Will the Real Lute Olson Please Stand Up?

It was Lute-lite, complete with wry asides, flippant comments about his players and, for once, slightly more charisma than a mannequin wearing a thick, white wig.

The freewheeling Lute Olson debuted Sunday, and if you needed a sign that the upstart Arizona Wildcats were having the times of their lives anticipating tonight’s national championship game against Kentucky, well, Olson’s microphone-hogging performance was it.

“Images--that’s all in somebody else’s mind,” the Arizona coach said, explaining the departure from his well-known perception as a bit of a bore. “If you ask the people that know me, it’s not the stoic thing.

“I guess I should come out and look like [Arizona State Coach] Bill Frieder with my hair messed up and tie loosened, and then probably I’d be a good old boy.”

Instead, Olson savored his first trip to the title game by teasingly suggesting that big men Bennett Davison and A.J. Bramlett would handle the ball-handling duties against Kentucky’s pressure defense; by repeatedly and facetiously urging his players to “be serious, please” during the interview session; by zinging Davison for a rambling answer and by zapping Davison again for his foul trouble Saturday against North Carolina.

“See, Bennett’s smarter than most people,” Olson said. “He wanted to make sure he had really good, fresh legs for tomorrow night. . . . When did you bail out on us, about a minute into the second half?”

Laughter, of course, ensued, which is something the Wildcat players acknowledged was not something they usually experience around Olson.

“If we win, he might not know what to do with himself tomorrow,” junior Miles Simon said. “He was so ecstatic last night after we won, and today you saw he was loose.

“But I’m sure when practice time comes around, the game face will be back on.”

Olson was not all sweetness and light, especially when Arizona’s much-publicized string of first-round tournament losses was brought up, or when he was asked if he would consider his coaching career less than successful if he never won a national title.

“Absolutely not,” Olson said. “Take a look at how many people have won an NCAA title. Take a look at how many of those who have won it [are] in states other than talent-rich areas.

“I feel blessed that we’ve had teams here four times [once with Iowa, three times with Arizona]. I’d love to win the championship. Would it make any difference to me in terms of how I look at my coaching career and how I look at the young people that we’ve worked with? Absolutely not.

“It’s amazing. There are 32 first-round losers, so the players probably have felt pressure from that. They’re going to hear it until they put me in my grave, but it’ll probably happen beyond that too.”

While Olson entertained, his starters tossed paper wads at each other, chuckled at private jokes, rolled their eyes at his answers and generally looked like a team playing on youthful spirit, free of expectation and full of giant-killing.

“I was telling my roommate that if we had beaten UCLA this year, we could have beaten them, Kentucky, Kansas and North Carolina--the top four programs in the nation in one season,” Simon said.

Does it seem strange to be one victory from a national title after having been swept by Pacific 10 rival UCLA?

“It’s not bizarre, because I think we should have won both those games,” Simon said. “We didn’t. But those losses never changed our goals or changed how far we knew we could go.”