After turning down Kentucky, Olson quickly built the Wildcats into an unlikely national force.

In December 1987, a time when newspapers still had silly money and serious ambition, I was dispatched by The (Louisville) Courier-Journal to Tucson for a story on Arizona basketball, a blooming phenomenon far off the beaten path of college hoops. At the time Kentucky was ranked No. 1 in the nation, nothing shocking there. Arizona was ranked No. 2, which was unprecedented.

The coach, Lute Olson, had surprisingly withdrawn from the Kentucky job search a couple of years earlier, and the blueblood hired Eddie Sutton instead. (That didn’t end well.) Our managing editor, a huge Kentucky fan, wanted to know how all of this was possible—how could anyone turn down Kentucky to stay at Arizona, and how could Arizona become this good?

At more established basketball programs, a kid newspaper reporter from Kentucky might get some cursory courtesy access—a