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Former Arizona basketball manager Todd Walsh, now of Fox Sports Arizona, brought two Wildcat immortals together this week for the network’s Cactus League Weekly Show.
In the above clip, Chip Hale of the 1986 NCAA baseball title team and Steve Kerr of Arizona’s first Final Four team in 1988, discuss their friendship on campus particularly at McKale Center where all the athletes convened at that time.
No Richard Jefferson Gymnasium or Lowell-Stevens Facility existed back then. The baseball team practiced and played across the street from McKale at Sancet Field.
As Walsh points out in his piece, McKale was a mecca for everybody involved with the Wildcats in that generation, including the media, to congregate.
Walsh writes that athletes from different sports and the media from then, including Dan Hicks, Kevin McCabe and Brad Steinke, would engage in shooting the basketball before or after hoops practice.
As a manager, it was Walsh’s responsibility to make sure the court was cleared where the McKale seats were moved back for additional rims, before Lute Olson appeared for the start of practice.
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Site founder and award-winning sports journalist Javier Morales has published his first e-book, “The Highest Form of Living”, a fiction piece about a young man who overcomes a troubled upbringing without his lost father and wayward mother through basketball and hope. His hope is realized through the sport he loves. Basketball enables him to get past his fears. His experience on the court indirectly brings him closer to his parents in a unique, heartfelt way. Please order it at Amazon (for only $4.99) by clicking on the photo:
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McKale had a certain ambiance in the 1980s when Lute Olson was building Arizona into a power (Fox Sports video screen shot)
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“Trust me when I tell you that you learn the art of negotiation in a hurry when you are trying to ask Chuck Cecil for the basketball back so he can get to his football practice and you can help start your own practice,” Walsh writes.
Kerr and Hale together was a reminder of Arizona’s imprint on professional sports today. The school is one of only 10 institutions with multiple alumni as head coach of a major professional football, baseball or basketball team in the United States.
Terry Francona, manager of the Cleveland Indians, gives the Wildcats three alumni coaching or managing a pro team. That ties Minnesota and is one behind leader California.
The following are lists of the schools with the most professional coaches/managers and then a listing of every school:
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TOTAL LIST OF SCHOOLS WITH ALUMS COACHING/MANAGING NFL, NBA OR MLB TEAMS
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ALLSPORTSTUCSON.com publisher, writer and editor Javier Morales is a former Arizona Press Club award winner. He has also written articles for Bleacher Report and Lindy’s College Sports.
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