Dave Silver arrived in Tucson at the start of the Lute Olson era and left sports broadcasting at KGUN-TV Channel 9 toward the end of the Mike Stoops years.
Save for the miserable John Mackovic years in football and the two years of interim staffs during the Olson leave-of-absence saga near his retirement, those were some golden times at Arizona for Silver to experience.
In between 1983 and 2011, Silver — who is enshrined in the Pima County Sports Hall of Fame — covered four Final Fours and a national title under Olson. He was a TV analyst for Arizona football games during “The Streak” against ASU, including the 1986 game that included Chuck Cecil’s 100-yard interception return for the touchdown.
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All eight of Mike Candrea’s national titles occurred during Silver’s time with Channel 9, including many in which he reported from Oklahoma City.
When Jerry Kindall coached the Wildcats to the 1986 College World Series title, Silver was there on the field when the team celebrated.
Silver, 62, has a background of being at San Diego State as a student at the same time legendary athletic director Cedric Dempsey was briefly the athletic director for the Aztecs. It’s fitting that Silver came to Tucson to report on some of the coaching titans Dempsey hired at Arizona — Olson, Candrea, Frank Busch, Dick Tomey, Dave Rubio and Joan Bonvicini.
Silver left sports broadcasting in 2011 to be part of the Regional Development team at the University of Arizona Foundation. In January 2019, he switched his fund-raising efforts to attract donors as the director of the development team for Arizona’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
When that switch from broadcasting to Arizona employee occurred, he became a full-fledged Wildcat fan.
Silver was a guest of our All Sports Tucson Old School Wildcat Talk. Here is the video:
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ALLSPORTSTUCSON.com publisher, writer and editor Javier Morales is a former Arizona Press Club award winner. He is a former Arizona Daily Star beat reporter for the Arizona basketball team, including when the Wildcats won the 1996-97 NCAA title. He has also written articles for CollegeAD.com, Bleacher Report, Lindy’s Sports, TucsonCitizen.com, The Arizona Republic, Sporting News and Baseball America, among many other publications. He has also authored the book “The Highest Form of Living”, which is available at Amazon.
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