They Won’t Say No to Title

This is the party Arizona and Stanford didn’t want to attend.

Will they still display their winning personalities once they’re here?

“I know as far as we’re concerned, we’re certainly going to try to win whatever games we’re in,” Arizona Coach Lute Olson said. The Pacific 10 Conference men’s basketball tournament will be reborn Thursday at Staples Center, 12 years after its original four-year run from 1987-90.

The dissenting votes in an 8-2 decision two years ago when the tournament was reinstituted for a six-year run in Los Angeles were Arizona and Stanford, longtime opponents of the tournament.

Now it’s time to play ball in a tournament that could mean as much as $300,000 for each school under a lucrative television deal.

Plagued by poor attendance when it was held in Los Angeles at Pauley Pavilion and the Forum in 1987 and ‘89, the tournament is expected to do much better at Staples, with fewer than 1,000 tickets remaining--and none in the lower bowl, a conference spokesman said.

Stanford Coach Mike Montgomery said his team is ready.

“There’s no question, you don’t go into it with any other thought but to try to win it, because that’s what we all do,” he said.

The record says Arizona and Stanford put their objections aside come tournament time: Arizona won three of the previous four Pac-10 tournaments and was 9-1 during that time.

Stanford reached the 1989 Pac-10 final and was 4-4 over the four years, third behind UCLA’s 6-3 record, which included the 1987 title.

“I really have two objections to it,” Olson said. “That is, we’ve been beating one another over the head here for 18 games. It makes no sense to me to play--for whoever goes to the finals--three additional games.

“I’m concerned about teams that go to the finals in this conference tournament and how much that’s going to take out of them headed to the NCAA.

“But the worst part of it is from an academic standpoint. I detest having our players have to miss three days of school at a very critical time when they’re dealing with midterms.”

Montgomery shares Olson’s views, but they were in the minority.

The final result is that the Ivy League is now the only Division I basketball conference that doesn’t play a tournament.

“I think some people were uncomfortable being compared to the Ivy League,” Montgomery said.

“At Stanford, we weren’t.”