T his is the best time of the year and it doesn’t take a weatherman or wizard to explain why.

It’s simple.

Any time baseball is in the spotlight, that’s the best time of the year.

Even those graybeards who don’t really care for the post- season tournament in Major League Baseball – in which eight teams qualify for a run at the world championship rather than two pennant winners – are thrilled that hum-babes still dominate the sports pages and television in the fall.

So what, if a wild-card trumps an ace? A ballclub doesn’t have to finish the regular season with the best record in its league to qualify for the tournament.

That changes baseball, which is nothing more than custom wrapped tightly in tradition, held together by stitches of folklore.

But at the finish, it still comes down to two teams in the World Series. That’s what counts and the marketing and advertising geniuses haven’t found a way around it, yet.

The new look owes everything to the old gleam.

The playoffs changed the postseason but didn’t ruin the national pastime.

Whatever it is, it’s still baseball. It’s our game.

As Thomas Wolfe saw it, “The scene is instant, whole and wonderful. In its beauty and design that vision of the soaring stands, the pattern of 40,000 empetalled faces, the velvet and unalterable geometry of the playing field and the small lean figures of the players. . . .”

In his 1983 “Sports Illustrated Baseball” book, Jerry Kindall, the much-loved retired University of Arizona coach, recalled his introduction to the game, thanks to his father, an excellent athlete himself.

“I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota,” Jerry wrote, “and when time and money allowed, Dad would take my brothers, the neighborhood kids and me to Lexington Park to watch the St. Paul Saints, a Triple-A farm club of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

“It is easy to remember the warm sun on the wooden left-field bleachers, the scramble for foul balls, the visits through the fence with the visiting team bullpen batteries, the pride I felt when the Saints won and Roy Campanella, Duke Snider, Don Zimmer and Clem Labine did well.”

Joe Garagiola, in his 1988 “It’s Anybody’s Ballgame,” plunked a note on the heartstrings familiar to us all.

“We put black tape around our first real baseball,” Joe wrote. “I remember you couldn’t play with it on the street or you’d wear it out. With our first good baseball, we just played catch – and we had to be on the grass when we did it . . . some nights that baseball even had a bed to sleep in.”

In his 1984 masterpiece “The Golden People,” Paul Gallico described a typical Babe Ruth home run:

“When the famous, dry ‘click’ was heard as the white ball arched and fielders stood with their hands helplessly placed upon their hips, their heads turned for a last farewell glimpse of the departing sphere, the great roar that exploded from the stands was for the Babe, but the salute was to the unconquerable, unquenchable us.”

Mr. Gallico hit a grand-slam homer with that line. That’s precisely what baseball, the greatest game of all, is about . . .

The unconquerable, unquenchable us.

Though Corky Simpson retired from the Citizen in December, he writes a weekly column.

Tyson

An acquaintance of Mike Tyson once told me the boxer “has no mind – there’s a rattlesnake coiled up inside his head.”

That head, the rattlesnake and the rest of Iron Mike should be put away for good and watched after, for his sake and for the safety of the public.

The former heavyweight champ will appear in a Phoenix court Nov. 19 and could face four years in prison for drunken driving and cocaine possession. He pleaded guilty to the charges Monday.

This guy will never learn.

If he’s not doing prison time on a rape conviction, he’s belting a parking lot attendant outside a nightclub, or hauled into court where a woman is awarded $100 by a civil jury in an incident in which Tyson allegedly grabbed her breasts.

If he’s not threatening to drink an opponent’s blood, he’s biting Evander Holyfield twice – once on each ear – and is suspended, his boxing license revoked.

Fifteen years ago, his prison sentence on the rape conviction was extended by 15 days when he threatened a guard.

Tyson has blown the $300 million or so that he’s won in the boxing ring and most of his shady coterie has deserted him. But he has a friend in The Associated Press news service, who can scarcely stand the thought of Tyson wearing pink underwear “and working on a chain gang” under Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

“I’ve really got to wonder what is to gain” by such punishment, wrote the AP’s sports columnist, Tim Dahlberg. He frets about Tyson spending time in “a tent prison run by a sheriff who likes nothing better than to get his name in the newspaper and his face on TV.”

Dahlberg finds it “laughable” that the prosecution suggests Tyson be put away to protect the public.

“A more proper sentence,” says the AP writer, “would be probation, with a mandatory prison term should he test positive for drugs and alcohol or break any laws.”

This is part of the problem. Tyson has been given the benefit of the doubt – and reduced sentences – too many times in the past. Any ordinary thug would have been locked up long ago for the rest of his life.

But the AP snivels that Iron Mike, as “a recovering addict living quietly in a rehab center,” is no danger to anyone. “He’s been clean and sober for eight months,” writes Dahlberg, “and if you believe his attorney, he’s committed to staying that way.”

Obviously Dahlberg does believe Tyson’s attorney.

On the other hand, if Mike is picked up on a DUI charge, with cocaine in his possession, he is a danger to anyone who might be on the same street.

Show me a fighter, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I’ll write you a tragedy. The fight game is filled with people desperate to climb out of poverty and a hellish existence. It always has been that way and always will be.

But most fighters and ex-fighters don’t go around assaulting women, beating up parking lot attendants and biting people’s ears off. Mike Tyson has gotten off too easy too many times in his troubled life.

He had an opportunity few of us ever have, to use his wealth in helping others – disadvantaged ghetto kids like himself, for example, and he blew it. In the words of Simon and Garfunkel, he squandered his resistance for a pocket full of mumbles and now “he carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down, or cut him till he cried out in his anger and his shame.”

Tyson needs to be put away in a safe place – even if it means wearing pink underwear and living in one of Sheriff Joe’s tents – as long as that rattlesnake is coiled up inside his head.

Retired columnist Corky Simpson writes every Saturday for the Citizen.

Larry Smith still can’t watch a football game without X’s and O’s flying around in his head.

He coached his final game seven seasons ago and yeah, he misses it.

From Sept. 20, 1980, through Dec. 27, 1986, Smith coached 74 games at the University of Arizona. He won 48 of them, lost 23 and tied three.

He took the Wildcats to two bowl games but it would have been five or six, had the school not been under investigation and eventual NCAA probation for rules broken under the previous coaching staff.

Nine days ago, Smitty turned 68. He and his wife, Cheryl, both retired and living in Tucson, just returned from Ohio where Larry attended the 50th reunion of his graduating class at Van Wert High School.

Just in case some athletic director in need of a first-rate head coach calls him,Smith picked up a few pointers while sitting in the bleachers watching the Van Wert Cougars defeat Celina, Ohio, 34-13.

“My high school still plays in the same stadium where I played,” he said. “They tore down the school and built a new one on the edge of town, but they play on the same football field. They have a new coach and he lines ‘em up in a wing-T. . . then he switches to a full-house, wishbone set . . . he mixes it up and does a great job.”

Sure, Smitty misses it. Especially this time of the year.

“You miss the preparation and the games,” he said. “You miss the weekends – Fridays before the game, then game day and then Sundays, when you break down the tape.

“But most of all, you miss the kids. Just being around them every day makes you feel good. You know, you bring ‘em in and they’re so young, just puppies. Then you watch them grow.

“You see them get a little more serious about things when they’re sophomores. Then in their third and fourth years, you see them grow into young men. It’s like someone turns a light on in their head. That’s priceless, to a coach, watching the maturity process. People – fans – don’t see that part.”

The worst part, losing games, is something the fans do see. And along with the media, Smith says fans have become a lot more impatient.

“There was a time when, if you ran a clean program, stayed competitive and did a good job out in the community, people were behind you,” Smith said. “Job security wasn’t based so much on winning and losing as much as character and involvement. Now, because of big salaries and long-term contracts, it comes down to one thing:

“Winning.”

In his seven years at UA, Smith never had more than a one-year contract.

“It bothered me because even if you deserved a little security, there was none,” he said. “But that was state law back then. It has changed now.”

Smith came to Tucson in 1973 as defensive coordinator under coach Jim Young. Smith moved to Tulane as head coach in 1976, where he turned around a woeful program and took the Green Wave to the Liberty Bowl.

He returned to Arizona as head coach in 1980. After taking the Wildcats to the Aloha Bowl in 1986 (they beat North Carolina, 30-21), Smith became head coach at Southern California. He won three Pacific-10 Conference championships at USC and had a 44-25-3 record.

He coached at Missouri from 1994-2000, taking the Tigers to the Holiday Bowl in 1997.

“USC was glitter and glamour, big games, great players and just a lot of fun,” Smith said. “Tulane was my first opportunity as a head coach. Missouri was an outstanding school with a lot of great fans.

“But UA was our dream job. And I’ll tell you what, the kids we had here worked harder and fought harder on that football field than any place I’ve been.”

Smith is engaged in a battle with leukemia. He said he “keeps it under control, although it’s the kind that’s never completely in remission.”

Corby and Ali, the Smith children, live in the Phoenix area.

“Corby is with a medical supply company,” Smith said. “He sells medical apparatus used in surgeries.”

Before he was hired, Corby was interviewed by Jeff Van Raaphorst and Nathan La Duke – two former Arizona State football players.

Corby and his wife, Jamie, have three boys, 8, 6 and 4. Ali, the Smith’s daughter, is a single mom with three children, a daughter, 8, and sons 4 and 2.

Smitty enjoys his job as analyst with Fox Sports television. But he said, “I’m probably more analytical than I need to be and I don’t provide enough color.”

The surge and thunder of the sport, the excitement and being around the players are stuff Smitty misses.

“But coaching has become such a ’24-7-365′ situation,” he said, “the pressure to win is so great and the fans and media so demanding, it really takes a toll on the coach today.”

And Smith, one of the most popular coaches in Arizona history, is content to be an “ex-X’s and O’s” guy, whose remembered joys are never really in the past.

Corky Simpson retired from the Citizen in December. He writes a column every Saturday

Walk your way past young people in flip-flops and cutoffs to a secluded nook on the third floor of the University of Arizona main library, and – whoosh! – you can travel back in time to the early days of football.

On a shelf unexceptional and anonymous there are bound volumes of “Spalding’s Official Football Guide.” It begins with the years 1911-1914 and inside the front cover, as a mark of ownership, is the signature of J.F. McKale, the Knute Rockne of Arizona athletics.

Pop served as football and baseball coach and then as director of athletics at UA from 1914 until 1957. He died June 1, 1967. Among his countless gifts to the school is this priceless collection of old Spalding guides.

To run your fingers across pages once touched by Pop McKale is reward enough. To read the words of an article written by no less than Walter Camp, considered the “Father of American Football,” is a buzz like you cannot believe.

As Arizona football zooms forward into a new era of wide-open offense, the wild and vagrant vibes of fans who love it contrast dramatically with what must have been the feelings of those spectators of nearly a century ago.

For one thing, there are a whole lot more of them today.

Camp, who worked for the New Haven Clock Co. and was an unpaid adviser to the Yale football team as well as the No. 1 promoter of the sport nationally, suggests a lack of fan support, at least regionally.

In his article, he writes: “The only section of the country where the American intercollegiate game does not hold full sway in the fall is on the Pacific Coast. Stanford and California gave up the game three years ago and adopted rugby in its place.”

Most interesting is Camp’s coverage of that cutting-edge invention, the forward pass.

Sonny Dykes, the offensive coordinator who brought fast-break football to UA from Texas Tech, would enjoy this passage in the Spalding guide of 1911.

“It is rather a strange commentary upon the use of the forward pass,” writes Camp, “that Yale and Michigan should each have won one of their most important contests of the year by means of this play. Yale won her main contest with one of these plays in the initial year of its introduction.

“Others, though using this play more frequently, usually lost rather than gained through its employment, just as did Harvard in her chief contest of 1909.”

Camp warned about the dangers of such a radical strategy as the pass play.

“It is a treacherous play, and the occasions for its use are so dependent upon the very immediate conditions surrounding it at the moment, that it should be placed in a special category by every quarterback and captain,” he writes.

“A forward pass,” Camp explains, “when it fails, may result in changing the entire complexion of the play in a moment.”

No kidding. Well, some things never change, Walter.

But offensive football, thankfully, does change. From that early day when the forward pass was used in the same manner as the late, lamented “fumblerooski” – as a trick play – the sport itself has evolved into mostly an aerial attack.

In the old books, there are photographs of players mostly bareheaded – though some have flimsy leather helmets resembling early aviators’ caps – and wearing woolen jerseys and moleskins. What pads there were hardly protected that which they covered.

Camp not only sired American-style football, he also gave us the first “All-America Eleven.”

Although none of the Arizona players made his All-America team in 1911, Camp did list among “men deserving honorable mention,” Wildcats Charles John Rolletti and Miles Miller Carpenter.

And since it is doubtful Mr. Camp ever saw Arizona play, you can bet your season tickets that Rolletti and Carpenter were nominated – and campaigned for – by Pop McKale.

Retired columnist Corky Simpson writes for the Citizen every Saturday.

The real Zorro didn’t wear a mask, save damsels and slash “Z’s” on the behinds of uniformed soldiers in Spanish and Mexican-era California of the 18th and 19th Centuries.

And he wasn’t Don Diego de la Vega. He was, and is, Maximillian Javier Zendejas.

A quarter-century ago, Max Zendejas was the best college football kicker in the country, a dominant offensive weapon for Larry Smith’s Arizona Wildcats.

Talented, good-natured, handsome and ferociously committed to driving a football through the goal posts from any distance, Max was the image of UA football during an exciting, often unbelievable era.

Not only did fans love him, Max was the perfect hero for Tucson’s large, immensely loyal Hispanic community.

He set field goal kicking records right and left, some of which may never be broken. He remains the all-time career scoring leader at Arizona.

And he simply destroyed the Arizona State Sun Devils, never losing to ASU in his entire career and beating them with never-to-be-forgotten last-minute field goals.

Max will be in town Saturday night for the Wildcats’ home-opener against Northern Arizona University.

Moreover, he will be the honorary chairman of Hispanic Heritage Day on October 20, when the Wildcats host Stanford.

He is one of the fabulous Zendejas family of kickers, numbering seven at this point and, with Alex Zendejas Jr. a freshman at Arizona, about to reach eight.

“Seven of us played college football and four of us made it to the pros,” Max said.

He is personally tutoring Alex Jr., whose father, Alex Zendejas, kicked at Scottsdale Community College. Alex Jr. was quoted somewhere as saying he wanted to break all of Max’s records at Arizona.

That’s a tall order. But could he?

“You know what? He has the potential and the athletic body,” Max said. “But the one thing that would stop everybody who wants to break my records is commitment, hard work and passion. I prepared every single day every summer before the season. That’s all I did. I had nothing else on my mind.”

Born in Curimeo, Michoacan, in Mexico in 1963, Max is the son of Joaquin Zendejas, once a professional soccer player, and his wife, Raquel.

The family moved to Chino, Calif., when Max was 8.

Instead of soccer, he became an American-style football player, like his cousins and brothers.

Brothers Luis and Alan kicked at Arizona State, Max at Arizona, cousins Marty and Tony at Nevada-Reno, Joaquin at LaVerne College in California and Alex Sr. at Scottsdale Community College.

Alex Jr. is next in that amazing line.

Max holds numerous Wildcat records, including career scoring (360 points), most field goals in a season (22), most field goals in a career (79), highest percentage for a career (.738), and is tied with Lee Pistor and Jon Prasuhn for longest field goal, 57 yards.

Max won the two games he played at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe during his career, which lasted from 1982-85.

In the 1983 game, Max beat ASU with a 45-yard field goal as time expired on CBS regional television and in front of 70,033 fans.

In 1985, before the largest sporting event crowd in Arizona history, 72,345, Max kicked his 57-yard field goal to tie the score at 13 with 5:29 left in the game, then booted the game-winner with 1:27 to play. That gave the Wildcats four straight wins over the distraught Devils.

Max was a living legend among UA football fans. But it’s typical of the guy that, even today, he credits not only coach Smith but his holders, Kevin Ward, Craig Schiller and Troy Lawton, and the snappers, Chris Kaesman and Mark Walczak, for his successful college career.

Was there one kick Max made that meant the most to him?

“Notre Dame has to be one of the best,” he said of his 48-yarder with no time left, in the direction of Touchdown Jesus at South Bend, Ind., to beat the Fighting Irish, 16-13, on Oct. 16, 1982.

Max was only a freshman.

“Then I had a good game against ASU when they came down here already celebrating the Rose Bowl they thought they were going to. That was great,” he said.

“My father was in the crowd with ball caps in both hands, one ASU and one UA. I looked up at him at the end of the game and he was wearing the Wildcat cap. I looked at Luis (the ASU star kicker) and he didn’t want to talk.”

Saturday night, hopefully Max will bump into his old coach, Smith, somewhere in Arizona Stadium. You can bet the Notre Dame game will come up.

But they’ll both have more fun talking about the “Z’s” Max put on Sun Devil behinds.

Corky Simpson retired from the Citizen sports staff in December. He writes a weekly column.

Some of the orneriest college football fans in the country will be cheering for the other team today in an act of graciousness, however brief and scripted, that should be a model for every campus in the country to follow.

Virginia Tech will be saluting – but not rooting for – East Carolina in the season-opener at Blacksburg, Va., on Saturday (9 a.m., ESPN).

The Virginia school was the scene of a massacre in April, The demons inside a young man’s head drove him to murder 32 innocent victims, leaving an entire nation mourning in stunned disbelief.

Virginia Tech’s athletic director, Jim Weaver, has called on Hokie fans to cheer visiting teams before each home game this season. After kickoff, it’s a different matter, Hokies being Hokies

And that’s the way it should be.

Football fans are supposed to hoot ‘n’ holler, boo and jeer and do whatever is legal to help their team stomp the other school into the turf, so to speak, in the interest of winning a game.

No matter who the opponent happens to be – the “hated” Purple Sparrows of Sisters of the Poor or the “hated” Pirates of East Carolina – the idea is to yell for your team and against this week’s bad guys.

Virginia Tech is ranked No. 9 in the Associated Press poll as the 2007 season kicks off. East Carolina is, to be polite, a good opener for the Hokies.

Not only are the Pirates (coached by Lou Holtz’s son, Skip) a decided underdog, they’ve lost the services of their starting quarterback this week in a disciplinary move.

No matter. The idea of cheering the visitors is one that should be adopted by all colleges. Show the other guys some respect. It’s a silly ballgame, not war.

But it’s not a golf match, either, so good manners can be put aside for three or four hours after kickoff.

Grandstand graciousness is something that should be promoted everywhere. It’s understood at a football game that sportsmanship has its limits in the bleachers (boorishness is not so handicapped).

That doesn’t mean the visitors can’t be applauded, even appreciated for showing up, before the game.

Most important are the young guys who play the game and the spirit with which they play. The fans are just part of the scenery. They’re there to make noise and, within the limits of the law, fools of themselves.

The best college football fans I’ve ever seen, in terms of class, are at the universities of Michigan and Notre Dame.

They’ve been known to cheer an opponent exiting the field after a good effort. Sure, it’s usually after the “beloved” Wolverines or Fighting Irish have roundly thumped them.

But cheering the opponent is a good thing to do, a good habit to get into.

Virginia Tech’s abbreviated act of pleasantry today is a noble act with a special meaning. College teams everywhere should pick up on it.

It would improve even the grandest sport in this country.

Corky Simpson retired from the Citizen in December. He writes a column every Saturday.

Updegraff

Dr. Ed Updegraff holds a reverence for the game of golf that’s almost equal to the reverence the rest of us hold for him.

One of the best amateur players in the country at a younger age, the retired Tucson urologist is now one of the best – if not the very best – 85-year-old golfers on the planet.

Last week, Dr. Ed shot a 74 at 49ers Country Club. He modestly defers an estimate, and probably has no idea how many times he has shot his age.

“All the time,” he says if you really press the subject.

The Arizona Amateur, held last week at Tucson Country Club, is among his favorite events -not so much because he won it four times but because it’s a showcase of the best the state has to offer.

Dr. Ed is Mr. Golf in this city and this state.

He has played forever, seen it all, knew Bobby Jones, is himself an amateur golf icon and continues to play so marvelously well because “I am able to maintain a high level of enjoyment.”

He credits that to “the wonderful group I play with regularly and those I play with in seniors events.”

A healthy attitude in any activity, he said, is good for you. That includes golf.

“When you’re young, it’s that competitive desire that pushes you to be good,” he said. “Now, it’s the tremendous level of enjoyment I get from playing with my friends.”

Updegraff won the USGA Senior Amateur in 1981 and was runner-up in 1982 when the event was played at Tucson Country club.

He won the Arizona Amateur in 1952, 1955, 1961 and 1969.

He won the 1993 Arizona Senior Amateur at Canoa Hills in Green Valley.

Born March 1, 1922, in Boone, Iowa, Updegraff received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Iowa. He then earned a medical degree from the Colorado School of Medicine.

He retired 20 years ago from his practice here.

Dr. Ed met the great Bobby Jones at the National Amateur at the James River Country Club in Virginia many years ago. They met again when Jones was in Tucson for the National Junior Championship at El Rio in the 1950s.

They spent time together when Updegraff played at the Masters Tournament at Augusta, Ga., in the 1960s.

“My last year at the Masters, 1969 or ’70, he was bedfast at this cabin there at the Masters,” Updegraff said. “We visited. He was very weak at the time.”

Jones died of a degenerative neurological disorder.

“Oh, he was the best,” Updegraff said. “With present day equipment, he’d compare well with today’s golfers, I am sure. But you know, it’s an apples-and-oranges sort of thing.

“Glenn Cunningham, for example, was the dominant distance runner of the 1930s, but he couldn’t carry the towels for today’s runners. Bob was dominant against his peers, but the game has evolved tremendously.”

So, in a foursome of Jones, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, which of the group would Dr. Ed put his money on?

Without hesitation, he said: “Tiger.”

“It would be touch and go, however,” he said. “And you could put Byron Nelson, Arnold Palmer and Billy Casper in there.

“I played with Nicklaus 20 years ago, and we were wondering if anyone would ever come along to challenge him and his records. Before Jack it was the same with Palmer, and before Palmer it was the same with Nelson and Hogan.

“Each decade the best rise to the top as other men’s talents diminish.”

And what remains is a man’s love for the game.

“Oh, yes,” Updegraff said.

Golf is perhaps the most honorable of all sports, for one reason: because it puts a player in position to penalize himself or herself for things opponents may not have noticed.

Dr. Ed would like to see the sport purify itself even more by pressing on with drug testing.

“I think it’s good idea,” he said. “I believe the ladies (tour) are going to do it and I think the men should, too. It’s a simple matter. I see where Gary Player thinks one or two players are using (performance enhancing) drugs, and I believe we should test in order to find out.”

If Dr. Ed could make one rule that would improve his beloved sport, what would that be?

“Speed it up,” he said. “One thing I noticed out here last week at the Arizona Amateur was players going from one side of the fairway to the other, studying things, taking time . . . and I truly believe we should have and enforce a continuous putting rule instead of marking the ball all the time.

“Golf is too expensive, and it’s too hard to play, for it to be dragged into a 5 1/2-hour ordeal.”

That his big concern, at age 85, is speeding up the game says a lot about Ed Updegraff, one of the great golf heroes in Tucson history.

Retired columnist Corky Simpson writes every Saturday for the Citizen.

Terry

I rise to make a motion that the laundry hanging from the rafters at McKale Center on the University of Arizona campus be increased by one white jersey bearing the number “31.”

Jason Terry deserves a presidential pardon.

The Dallas Mavericks star is one of the most popular UA players of all time, a major contributor to the school’s 1997 NCAA basketball championship and a 1999 All-American.

“JT” loves the school and has been generous with his time and support, returning for various functions on behalf of the basketball program. He will be here with former teammates when the national championship squad is recognized on its 10th anniversary Saturday at the Westin La Paloma Resort & Spa.

The jersey Terry wore to bed along with his basketball trunks (he was a strange kid) the night before Arizona defeated Kentucky in the ’97 championship game at Indianapolis would have been hoisted to the roof at McKale long ago but for the matter of his taking money from agents during his junior and senior years, 1998 and 1999.

He wasn’t alone. UCLA and Texas Tech players were caught in the same trap by unscrupulous agents. The incident is the reason Arizona practices are now closed.

The Wildcats had to forfeit their only game in the 1999 NCAA basketball tournament, which wasn’t all that meaningful inasmuch as they lost to Oklahoma, 61-60.

The school also had to repay the NCAA for its cut of postseason play in ’98 and ’99.

JT accepted something like $11,000. He was ineligible for his entire senior season – or would have been, if anyone had known about the money. The school didn’t, obviously, and a review board of the Pacific-10 Conference decided there was no need to forfeit the 1998-99 schedule.

Terry was a fabulous college basketball player and is today one of the stars of the NBA. He’s quick as a panther, has a great shooting touch and plays extremely well on defense. But his biggest contribution has always been the fact he’s the consummate team player.

He proved it in that championship season.

Miles Simon, now a Wildcat assistant coach, was dealing with academic problems – in street clothes – the first semester and missed 11 games. With Terry filling in, the Cats put up a 9-2 record.

But when Simon returned, and because a team can only start five players at a time, somebody had to sit down. Terry stepped forward and volunteered. He was the best No. 6 man in the country, and was so recognized.

Olson has spoken often about JT’s attitude and unselfishness. The UA fans loved him. Especially when he’d celebrate victories with them by jumping up on the scorer’s table at the final horn.

Before the game against highly favored Kansas in the NCAA regionals at Birmingham, Ala., in ’97, Terry decided to wear his uniform to bed. The Wildcats won and he wore the same pajamas before every game the rest of that tournament. Arizona beat three No. 1 seeds – Kansas, North Carolina and Kentucky – to win the national championship. No school has ever done that, before or since.

Terry is as crazy about the Cats today as he was when he played here.

UA president Robert Shelton should issue an presidential pardon to JT and have that “31″ jersey lifted to the rafters in McKale to join the No. 25 of Steve Kerr, No. 32 of Sean Elliott, No. 10 of Mike Bibby, No. 22 of Jason Gardner and the No. 00 of the late, wonderful women’s player, Shawntinice Polk.

Richard Nixon pardoned Jimmy Hoffa. Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon.

U.S. presidents have pardoned counterfeiters, bootleggers, bank robbers and at least one guy convicted of helping bomb a coal mine. Gen. Robert E. Lee, who led an army against the Union, was pardoned.

Shelton or somebody should forgive Jason Terry, and honor him – and the basketball program – by adding his jersey to the ceiling at McKale.

Retired columnist Corky Simpson writes every Saturday for the Citizen.

Now that he has broken baseball’s home run record, the only prize left for Barry Bonds is election to the Hall of Fame.

He’ll be eligible five years after he hangs up his San Francisco Giants uniform for the last time, and the matter of whether he deserves enshrinement will be the bloodiest debate in baseball history.

Because of the steroids cloud hanging over his head – did he or didn’t he? – and because of his crabby personality, there’s bound to be an enormous amount of opposition to the former Arizona State Sun Devil making it to the Hall of Fame.

He will get my vote, begrudgingly.

One plastic card I carry with pride in my wallet says I’m a dues-paying member of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, the Hall of Fame electorate.

Unless they kick me out before then, I will have completed the required 10-year membership (in the Arizona Chapter) by the time Bonds’ name is on the ballot.

I dislike the man enormously. His towering arrogance makes him the most loathsome athlete I ever encountered in a sportswriting career of nearly half a century.

But I will vote for the 756 home runs, 510 stolen bases, 1,953 RBIs, lifetime batting average near .300 and a slugging percentage of .610 this remarkable ballplayer has amassed in a career that has stretched across 22 seasons.

The biggest jerk of all time just happens to be the greatest home run hitter.

Barry Bonds belongs in the Hall of Fame and no honest voter can ignore that fact. Which is too bad because I’d love to not vote for him.

Did he juice up? Probably, but who knows? And for how long?

Bonds had Hall of Fame numbers before he passed Babe Ruth and went on to break Hank Aaron’s home run record. Like him or not – and make no mistake, most people, including teammates don’t – he is one tremendous athlete.

He is also a symbol of the times.

Face it, heroes are not what they once were (when we didn’t hear the bad stuff about them).

Heroes aren’t alone. Movies are dreadful, most of them at any rate. Some of the drivel that passes for popular music is disgusting.

And in both of these fields, awards are given every year where pink slips – or handcuffs – by all rights should be.

Things simply are not the same, in the classroom, the workplace, the pew or on the ball field.

Grumpy old Barry Bonds is not someone you’d invite home to dinner. He’s not someone you’d even want to be near.

But he’s one of the greatest ballplayers who ever lived and that fact can’t be ignored.

By most accounts, Babe Ruth was a slob, a carouser and a potty-mouth. Ty Cobb’s racist personality has been well chronicled.

They’re both in the Hall of Fame.

Eight players on one of the game’s greatest teams ever, the 1919 Chicago White Sox, including the incomparable Shoeless Joe Jackson, were banned for life for throwing the World Series.

Hal Chase, by most accounts the best fielding first baseman the game has ever seen, was widely believed to have bet on baseball.

A succession of managers complained to team owners and league officials that Chase had deliberately fixed bets and thrown games. It took the discovery of a $500 check given to Chase by a gambler for throwing a game in 1918 to get him out of the game.

Jackson, his crooked teammates and Chase are not in the Hall of Fame. But the point is, baseball has had its share of ugly characters over the years.

Albert Belle was an exceptional, though troubled, baseball player. Terrell Owens, Ron Artest and many other big-time athletes have been dominated by their darker side.

Even the great Willie Mays, Barry Bonds’ godfather, could be a pill at times.

Barry’s father, Bobby Lee Bonds, who died in 2003 at 57, was an outstanding baseball player. A right-handed hitter (Barry hits lefty), Bobby slugged 332 home runs, stole 461 bases, drove in 1,024 runs and had a lifetime batting average of .268. He played for eight teams in a career that lasted from 1968 to 1981.

I was working in Phoenix when Bobby Bonds came up to the Triple-A Phoenix Giants, and nobody in the Pacific Coast League could get him out. He didn’t stay in the PCL for long.

Bobby was legitimately what baseball likes to call a “phenom.”

So, Barry came by his enormous talent naturally. I don’t know where he got his sullen nature.

The coach at a mid-major college in northern California told me several years ago that he had tried to recruit Barry Bonds out of high school but that his academic standing was atrocious.

Barry somehow managed to enroll at Arizona State, though, and was a star. He was built like a rake in those days and was projected to be a singles-hitting speed demon when he got to the majors.

Nobody could have envisioned the 6-1, 228-pound physical specimen he became. Or that he would be a home run-hitting monster.

Personally, I wish Barry Bonds had gone into some other line of work than baseball. It’s my favorite game, it has been a huge part of my life and I hate to see bad people be successful in it.

But Bonds now reigns as the greatest home run hitter the sport has ever had, and he belongs in the Hall of Fame.

For that reason, he will get my vote.

It is doubtful many of us will be able to look back years from now and remember precisely where we were and what we were doing when Barry Bonds broke the home-run record.

The moment is much more important than the individual.

Bonds is no Henry Aaron, whose record of 755 home runs he is about to break. Nor is he an Alex Rodriguez, who – if he stays healthy – will almost surely break Bonds’ record, whatever it becomes.

As a nation of baseball fans, we just don’t like Barry Bonds.

So his greatest moment won’t really be all that great to the rest of us.

Much of this is because of personality. The rest is the mere matter of history wearing down the hoopla.

Bonds is a surly, sullen, egocentric cuss who happens to own a magical swing of the bat.

Henry Aaron was, and is, a folk hero who worked his way up from segregation and the Negro Leagues to surpass the record of Babe Ruth, a larger-than-life character who was also the most beloved ballplayer the game has known.

When he was engaged in a salary hassle in the 1920s, demanding a pay raise, the owner of the Yankees told him, “Babe, do you realize you’re making more than the president of the United States?”

To which Ruth replied, “Well, I should. I had a better year.”

Ruth was a heavy drinker, a womanizer, a glutton and braggart. He was a heavy man with a beer belly and with pencil-thin legs – a strange looking galoot for sure.

But he had the personality of a cocker spaniel puppy. You had to love the guy.

Aaron is a splendid man, quiet and modest and altogether worthy of the love and affection of this nation.

Rodriguez is a magnificent athlete who can be as charming as anyone, including Ruth or Aaron.

Bonds, though, is his own worst enemy, a public relations nightmare for the San Francisco Giants, who have made him a millionaire many, many times over.

Barry is quarrelsome and crabby. His moods run from bad to abominable. There is unfathomable anger in this man.

And to top it all, there is the dark cloud of performance-enhancing drugs – the black plague of baseball – hanging over his shaved head.

Did he or didn’t he?

Was it anabolic steroids or a nutritious diet and lots of weight training that turned Bonds from a lanky, thin-as-a-rail lad into a monster?

He says no, he didn’t juice up, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

The commissioner of baseball, Bud Selig, has been chasing the Giants around the past week or so, hoping to be there when Bonds breaks the record. But it’s strictly in the line of duty.

Selig hates Bonds and everything he stands for. But what Selig stands for is public relations and political correctness. He’ll be there to pose with Bonds on the field, smiling as if he really could stand the guy.

Some interesting numbers:

Bonds had 292 home runs in the first 10 years of his career, at which point he was 31.

Aaron had 342 homers at the same juncture. He was also 31.

Rodriguez was 28 after his first 10 years in the big leagues, and had hit 345 home runs.

Ruth was a pitcher for most of his first decade in the majors, but still had 238 home runs by that time. He was 28.

History, even in sports, is advancement – more a matter of carrying on than completion.

It is a process, not a number.

So, after Bonds breaks Aaron’s record, Rodriguez will break Barry’s.

The difference is, we’ll be a lot more likely to remember where we were and what we were doing the moment it happened for Alex.

Retired columnist Corky Simpson writes for the Citizen on Saturdays.

Beard

Of all the doors of economic opportunity open to star athletes, the girlie-magazine market must be the most curious.

Former University of Arizona swimming sensation Amanda Beard has advanced the debate – I’m not sure in which direction – about women’s place in sports by dropping her Speedo for the cover spread in Playboy.

She may have banked a million bucks, or whatever the flesh journal is paying these days to its marquee strippers.

But assuming, long term, that her career is not in nudie magazines, was it worth it?

Does it matter that Amanda may have disappointed a worshipping sports public by baring her behind and other parts?

A lot of parents must be shaking their heads in the negative example she has set for a few million kiddies.

As a seven-time Olympic medalist, swimming to glory at the Summer Games of 1996, 2000 and 2004, and with plans to compete next year in Beijing, Amanda became the idol for little girls all over the country.

She showed them what can be achieved by combining talent, hard work and dedication.

But what is she showing them, beyond the obvious, by cavorting in her birthday suit for Playboy?

In the 2004 Olympics, Beard won the gold in the 200 meter breaststroke, and the silver in the 200 meter individual medley and 400 meter medley relay.

In 2000 she won the bronze in the 200 meter breaststroke.

Back in 1996, a mere 14 years old, she was the darling of the Atlanta Olympics where she picked up a gold medal in the 400 meter medley relay and won the silver in the 100 and 200 meter breaststroke.

At the University of Arizona, Beard was the NCAA champion in 2001 in the 200 meter breaststroke.

Maybe we should be careful about judging too quickly.

Maybe social rules on things such as modesty no longer apply to emancipated female superstar-athletes.

Old-fashioned ideas about athletes as wholesome, all-American girls and boys-next-door may no longer apply.

Winning the hearts of sports fans perhaps no longer carries with it any responsibility to live up to a certain moral image.

In which case, it wouldn’t matter if a beautiful athletic queen took on the role of come-hither seductress for some slick skin-magazine.

Propriety changes its roles constantly.

This isn’t the 1930s and Amanda isn’t Sally Rand or Gypsy Rose Lee, a couple of strippers who were looked down up by pillars of a different society.

Besides, male athletes have traditionally had the opportunity to step off the playing field or court, or climb out of the pool into lucrative paydays in movies, business, politics and such.

Maybe Amanda can charm her way off the pages of Playboy into greater success as a model and eventually onto the silver screen, where her experience at peeling off her clothes would come in handy. Who knows?

And who cares if people lose respect for Amanda the athlete?

Sometime back, reviewing her athletic career, she said, “I’ve received so many opportunities because of swimming – opportunities that a lot of people don’t get. I feel so blessed to have been able to experience what I’ve experienced.

“It’s been a wonderful life, and in a lot of ways, I think the best is yet to come.”

I agree. Amanda is a charming, intelligent and beautiful young lady and surely the best of her life is yet to come.

But as charming, intelligent and beautiful as she is, she wouldn’t have gotten a second glance – let alone a first-team cover spread from Playboy – had she not first made a name for herself in sports.

Her appearance on the pages of a publication that glorifies lust trivializes the incredible effort and hard work this young lady has put in to become one of the world’s best athletes.

So, OK. It’s her life.

But it’s the public’s respect for Amanda that will determine her future success.

Retired columnist Corky Simpson writes every Saturday for the Citizen.

Don Meredith was the best football analyst television has given us.

That “Dandy Don” was chosen for this year’s Pro Football Hall of Fame broadcasting prize, the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award, atones for an egregious omission.

There was a time, believe it or not, when televised professional football was not only worth watching but worth listening to. That was from 1970-73 and again from 1977-83, when the folksy, outspoken Meredith was a member of ABC’s Monday Night Football.

The best broadcast team ever assembled was an act of unnatural selection. Downright weird casting turned out to be a stroke of genius:

It brought us the team of Howard Cosell, Frank Gifford and Meredith.

Monday Night Football was the most entertaining sports show, and one of the best television programs period, that the medium has discovered.

Today, except for a gem of thought here and there from John Madden, it’s mostly monotonous shouts and murmurs from the broadcast booth. You’re better off muting the sound.

Ah, but in those golden days . . .

Cosell was the carnival barker, pompous, pretentious, condescending – and utterly entertaining. He was the W. C. Fields of the jock shop.

Humble Howie was like some guy sent over by the news department in an effort to get him chased off or killed. His ill-adjusted wig, nasal foghorn of a voice and highfalutin speech were the perfect foil for the spirited, uninhibited Meredith.

They tangled once, for example, on “wont.” It was some running back’s “wont,” Howard said, to do this or that. Meredith pretended to confuse wont with “want” and they sparred.

Gifford, like Meredith, was a former NFL star player. Unlike Meredith, his television character was “normal,” and therefor came across as ponderous and uninteresting. But that character fit perfectly in the casting.

Cosell’s legend is immense. My favorite Howardism, uttered when a player ran some distance for a touchdown, then held the ball in the air and danced in the end zone, was: “Look at him register elation!”

One Monday night in the middle of a game, a copy boy tore an Associated Press story off a teletype in the booth and handed it to Cosell. I believe the story was about Henry Kissinger’s first announced visit to China.

The kid handed the story to Cosell, who declared: “I have just been informed by the White House that Kissinger will visit China.”

Cosell seemed to believe his voice was the reason people tuned in to Monday Night Football and what anybody else had to say was ambient noise. He ran the gamut from hard to understand to hard to take. Sometimes you wanted Meredith and Gifford to throw him bodily out of the press box.

But it was great entertainment and this oddball mixture of personalities made the trio the Marx Brothers of sports broadcasting.

Once when Cosell mentioned then-President Nixon (probably suggesting they should get together to settle world problems), Meredith blurted out something about “Tricky Dick.”

Covering a Cleveland Browns game one night, Meredith had a little double-entendre fun with the name of a wide receiver, Fair Hooker, from Arizona State.

But it was harmless.

When ABC cameras were unfortunate enough to capture a group of fans exposing their middle fingers at the broadcast booth, Meredith suggested, “Aw, they’re just saying, ‘We’re No. 1.’ ”

In what became his trademark, when a team would score and put the game out of reach, Dandy Don would sing a line or two – off key – of Willie Nelson’s song “The Party’s Over.”

When he wanted to be, Meredith was sharp, clear and concise in explaining a play or strategy. The former Southern Methodist All-America quarterback was the NFL’s player of the year in 1966 and knew more about football than even Gifford (a former USC All-America running back).

The award Meredith, 69, will receive on Aug. 3 at the Pro Football Hall of Fame Enshrinees’ Dinner recognizes outstanding contributions to radio and TV.

Dandy Don had many, and the award is long overdue.

Retired columnist Corky Simpson writes for the Citizen every Saturday.

High on the list of things I wouldn’t do for any amount of money is youth-league sports administration.

The kids are great, but “leagues” are for adults, namely parents.

And they can make life miserable.

Take for example Darlene Biernat, who decided this week to resign as administrator for Tucson District 12 Little League. She will step down at the end of this month when the all-star season ends.

Competent, caring and experienced – she has been a volunteer for 18 years – Darlene has finally had it.

Problems with the district’s pool-play format this year for all-star tournaments have infuriated parents and they’ve taken their anger out on her.

A torrent of complaints and harassment on her cell phone and work phone led to her decision.

Darlene’s husband, Gene Biernat, is the administrator of Tucson District 5 Little League. They were married seven years ago this month, having met three or four years before that in the process of Little League business.

The new pool play structure in District 12 has a tiebreaker rule which, unfortunately, led to the elimination of an undefeated team. That team allowed more runs than the one that advanced.

Silly? Not fair?

Yes, especially if you’re Mark Albrecht, who watched the Sunnyside Majors team (ages 9-12) go unbeaten but get eliminated.

“I have consoled many players over the years as they were eliminated from tournaments because they lost their game,” Albrecht wrote in an e-mail to the Citizen, “but never, until this past Monday night, have I ever had to console them after winning their last game.”

But this is what happens when you adopt pool play. A playoff, as some readers have suggested, might be the best way to avoid such problems.

Regardless, Darlene didn’t make the rules, which were approved by a regional Little League panel. She did discuss them at a meeting with coaches last month, but she said no one complained.

Besides, this lady works from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and then begins her volunteer job with Little League, often working until 1 or 2 a.m. during all-star tournament time. What many parents don’t realize is their kids’ names and pictures wouldn’t be getting into the newspaper at all if not for the efforts of Darlene and Gene.

There’s a bit more to Darlene’s decision to step down than pool play.

She told the Citizen that this has been the worst year she’s experienced, in terms of bad behavior. In the past week or so, she said at least three fistfights have broken out – among adults, naturally – in the bleachers at these kid league games.

Parents, she said, are setting a “win-first” example for the children.

Well, what else is new?

The problem in youth league sports is always with adults. Parents and coaches, mainly.

The kids just want to play ball. They deal with bad calls and defeat a helluva lot better than do mom and dad or the coach.

Put these youngsters in a daily playground program with no coaching staffs, no parents, no national or regional offices and no snazzy uniforms – just choose up sides and play the game – and they’d have a lot more fun.

And learn more about fair play and teamwork.

A kid can handle the sharp, numbing surgery of “Yerrr Out!” But a parent wants to appeal the decision.

The ideals of youth league baseball, learning to get along with others, learning to win and how to handle defeat, playing together and by the rules, these things are wonderful for kids.

But they are a thin crust over a volcano of trouble from parents interested only in their child finishing on the left side of that hyphen in the final score.

I admire Darlene Biernat for her nearly two decades of service. But I don’t know how she did it, and I don’t know how Gene does it.

When I feel the need to deal with frustration and agony, I will hit myself in the thumb with a claw hammer.

But there is no way I would ever – EV-er – be an administrator in a youth sports league.

Retired columnist Corky Simpson writes for the Citizen every Saturday.

Young athletes are better today than ever, but they don’t have as much fun as we did when I was a kid.

They couldn’t. Today they’re one-sport wonders.

We played every game there was and even made up a few, some of them stretching the imagination to outrageous lengths.

I sat in the nosebleed section at McKale Center and watched this year’s Lute Olson Basketball Camp, which ended last week. I was amazed at the skills of these whippersnappers with skinny legs and oversized sneakers.

These young’uns are far better at basketball – light-years advanced – than I and my buddies were.

Kids today switch hands and dribble with an ambidextrous ease that just blows your mind. We couldn’t begin to do that when I was growing up. We were right-handed or left-handed, and that was pretty much that.

Oh, sure, today’s kids “carry” the ball, and in my day, that was an infraction. But the game has evolved in such a way (twice as fast, for one thing) that it’s best to give ballhandlers a greater degree of freedom.

It makes basketball a much better game to play and to watch, I think.

But here we are in the middle of summer and these boys were playing . . . basketball!

Geez, we’d have been about halfway through the league schedule in baseball when I was a boy about a hundred years ago.

Coaches, parents and fans tell me that competition is so fierce today that a kid has to concentrate on one sport.

That’s why there’s summer basketball and winter baseball. Football is pretty much year-round, too.

And that’s a shame.

Maybe we were “uncool” and backward, watched B-movie Westerns and black-and-white television, but whatever sport was in season, we played it. And we invented others.

We loved all the sports and wouldn’t have dreamed of choosing just one.

In my Midwest hometown, when there was ice on the ground we played hockey – even though we didn’t know the rules. We knew there were two goals to be defended, and you could jump on top of somebody and pound his face into the snow.

Then we’d drag our bloody little bods to somebody’s driveway, shovel off the snow and shoot baskets.

At the first sign of spring, sometimes before, we’d hit a few flies, play some pepper and get ready for baseball. When the leaves turned from green to brown and red and yellow, we played football.

We didn’t have basketball camps, or baseball or football camps.

“Camp” was something your church had way out in the boondocks somewhere. You went there for a couple of weeks, drank a lot of Kool-Aid and got munched on by mosquitoes big enough to throw a saddle on.

When the weather was so bad we couldn’t play outdoors, we went inside and used our imagination. My best friend, Jimmy Hooten, had this large basement at his house, and we made basketball hoops from the rims of coffee cans. We used a tennis ball – and boxing gloves.

Seriously. Jimmy had one set of boxing gloves. We’d play one-on-one basketball, and you wore a boxing glove on one of your hands.

According to our rules, while dribbling the ball or shooting with one hand, you could punch your opponent’s lights out with the other. Defenders defended with one bare hand and threw punches with the gloved fist.

But you couldn’t “carry” the ball.

We stooped so low we even made super-miniature baseball “stadiums,” got down on our hands and knees and swatted marbles, using wooden pencils as bats.

Once, on an early April stroll along Spring River, I found a bag of some kind of seed a farmer had left beside a fence. I didn’t know what it was – still don’t – but for the heck of it, I built a tiny baseball park and planted the seed where the outfield grass and infield grass would be. I formed a pitcher’s mound and took about a million little sticks and built a fence around the outfield.

I never did go back to check on my ballpark, but I would like to think that some weeks later, a startled Farmer Brown busted into his house and said something like, “Edna, Edna, come quick! You know them there little people – them Leprechauns – we used to read about? Well, by golly, they’re for real!!”

We’d play baseball on the town tennis courts if they were empty. We hit tennis balls with a broom handle.

And none of us made it to the big leagues, or even to Division I basketball, football or anything else.

But we had a great time.

And thank goodness, we weren’t forced to choose one sport.

Besides, no college in the history of the world has even given out scholarships in “boxing ball.”

Retired columnist Corky Simpson writes every Saturday for the Citizen.

Jim Young's UA teams went 31-13 from 1973-76, including seasons of 8-3, 9-2 and 9-2, yet the Wildcats did not go to any bowl games.

Remembered joys are never past. The three decades since Jim Young was head football coach at Arizona are still fresh in the minds and hearts of Wildcats fans who recall how he turned around the program.

The Southern Arizona chapter of the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame announced this week its annual youth football award will have a new name:

The Jim Young Award.

Jim and his wife, Jane, were honored Thursday night at a reception in UA’s Jim Click Hall of Champions. Among those present were former Wildcats head coaches Larry Smith, who came with Young from Michigan in 1973, and Jim LaRue.

Since retiring as head coach at Army in 1990, Jim and Jane Young have lived in Tucson.

Jim’s record at Arizona was 31-13 from 1973-76. He moved on to Purdue, where the record was 38-19-1, and finally to Army, 51-39-1. He returned to Tucson and came out of retirement after leaving Army to coach the Wildcats’ offensive line under Dick Tomey from 1992-94.

With a world of ingenuity and enthusiasm, a young guy from Bo Schembechler’s staff at Michigan came to Tucson in 1973, and UA football took off like a rocket across the desert sky.

The Cats had been losers in seven of the previous eight seasons until the quiet, scholarly looking gent rode into town.

The next three Arizona teams went 8-3, 9-2 and 9-2. The Cats put up impressive wins against Wyoming – a rugged Western Athletic Conference opponent back then – Arizona State, Indiana, Iowa and a Texas Tech team that had owned the series with UA.

Young was inducted into the UA Sports Hall of Fame in 1996 and three years later, the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Ind.

“This is an unexpected honor,” Young told the guests at the Hall of Champions this week. “Arizona has been very good to us.”

And the Youngs have been very good to Arizona.

Smith, who also retired in Tucson, with his wife, Cheryl, has been a friend of Young’s for most of his life.

“I became a head coach because I had great teachers,” Larry said. “One was Gil Smith, my high school coach. Another was Doyt Perry, my college coach at Bowling Green.

“And the other was Jim Young. Jim was a great coach because he’s a great teacher. His organizational ability, his teaching and his preparation were always the best.”

Smith and Young first got together back in their hometown of Van Wert, Ohio, when Larry was a fifth-grade basketball player coached by high school athletic hero Young.

“He’s my closest friend,” Young said of Smith. “Any success we had at Arizona was due in very large part to Larry coaching the defense.”

The secret to the Wildcats’ turnaround under Young was hard work, Smith said.

“We believed we could outwork everybody,” he said. “We won a lot of games because we worked so doggone hard in practice.”

Jane Young was in a wheelchair this week because of a broken left leg, an injury she suffered in a fall while playing golf.

“The first time we came to Tucson was in 1970 with Bo Schembechler and his wife,” Jane Young said. “Bo and Jim were scouting the Arizona spring football game. (In those days, it was allowed.)

“We were very impressed with the weather. It was 63 degrees at the time in Tucson. A few years later we were thrilled when Jim got the job at UA.”

Jane and the late Georgia Kindall, wife of Arizona baseball coach Jerry Kindall, became great friends.

A special guest at the reception this week was Jack Lengyel, who became head coach at Marshall shortly after the tragic airplane crash that wiped out the team, coaching staff and numerous boosters in 1970.

In the 2006 movie “We Are Marshall,” Matthew McConaughey, plays the role of Lengyel. Jack’s wife, Sandy, was also a guest at this week’s function here. The role of Lengyel’s wife in the movie, due out on DVD in September, is played by Kimberly Williams.

A couple of sidelights to the Jim Young story:

● He was a fullback on the 1954 national champion Ohio State team coached by Woody Hayes. He transferred to Bowling Green when Doyt Perry of the Ohio State staff became head coach there.

● Jim coached Michigan in the 1970 Rose Bowl when Schembechler was hospitalized with a heart attack.

● Young’s first staff at Arizona contained no fewer than three men who would become head coach of the Wildcats: Smith (1980-86), John Mackovic (2001-2003) and Mike Hankwitz, who served as interim coach when Mackovic was fired during the 2003 season.

To get a copy of his book, “Corky: 30 years of sports commentary,” call 573-4417 or go to tucson.com/store.

Retired columnist Corky Simpson writes every Saturday for the Citizen.

Young