By
Keith Carmona
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Wildcats overcame death, suspensions to get to Sweet 16
The world they knew was crashing in on them.
Who they were and what they were supposed to be was in serious doubt.
Basketball was no longer fun. It was a burdensome chore that they were doing because everyone expected them to.
Once enjoying the lofty position of the nation's No. 1 spot, the Arizona basketball team plumetted down to mortality.
Loren Woods, Gene Edgerson and Richard Jefferson were suspended. Bobbi Olson, UA head coach Lute Olson's wife of 47 years, died.
Forget being fun - basketball didn't even seem important anymore to the Wildcats.
"We were supposed to be such an amazing team, and suddenly our world was collapsing," said Edgerson. "Losing the games was one thing, but the tragedy of Mrs. O was awful. It was a horrible time for us."
With their first Sweet 16 berth in three years, the Wildcats' path into the NCAA Tournament's Regional Semifinals has been anything but traditional.
Last October, nearly every sports publication tabbed UA as the favorite to win the National Championship. Two months later, Arizona nearly dropped out of the Top 25. Few felt that the troubled Wildcats had the might to challenge for their own conference title, much less make the Sweet 16.
Over Thanksgiving weekend, a jet-lagged UA team lost to unranked Purdue after flying in from Maui, Hawaii. A week later, they suffered two consecutive losses to Connecticut and Illinois, and in December, they fell to Mississippi State.
Suddenly, the once-exalted Wildcats - who had fantasized of an undefeated season - had three losses before Christmas.
Jefferson was benched for one game after accepting a free airline ticket from Bill Walton, his former-roommate's father. Woods was suspended for eight games to start the season for accepting gifts from a family friend. Worst of all, Bobbi Olson was battling ovarian cancer.
Two weeks into the Pacific 10 Conference season, Edgerson was asked to stay in Tucson while the team traveled to Washington because of a confrontation over playing time with acting head coach Jim Rosborough.
But Arizona reached its lowest point on Dec. 30.
Mere hours before the loss to Mississippi State, Olson told the team that he was relinquishing the head coaching reigns in order to be with his wife, who was suffering from the final stages of ovarian cancer. She died two days later.
"It hurt, it hurt bad," Edgerson said. "She meant so much to this program that when we lost her, we were mourning almost as much as Coach was."
At that point, Arenas knew the rebuilding process had to begin.
Slowly Regaining Strength
"To see the man go down and cry - I think that's what brought us together as a family," Arenas said. "We just all became one."
The plunge from grace was hard and bitter, but even worse was that the Wildcats couldn't find the remedy at first.
First there was the anger. The Arizona practices were brutal. Fights nearly occurred during practices when egos and bodies collided, Arenas said.
"When we knocked each other down, it was more like, 'You stay down there,'" he said. "But we weren't doing it on the court (during the games)."
Finding how to cope with all of it was difficult. But the on-court malaise didn't last because the players knew the violent episodes weren't the answer.
"It didn't really help at the beginning because we were still losing," Arenas said. "We were trying to figure out what was going on, but nobody really had the answer.
"At the beginning, when we were going through struggles, it got us out of the (championship mindset). We knew when we were still good, the coaches had faith in us, the fans had faith in us, so we got our faith and confidence back."
Getting back into championship form took time.
The Wildcats were 7-4 and in utter turmoil.
Not helping matters was Woods's sub-par offensive season that he would lament about after each game, though Arizona players insist that away from the media, Woods was his normal, happy-go-lucky self.
"Even though Loren was struggling, I think he was helping everyone out," Arenas said. "He told us, 'I'd rather have last year's team that this year's team.' He'd rather have last year's because we didn't fight, we just went out and played. We had fun while we were doing it and we are all happy."
The Arizona players can't pinpoint a day in which they noticed a change in the team's spirits, but the players-only meetings were positive group therapy.
"During the down period, we had meetings almost every single night," junior forward Michael Wright said. "We were hanging out with each other, shooting free throws at 9 o'clock at night. And at that point I knew that we could get it back together."
And they did. After the New Year, the Wildcats won seven of their next eight games, their only loss coming to No. 2 Stanford.
"One day in practice, we just came out and everything just gelled," Arenas said.
Dancing Past the Misfortune
From their lowest ranking (No. 21, the week of Jan. 6), the Wildcats have won 17 of their past 19 games and are on a season-high eight game winning streak. The UA starters shook their one-and-done reputation by defeating Eastern Illinois and Butler in Kansas City, Mo. last weekend.
Olson's return to the bench on Jan. 18 against No. 24 UCLA inspired the team, Jefferson said.
"We went through so much at the beginning of the season that we knew that once Coach Olson got back and once everyone got used to playing with each other again, then everything would be fine and everything would be clicking," he said. "And we're clicking perfectly now."
From the first day of practice, every Arizona player has proclaimed that anything shy of a National Championship would make for a disappointing season.
But, here they are. Arriving in San Antonio, the Wildcats have emerged from the season from hell as the favored squad to advance to the Final Four.
Five months and numerous obstacles later, they stand by their proclamation, even though a Sweet 16 berth in the face of their misfortunes is an admirable feat.
Though the 25-7 Wildcats have lost seven games more than they initially wanted, Jefferson scours at the word, "excuse."
"Do we have any excuses? No," he said adamantly. "Even when we were losing - when we lost to Mississippi State and to Stanford - you have not heard an excuse out of this team yet. Everyone else has made excuses for us, but you have not heard it out of our mouths."
This year's team has been tested. And they're still standing.
"(The adversity) helped us a lot," Arenas said. "We went through so much that we can't help but prevail from it."
It has been a long, strange trip, as Deadheads Luke Walton and his dad would say.
