False Article on Olson Derails Editor’s Career and May Alter Coach’s

You wouldn’t want to be anywhere near this town next week should basketball coach/hero/savior Lute Olson decide to leave the University of Arizona to take the head coaching job at Kentucky.

The people of Tucson are steamed, and it isn’t because their beloved coach would think of abandoning a program he turned around after just two years.

They’re angry because Olson is seeking employment elsewhere, he says, owing to a damaging article that appeared in the Arizona Daily Star last Wednesday.

The copyrighted story, featured prominently on the front page of the paper, claimed that Arizona had purchased uniforms for its basketball team from a company that had hired Olson as a consultant.

If true, it would have constituted a conflict of interest.

But it wasn’t true. The Daily Star ran a front-page retraction the following day that absolved Olson of guilt. It reported that the company for which he was an adviser did not own the uniform manufacturer when the purchase was made in September of 1983.

Daily Star Managing Editor Jonathan I. Kamman called the error “grievous and deplorable.”

Writer Rich Dymond and sports editor Sam Pollak resigned rather than accept demotions to lesser positions.

But that was hardly the end of it.

Olson, who had said last Tuesday that he wasn’t a candidate for the vacant Kentucky job, changed his mind the next day, he says, because of the article.

“Given the circumstances of the day,” Olson told the city’s other daily paper, the Tucson Citizen, “I think there’s a definite need for me to be available for talks with Kentucky. . . . When people can come out with a flat-out character assassination with fabrications through and through, then I owe it to my family to look at what other people have to say.”

Olson, as is the case with many successful college-town coaches, is treated like royalty in Tucson. He took over a team that had gone 4-24 in 1982-83 and coached it to an 11-17 record the following season. This season, Arizona was 21-10.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that the Daily Star story touched off a rage throughout the city. There were several bomb threats at the paper last week, not to mention hundreds of angry calls. Some Arizona fans picketed in front of the Daily Star in protest, holding up signs such as: “Send the Star, Not Lute, to Lexington,” and “Cancel Your Subscription.”

There are rumors that businesses in the community are thinking of pulling their advertising out of the paper in protest.

“This has been the most difficult week I’ve ever been through,” said the Daily Star’s assistant executive editor, Steve Auslander. “Morale is very low.”

Auslander also said that he didn’t think Olson used the story as the perfect reason to leave for Kentucky.

“I have to believe what he said,” Auslander said. “I think he has great integrity.”

Wednesday, March 27, was a dark day for the Arizona Daily Star.

The two Tucson papers, the Daily Star and the Citizen, operate out of the same building, though most everyone will tell you their philosophies are different.

In a town where local television newscasters refer to the University of Arizona as “we” and “us,” the Daily Star has long been considered an adversary of the university by boosters and fans.

“I don’t think they (the Daily Star) were out to try and get Lute,” said Jim Sakrison, president of the 3,000-strong Wildcat Booster Club. “But it seems their philosophy is that if they can find something negative, they’ll print it. . . . The Citizen is much more responsible. I think they are more objective. Maybe I’m biased.”

The Citizen is where you’ll find headlines such as “Courageous Comeback Falls Short” in describing an Arizona game.

It hasn’t made journalism easy for those at the Daily Star. The University of Arizona consumes much of the daily sports pages, and rightfully so. The city of Tucson has a population of 367,280. Thirty-thousand students attend the university.

“We never saw ourselves as adversaries of the university,” said Pollak, who in May would have celebrated his fifth year as sports editor of the Daily Star. “But if something was there, we did it.”

In 1981, Daily Star writers Bob Lowe and Clark Hallas won the Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles exposing irregularities in the football program at Arizona.

This year, it was the Daily Star that wrote a story about a freshman basketball player who had quit the team. It was also the Star that wrote a story asking why there were no black players on the baseball team.

In the recent listing of Associated Press Sports Editors’ awards, the Daily Star placed among the top 10 Sunday sections for papers with a circulation of 150,000 or less (the Star is at 75,000).

But the Daily Star has long had the image of wearing the black hat in this community.

“I don’t think they deserve the bad-guy image,” said Dale Walters, managing editor of the rival Citizen. “They get it partly for stories like this and partly because boosters think there should only be positive stories.”

The problem with doing hard-hitting stories in a town where the focus is narrow and coaches are almost gods occurs when a mistake is made, especially one of this magnitude.

Auslander is hoping the community will someday be able to forget last week’s article on Olson.

“I think that most people understand that we make mistakes,” Auslander said. “We lost no time in saying we were wrong. We talked to Olson about it. . . . We’re not trying to run anything into the ground. This is our home; we don’t want to see things like this happen. The simple fact is we screwed up.”

Sam Pollak has a wife and three daughters. And now he’s out of work. He started at the Daily Star in 1980. He worked at the Dallas Times Herald before that. Pollak didn’t write the story that eventually cost him his job.

“As sports editor, though, I have to take responsibility,” he said. “It wasn’t my mistake, but my mistake was not asking the right question.”

It seemed like a great story when a disgruntled uniform salesman called the paper and told Pollak how MacGregor Sporting Goods, which pays Olson $3,000 a year to serve on its advisory board, owned Medalist Industries, the company that provided the Arizona basketball team with its uniforms.

Pollak assigned Dymond to the story.

But had Pollak asked when MacGregor actually purchased Medalist Industries, he would have discovered that it wasn’t until April 1, 1984. The team purchased the uniforms in 1983.

Pollak and Auslander admit that the Daily Star rushed the story and should have examined it more closely, especially because it implicated the popular Olson.

“Is that (one mistake) worth five years of a good sports section?” Pollak asked. “That’s not for me to decide. . . . This is a college town, and Olson is immensely popular. The Star felt it had to do something. That decision was not made by me. The shame of it is that we have a terrific sports section.”

Pollak and Dymond were asked to take lesser positions at the paper and to take salary cuts.

Pollak said there was never a question what he would do. He resigned.

He said he and his family will head back to the East Coast, where he hopes to find a job.

The most difficult part might just be getting out of town.

Said Pollak: “As soon as I see them boiling the tar and plucking the chickens, I’m going to get out of here.”