply reduce to a club sport. Nobody cared.
Most Wildcat fans haven’t read Coach O’s book. And y’know what? Don’t. I want it to be a surprise.
His tremendous humor. He coulda been a humorist for the New Yorker.
Monitoring the middle school locker room for pre-teen smokers.
His personal surrender to God at the University of Colorado-Boulder and self-discovery of his Herb Brooks-like game strategy.
His fascination with the civil rights movement, Jackie Robinson and Fred Snowden sculpting whom he recruited.
Bobbi’s hat.
His battle with stage fright.
The players who almost died under the strangest of circumstances.
Coach Olson’s Immortal Beloved.
The last time I showed my hand at what I had in regards to telling the stories of Arizona Wildcat lore, every half-assed racist writer ever employed or contracted by or through Arizona’s media outlets including the Star and Citizen and its current Dot Coms, plagiarized my work. Morales. Villareal. Rivera. I’ll deal with you later. This is about my trek to tell the story of Papa Lute.
Why?
The Young deserve better than what is afforded them by bitter, envious men and a few controlling women. You know who you are. (Cue clip from Tombstone, “Telling them I’m coming and hell’s coming with me.”) Nothing speaks louder than a $450M budget of an epic that portrays someone like an as**at. Just ask Art Howe, upon the release of “Moneyball”.
If one reads local news clippings scribed by the writers of the day, they would see Coach Olson as a tyrannical controlling man. He wasn’t, Ben (Hanson).
Sure, Coach Olson didn’t hesitate to talk back to a smarmy reporter, ( your dad, Greg Hanson), and nobody likes seeing the key figure of the program basically tell his dad to shut-up while traveling with the team. Ben Hanson suffers strong traits of narcissism. His dad (Greg) should have spent at least two more seasons in pro baseball before retiring to the sports desk of a local newspaper, where he spent a lifetime cursing out anyone who didn’t live up to his personal expectations. Jocks are cocky? Really?
Do you know where the f**k you are, Greg Hanson?
Over time, Tucson’s most loyal fans recognized the war between commentary and commitment, between coaches trying to guide students and reporters trying to sell stories. Neither side would ever be satisfied. Except on April 1, 1997.
As November 5, 1955 stands out as the day Doctor Emmett Brown invented time travel, April 1 1997 stands out as the first day when the University of Arizona’s Men’s Basketball team became the first TV sports to win a global title in front of the largest TV audience of its time. The 1986 UA Baseball team won, but the TV audience was not enough to register a Neilson rating.
Papa Lute was on Jay Leno’s show a couple nights later. That’s how big a deal it was. People who were there Still talk about it. Anu Who? Everyone knows where they were on March 31, 1997. Arizona 84 - Kentucky 79. OT.
David Letterman’s staff had to quickly rewrite his opening monologue on March 31, 1997, and given the studio audience had their analogue cell phones taken away before waiting in line for the show in New York, they had no idea who won the game. “How about those Wildcats!” Letterman bellowed - twice. The second time, a floor director scrambled to write out the score on a large Audience Sign, “AZ 84 - KY 79” The audience then erupted.
Back in Tucson, the city was rioting. Disney, New Line, Warner Brothers and Paramount all called the AD office and asked for exclusive rights to the Story. UA admins and boosters take the most foolish action - they refused to offer an exclusive and quietly demanded a bigger financial offer. The major studios do share intel and like the NFL draft, smelled the financial ambush overnight. Instead of the UA benefiting from a bidding war, they studios waited for the Wildcats’ story to cool off and then watched the box office results of sports bios taper with Secretariat. As much as Invincible and Miracle were exciting to watch, they were also box office flops. The conversations I had with the former-execs of Mayhem Productions who made all of those films, were humbling. The liked Coach Olson, they liked the Story, they even ‘liked’ me. They couldn’t afford to make it. Not the only door I knocked on, all such doors appeared unprepared to open at that time. Even the CBS Sports video production of the 1997 Final Four mentions Arizona’s victory as an understatement, produces with the presumptions that another team would win. None mentioned the heroics of Jason Lee or Jason Terry or Donnell Harris or Bennett Davison.
In 2016, I befriended Bennett Davison and he told me the behind the scenes story of what happened, how the Cats won it all. They almost didn’t make the trip. He almost played for another team, and so on. (Davison was almost an Oregon Duck.)
I had made a decision in 2010, which I’ve since changed my mind about, to combine the tell of the story of Coach Olson with the story of my dad’s days as a narc cop who led the State’s ware on drugs and human trafficking spanning two decades. Some of you have heard of or read The FAithful. My dad’s workmates were starting to die off and I knew I needed to use social media to travel back in time, so to speak, and gather intel. His police file had been destroyed in 2001, city protocol. I needed living witnesses. Whomever read the novel agrees with me - the cops recalling stories as eye-witnesses to life-saving heroics - those were the best parts.
It was a Dark time in Tucson. Anyone who says it was great here was Using or dealing drugs or sexually assaulting kids.
It was only a paradise for people who thrived abusing other people. My dad made the city safer. His teammates became the foundation for the DEA. His work included a drug bust at my future high school, Santa Rita HS, where the cops-posing-as-students ended the terror of the drug pushers, who sent kids to the school to market by intimidation. When busted, the Story hit the local media, whereby its principal, the late Pat Hale, demanded ideas from her teaching staff to distract from this embarrassing scandal. The result was a march band that looked like a cross between Up With people and Elton John (everyone looked q***r), the on-campus club, class and team, “Shakespeare Touring Company” (15th-century, but not q***r), and what would become the Fox TV series, “21 Jumpstreet”. Producers paying attention to the police scanners took the reports of the arrests to their head writers parked at Michael Landon Studios at Old Tucson and pitched the concept to the mother ship. CBS had hits “Dallas” and “Falcon Crest” and couldn’t be bothered. One young writer recruited a mentor with contracts elsewhere to help him pitch it to a newborn network hungry for edgy programming. That senior writer was Stephen Cannel. My professor at UNLV spent years learning from him. He was fascinated by my dad’s real life hook to this Story because he was there when it was first pitched. CBS said no, Fox said yes. Not the first time.
I plan to play my dad in my retelling of those events, the script titled, “Shakespeare High”.
As for telling the story of Papa Lute, I didn’t approach Coach Olson directly.
I knew I needed a player’s trust. Eddie Smith opened his heart to me, and out poured “Cornerstone”. I was honest and vulnerable toward the Olson Family and they welcomed me, albeit it as a biographer.
Coach Olson knew his words had made it into films like “Hoosiers” and reveled at the idea of Disney making his story into a film. He’d seen Invincible and Miracle and was delighted that someone was pitching it to the same people who made those films. I’ll share what happened next for another time. I want to share a more important story about Coach Olson.
I never got to meet him in person, and a brisk walking by him at an airport doesn’t count. He saw the fan-love in my eyes and he walked by and offered a gentle smile back, clearly suffering from jet lag but always a twinkle of kindness for an adoring fan.
Just after our first of many phone calls, Eddie Smith called me at my home in Colorado and asked how the first chat went. I had to cut the call short, after two hours, to go pick up my son from childcare, I said.
“You Spent Two Hours Talking to Coach O??? About What? I played for him two years and I don’t think I talked to him for a full two hours combined!” I laughed. “Family. Bobbi. His Father Wound.”
Lute Olson showed me a side of him that few people ever saw, maybe including his own kids. In his book he comes out and says it a few times, but I think most fans read it looking for what they think is interesting. Coach Olson story all too often gets reduced to reading the back of a trading card. Stats. Four Finals Fours. Woulda been Five if the refs in Chicago… (2005).
Coach Olson didn’t care about winning. He hated losing. His joy of the job was not in media attention nor the game itself. His joy was fathering boys to men. Kids to adults. In Christianity, we call it the Father Wound. His dad died when he was 10. His brother was killed in an accident a short time thereafter. He then fell in love, with a game invented by some fella in Kansas. Coach O’s sabbath was a ball and a hoop. Sure, when he got older, he also loved wine tastings. But he never really stopped being the kid from North Dakota who fell in love with a basketball.
As a teenager, Bobbi was repulsed by him at first. His every effort to woo her failed. He was hilariously clumsy.
It was his vulnerability that touch her heart. He was a boy who missed his dad.
Steve Kerr (death). Mike Bibby (divorce, not death). Bennett Davison (divorce).
Me. (Cancer, 1991).
Papa Lute was engaged with every kid who needed a parent in pursuit of his own personal healing, a subconscious survival skill to possibly say one last goodbye to a father he barely had enough time with. Sports, coaching, teaching and parenting were all a means to an end.
Papa Lute was like Don Quixote using basketball as his sword to once again find the Rainbow Connection.
The lovers, the dreamers and Lute. (Cue Kermit’s guitar string.)
Three conversations jumped out at me after I read his book. One was by the late Dick Enberg, long before he hosted the CBS Sports desk for March Madness. He gave Coach Olson critical wisdom at the Final Four in 1977. (I can’t wait to film this scene.) “Your life will never be the same again. You’ve proven you can win at this level.”
The next conversation was when a trusted coach and mentor posed a question to Coach Olson over the phone, as he settled into his home office in Iowa City, just returned from a blitz by UA boosters including a young, ambitious Jim Click Jr.
Coach Olson somewhat opposed to accepting the offer from Cedric Dempsey to take over Arizona. “Ask yourself if you will look back on this moment and wonder, what if?”
The Stebbens were the voices of sanity and reason in the life of Lute & Bobbi, neither really ever prepare for the limelight. After Bobbi died, they moved from Tucson. I vowed to get in touch with them for Fact-Check once the movie was sold to a distributor. (Not yet.)
Coach Olson’s next call was to Illinois Sports Hall of Fame Coach Jim Rosborough. He asked him, “We could repeat as national champions at Iowa for the rest of the decade…you wanna do it again…if I say yes, you wanna come with me?”
I can almost hear James Horner’s musical score under the scene. Coach Rosborough stayed and laid the foundation alongside his longtime coaching partner. He took over the Northern Illinois job for a few seasons and rebuilt their program en route Division I status and a March Madness birth. He left there shortly after that and rejoined Coach Olson. There were so many other coaching heroes whose contributions led to key wins and titles for Arizona, but the dynamic duo were unrivaled in sports - not just college sports - in any sport. Olson and Rosborough.
Papa Lute almost left Arizona several times. Like flirts of nuclear war during the 1980s, the general public will really never know how close we came…to losing Lute Olson to USC or other schools. Remember, Coach Olson’s kids were raised in LA rooting for the Trojans during the OJ Simpson years. He helmed his craft at Los Angeles City College, long before he was hired at Long Beach State. Except that their dad and grandpa was the head coach at Arizona, the entire Olson family were USC Trojan fans - with a few Bruin and other fans scattered in.
But, Dr. Sam Beckett was successful in his Quantum Leap to keep Papa Lute in Tucson just one more season, no matter how many idiot fans wrote on Starnet’s web site, name-calling for him to retire or referring to Jim Livengood as Jim Livenbad…it’s my understanding that most of those fans have died or left the city. Today’s generation has no idea who Lute and Bobbi Olson were except for some blandly-edited clips that once ran for packed, if not Opera-like audiences at McKale Center.
In 1989, David Fitzsimmons drew a cartoon of Coach Olson’s contract renewal, “Is this how much it costs for a living god?” Today a statue of Coach Olson stands in front of McKale Center. The answer, Dave As***le, is yes, and it was a bargain. Just ask Louisville how much Rick Pitino cost to deliver its title. Papa Lute won clean.
In 2001-02-ish, I was making a delivery at UCLA and wound up in the athletic director’s office. To my astonishment, a tall aged man was in one of the offices. Minding my own business, a staffer asked me if I knew who that was. I bent my head to see the person’s face, and he peeked his own face out of the doorway just-enough.
It was Coach John Wooden.
I immediately smiled and nodded. I couldn’t control my words as they poured out of my mouth. “You taught the greatest teacher the game of basketball ever had.” He echoed my words back to me, the staffer just a mental beat behind, suddenly fixated on the enthusiasm and adoration that poured outta my voice.
“And who’s that?” he asked, smiling and curious of whom I was referring to.
“Lute Olson,” I said. “I’ve never met him. I grew up there…Tucson.”
“Lute? Oooooooooh yes!” Coach Wooden echoed back, “He is the greatest teacher the game of basketball ever had.” This time stepping up out of a chair made for shorter people - he was much taller than I expected, to look me in the eye and smile at me.
I think I managed to mutter that it was my lifelong dream to make his story into a movie, but before I could say much else, the staffer signed off my delivery and I was a step away from the exit.
The staffer handed me my paperwork and I looked back at Coach Wooden, and said, “Thank you, coach, for everything. You helped a make a maker of men.” I don’t remember if I got those words out just like that, but I am going to tell this story that way anyway.
And thus my quote, “Lute Olson was the greatest teacher the game of basketball ever had.” - John Wooden
As God as my witness.
And now he’s in heaven his Father Wound reconciled, together again with his earthly dad and his heavenly father - and Bobbi - forever.
My dad’s motion picture bio will be called, “PeAce Man”.
Coach Olson’s will be developed as a feature film titled, “PApa Lute”.
Bennett Davison’s memoir account of the 1997 national championship run will be called, “Power ForwArd”. Bennett played 12 seasons of professional basketball and his story in Italy was more entertaining than the events of March 1997.
I will not be the sole screenwriting credit, nor directing. A-list names will be announced in time.
The acquisition of “Remedial English” by Will Smith’s producing team will accelerate this.
I also thanked Coach Jim Rosborough for inspiring me to secure multiple teaching licenses, discovering the joys of the learning curve he and Papa Lute used to write the story of Arizona basketball in the permanent ink of southwestern history.
Let the young feast.
