The Athletic has a pretty good article about the rivalry, and my most gut-wrenching loss in that series - please forgive my indulgence, it's pretty long:
The UCLA-Arizona rivalry: The McKale mystique, a hated villain and a thriller that never will be forgotten
Once it went final, with the crowd at Arizona’s McKale Center stunned and silent, Don MacLean ran off the court because he didn’t know what would happen. The cocky UCLA forward, who had just played the game of his life, bolted into the visitors’ locker room and collapsed in the showers, exhausted.
On Jan. 11, 1992, the Bruins celebrated in Tucson like they had won a national championship. In some ways, their 89-87 win might have been more difficult. They had just snapped Arizona’s 71-game home win streak in one of the great contests in conference history.
Guard Darrick Martin, who had hit the winning shot, ran around pumping his fist. Forward Gerald Madkins dropped to the court, raised his arms and yelled. If a snapshot summing up the UCLA-Arizona rivalry exists, this was it. The energy, the emotion, the stakes. An unforgettable moment. One worth looking back on three decades later.
On Saturday, the rivalry continues with UCLA’s visit to Arizona, only this time it will have a different vibe. A new chapter is about to begin. Next year, the Bruins will dribble off to the Big Ten, and the Wildcats will head to the Big 12. While both schools wish to schedule a non-conference series, the rivalry will change. For those involved, it’s disappointing.
For years, UCLA-Arizona has been the West’s premier showdown. For a significant stretch, the road to a conference title went through one of two places — Westwood or Tucson. The rivalry has been so rich, players from both sides have discussed a “30-for-30”-like documentary to remind folks that rivalry passion extends beyond Duke–North Carolina.
“The rivalry, it just goes so deep,” former Arizona guard Damon Stoudamire said. “There was genuine respect, but I also think there was genuine hatred.”
The 1992 game was a classic. The Bruins entered as the nation’s No. 2 team. The Wildcats were No. 6. The combined rosters that afternoon included 15 future NBA players. Thirteen played. (Future All-American Ed O’Bannon, a freshman, sat out because of injury.) The game featured an incredible 27 lead changes and 14 ties.
It was personal. Not just for UCLA coach Jim Harrick and Arizona’s Lute Olson, but for the players. As always, the familiarity ran deep. UCLA’s Martin and Arizona’s Matt Othick had come out of high school as the nation’s top point guards. UCLA’s Tracy Murray and Arizona’s Wayne Womack had grown up in the same California neighborhood, just three houses away. Coaches from both schools had recruited nearly every player on the court.
“I played against a lot of those guys in the summer,” said Womack, who considers Murray a brother. “It just made the competitiveness that much stronger, just knowing those guys and being able to go back to Cali, and say, ‘Yo, we beat the hell out of you guys twice this year.’ A lot of it was bragging rights, but it was also a sign of respect.”
After beating the Wildcats, the Bruins took the celebration onto the flight back to Los Angeles. The conference season had just started, but they knew a win over Arizona in McKale would make a statement. Then turbulence hit. The plane shook. Players bounced. O’Bannon yelled. The contrast in feelings was not lost to those on board.
“We were like, ‘We just won the biggest game of our lives at UCLA and we’re about to go down?”’ former UCLA guard Mitchell Butler said.
“Worst plane ride ever,” assistant coach Tony Fuller said.
Said Murray with a laugh: “I’m just glad we lived to tell the story.”
Today, Arizona has one of the top home courts in college basketball. In 1992, McKale Center was even better. Louder. More intimidating.
UCLA’s Shon Tarver had experienced it for the first time the previous season. As a freshman from Portland, he wasn’t ready. Not for the talent around him. Not for the Arizona crowd. For the first time in his basketball life, Tarver felt overwhelmed.
“It was the loudest my eardrums had ever heard in my life,” Tarver said. “I equate it to standing next to an airplane with the engine roaring. My ears were vibrating.”
From 1987 to 1995, Mark Gottfried worked as a UCLA assistant under Harrick. He would go on to become head coach at Alabama and North Carolina State, programs that had annual stops at Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium and Kentucky’s Rupp Arena. Neither environment, he said, topped what he experienced in McKale in the 1990s.
“First of all, it’s a sea of red,” Gottfried said. “And I don’t know that they ever sat down, at least during our games. There were times, like in your timeouts, you couldn’t even hear each other hardly.”
Othick, who played four years at Arizona, said he got chills almost every time he took the court at McKale. He recalled a non-conference game against Billy Tubbs and Oklahoma his sophomore season. After a late Sooners rally tied the game, Arizona’s Matt Muehlebach hit a 3-pointer. Othick canned one. Jud Buechler buried a 15-footer.
“It was back-to-back-to-back, and I swear it felt like the roof was going to come off,” Othick said of a 1990 win that extended Arizona’s home win streak to a national-best 41 games. “It was just indescribable.”
This mystique wasn’t always there. In 1984, Olson’s first season, UCLA and freshman guard Reggie Miller went into Tucson and won in front of an announced crowd of 7,683. But slowly things started to change. In 1985, Arizona beat the Bruins for the first time in nearly six seasons, planting a rivalry seed.
The streak sprouted during Olson’s fifth season. On Dec. 4, 1987, an Arizona team featuring Sean Elliott and Steve Kerr routed Long Beach State. The Wildcats that season won 35 games, advancing to the Final Four. From there, Arizona wouldn’t lose another home game for three more years, beating ranked teams such as Duke, Oklahoma and UNLV.
“Our fans, they were starving for a winner,” said Elliott, who in 1989 broke Lew Alcindor’s Pac-10 career-scoring record in a 102-64 rout of UCLA at McKale. Asked if it meant more that the milestone moment came against the Bruins, Elliott laughed.
“Oh, yeah. You better believe it,” he said. “By that time, my senior year, a lot of guys on our team didn’t like UCLA at all. ‘Hate’ is a pretty strong word, but it was close. For me, what more could you want? It could not have set up any better.”
On Saturday, the rivalry continues with UCLA’s visit to Arizona, only this time it will have a different vibe. A new chapter is about to begin. Next year, the Bruins will dribble off to the Big Ten, and the Wildcats will head to the Big 12. While both schools wish to schedule a non-conference series, the rivalry will change. For those involved, it’s disappointing.
For years, UCLA-Arizona has been the West’s premier showdown. For a significant stretch, the road to a conference title went through one of two places — Westwood or Tucson. The rivalry has been so rich, players from both sides have discussed a “30-for-30”-like documentary to remind folks that rivalry passion extends beyond Duke–North Carolina.
“The rivalry, it just goes so deep,” former Arizona guard Damon Stoudamire said. “There was genuine respect, but I also think there was genuine hatred.”
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MacLean finished his college career as the Pac-12’s all-time leading scorer, an achievement he still holds today. After a nine-year NBA career, he worked as a basketball analyst, first for UCLA, then for the Pac-12 Networks.
When MacLean first returned to McKale, more than 10 years after his college days, he could tell the Arizona fans still fumed. “Nobody ever said anything, but they looked at me with hatred in their eyes,” MacLean said. “Literally hatred.”
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“I look at my four years of college,” Stoudamire said. “We won the Pac-10 twice, they won the Pac-10 twice. We went to a Final Four, they won the national championship. It’s over, man. It’s disappointing. But I don’t think you can get it back. Again, you could play it, but once a year? Who cares. I just don’t think the game will have the same cache it once did.”
Othick recently expressed similar thoughts to his 14-year-old son, who suggested Arizona might be better off in a new conference with different opponents. Responded Othick: “Yeah, but there’s nothing like a great rivalry. And it starts all over. All these teams they’re about to play (in the Big 12), there’s no history.”
That’s what makes this difficult to digest.
“The way it was, no matter if coaches liked each other or the people running the schools are mad, it didn’t matter, you still had to play each other,” Othick said. “There’s something to that. And that part of it is really sad, that it’s going away.”
