It’s His State of Happiness

WOODEN CLASSIC Sunday at the Arrowhead Pond, Channel 9 Arizona vs. Mississippi State, 1:30 p.m. | UCLA vs. Boston College, 4 p.m.

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On the night of Nov. 2, the simple act of turning on the TV to check scores took on new meaning for Arizona Coach Lute Olson.

To put it in basketball terms, election night was like Selection Sunday and the Final Four rolled into one for his wife of less than two years, Christine Toretti Olson, a GOP activist and Republican National Committee representative from Pennsylvania.

“She felt responsible for everything that happened in Pennsylvania,” Olson said. “The good news was, they gained seats in the Pennsylvania House and Senate. The bad news was, they got beaten in the presidential race.”

George W. Bush lost Pennsylvania, but not much else.

“She’s very, very competitive,” Olson said. “You could almost see her getting her game face on as things started to happen.”

Christine, a prominent Pittsburgh philanthropist and chairman and CEO of S.W. Jack Drilling, a family-owned oil-and-gas exploration firm, considers that a fairly conservative estimate of her political fervor.

“I start to sound like a Mafia hit princess,” she said with a laugh.

When the brother of her best friend from high school ran for the state legislature as a Democrat, she had no mercy.

“I said, ‘Let me tell you, ‘I’ll do everything I can to beat you,’ ” she said.

And yes, she already has sized up what sort of candidate her rather senatorial-looking husband would make.

“A reluctant one,” she said.

“I tell him he has high name recognition and electability. He says he’s had enough politics in college basketball.”

Olson, who brings No. 21 Arizona to the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim to face No. 15 Mississippi State in the John R. Wooden Classic on Sunday, is also politically savvy enough to walk a delicate line. He declined an invitation to join his wife -- who has been ranked among the Mother Jones 400, a list of the nation’s top political donors -- at the Republican National Convention in August, saying it was important for him to be on campus.

“I don’t really get involved on the political end of it,” Olson said. “For a person in my position, you’d make half the people happy and half the people unhappy.”

New Year’s Day will mark four years since Olson’s wife of 47 years, Bobbi, died of ovarian cancer.

She was such a part of the basketball power Olson has built at Arizona that the court at McKale Center bears her name: “Lute and Bobbi Olson Court.”

Lute, now 70, remarried in 2003, a year after he and Christine had met at a Final Four banquet. (A member of the board of the NCAA Foundation, a fund-raising group, she didn’t know who the striking white-haired gentleman seated next to her at dinner was.)

It didn’t take long for people in Tucson to worry she’d take him back to Pennsylvania, where she keeps a home and serves on numerous corporate, political and charity boards, including those of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education and the Andy Warhol Museum.

The concern in Arizona caught her husband by surprise. “I wasn’t aware of that until she mentioned to me that in talking with some of her friends, one being a TV person here, she was asked if she was aware a lot of people in town think, ‘Maybe you are going to whisk him away,’ ” Lute said.

“I’m sure she would want me to stay at it longer than I might myself. She knows how important it is to me. She’d be the last person to want me to stop.”

Christine, 47, lives with Lute and the two youngest of her three sons in Tucson but frequently returns to Pittsburgh on business. She understands the concern people have that he might leave.

“They love him so much here. They do fear that,” she said.

“Because of our age difference and because my career was still building and his is in its latter years, people thought he might retire. Actually, it was a sign I really wanted to do something different in my life.”

Although Lute said the move has been “a huge adjustment for us both,” things as simple as walks with Christine have brought a peacefulness he couldn’t imagine during Bobbi’s illness and, finally, her death, in the midst of a season when the Wildcats would reach the 2001 Final Four.

“A lot of things about that year are really a blur because of what Bobbi had to go through the last few months,” Lute said. “I was asked by a lot of people, ‘Why did you come back so soon?’ The thing that was obvious to me was that season was very hard on our players. So many of them knew Bobbi very well.

“I’m an adult. I could see what was happening. I knew from her doctors what her battle was. With the players, it is a normally very open program and all of a sudden they couldn’t get much feel for what was going on. It was a very tough thing. I came back to help stabilize things.

“She was in the hospital for eight straight weeks, and it was a matter of going down in the morning as much as I could before I had to be at school and then back for dinner every evening and back the next morning. When I think of it, it really is like a blur, like a nightmare.

“I don’t know how you go through it without family support. I had the support of our five kids and grandkids.”

Christine doesn’t play the same role Bobbi did, but she enjoys the players and even enjoys recruiting.

“She really has helped us with the program continuing with a family atmosphere,” Lute said.

When last season turned disappointing, ending with a 20-10 record and a first-round NCAA tournament loss, Christine was there.

“She could see when I was frustrated about things, but she is by nature very positive. And when I see things happening on the political end she doesn’t agree with, we can provide comfort to each other,” he said.

All people in Tucson want is for Lute to be comfortable right where he is.

“I signed a new five-year contract at the end of last year,” he said. “The whole thing gets down to, as long as I feel I’m doing a good job with the kids and the kids feel comfortable with me, do I have the energy and health I need to do it? I love what I’m doing. I can’t think of anything other than health that would change it.”