OLSON DOES NO GLOATING AS HE SAVORS TRIUMPH.

Byline: Bill Lyon Philadelphia Inquirer

He could have gloated. He could have turned, vengefully and gleefully, on his old tormentors after all those years of enduring their barbs.

Instead, at the moment of his greatest triumph, Lute Olson remained very much the gentleman. And those who have lashed him ought to hang their heads in shame.

He couldn't even bring himself to enjoy vindication. Asked if this, winning this national collegiate basketball championship, atoned for all the taunts about past tournament flame-outs, he smiled that weary, patrician smile, and said something sad but true about human nature:

``I know I'll go to my grave with some people still talking about some of those losses.''

And then he added: ``I feel bad for them.''

If you are a critic, you will regard that comment as smug and self-serving. If your opinion of Lute Olson has been reversed, you will regard that comment as magnanimous and wonderfully forgiving.

Olson came to that position only after Arizona and Kentucky had played a game for the ages Monday night. It raged into overtime before Arizona finally won, capping off an unprecedented tournament run in which the precocious Wildcats eliminated, one by one, three No. 1 seeds.

Yes, the game was ragged and flawed, but then that is precisely the allure of this sport and this tournament. It's supposed to be raw with emotion and fraught with uneven play - something impossibly heroic one moment, something dunderheadedly stupid the next, both from the same player. These are, after all, children.

We tend to forget that, just as we tend to forget that finishing second at something is hardly the colossal failure we make it out to be.

As near as can be determined, Olson's biggest crime was the Super Bowl Syndrome. That hypothesis says that if you do not win it all, then you are a loser. It is cruel and unjust and insanely unreasonable. It persists, nonetheless.

Olson had brought three previous teams to the Final Four and they had lost right away. He had three other teams, highly regarded and highly ranked, that lost to low-seeded opponents. That qualified as a trend. Olson's reputation was established. The rush to judgment was severe.

Olson was a latter-day Guy V. Lewis, the coach who managed to keep even the wondrous Phi Slamma Jamma of Houston titleless. Or maybe Olson was a modern-day version of Jim Boeheim, the Whiner of Syracuse. Either he overcoached or he couldn't coach. The opinion varied from season to season.

Once you have been assigned a label, the critics then feel comfortable in assigning certain traits to you. These are then repeated as gospel, passed along to readers and listeners, and in this perverted way is some public opinion shaped.

So, if you have a man with silver hair and stylish wardrobe, a man who seems to be so much in control of himself that he must wear some sort of emotional girdle, then you describe him as aloof, with an air of superiority. You say he is distant and dour, cold and withdrawn, much too much the stoic.

The fact might be that the man is from Minnesota and the Dakotas, descended from hardy, self-sufficient stock, a country boy with simple values, a man for whom family is of inestimable importance. Interviewed twice for the Kentucky job, Olson passed, the second time because the thought of Olson and his wife leaving brought tears streaming down the cheeks of their grandchildren. Ah, but there's no vinegar in that.

When Olson took over at Arizona, 14 years ago, the program was a disaster. Of 18 Pac-10 games, Arizona had won one. Those students who did come to home games spread out in the stands and did their homework. The arena was quieter than the library.

Olson won 11 games his first year, which was an improvement of seven, and he lost 17, which was another improvement of seven. Since then, Arizona has been in the NCAA tournament every year.

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Photo

Photo: Arizona coach Lute Olson, after seeing one of his dreams come true, refuses to tee off on his critics.

Associated Press