Arizona’s first Final Four team, led by Sean Elliott and Steve Kerr in 1988, launched a superpower originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
INDIANAPOLIS – Sean Elliott played nearly 1,000 games that counted between his dozen years in the NBA and four in college baskeball with the Arizona Wildcats, which of course concluded nearly 1,000 times with his teammates in the locker room. And yet there was something about that one occasion at Seattle’s Kingdome he cannot forget and does not wish to forget, even 38 years later.
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A 6-8 small forward during his playing career, Elliott is Arizona’s career scoring leader, with 2,555 points. He was named Player of the Year for 1989 by the National Association of Basketball Coaches. He was a two-time first-team All-America selection, after his junior and senior seasons.
On that day in March 1988, though, Arizona crushed North Carolina in the NCAA West Region final and earned their school’s first-ever appearance in the Final Four. And so Elliott tells that story to young people who then were years away from being born because it conveys the immense rewards available to a group willing to embrace and support the collective endeavor to achieve a common goal.
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“It’s hard to put into words how joyful that locker room was. I’ve never seen people react to any individual award the way our guys were that day,” Elliott told The Sporting News. “We were just overjoyed. I thought I was having an attack. Everybody was just whooping and hollering and hugging each other. There’s no better feeling than to get 12 to 15 guys across the line that have all sacrificed and played for each other. That was the ultimate feeling. It was awesome.”
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The ending to that season was not ideal. Arizona lost in the national semifinals to Oklahoma, allowing a combined 42 points to Sooners big men Stacey King and Harvey Grant. The Wildcats believed they could win a national championship, but instead had to watch as the Sooners fell to superstar Danny Manning and the Kansas Jayhawks at Kansas City’s Kemper Arena.
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And yet, in the broadest sense, everything about that Wildcats’ season turned out perfectly. Because all Arizona basketball has become in the past four decades – including this appearance here at the 2026 Final Four at Lucas Oil Stadium, which will place U of A against powerful Michigan on Saturday night – was built on the foundation of the 1987-88 team: Elliott, power forward Tom Tolbert, center Anthony Cook, shooting guard Craig McMillan, point guard Steve Kerr, reserves Jud Buechler, Kenny Lofton, Joe Turner and Harvey Mason and head coach Lute Olson.
They were the first truly great Arizona team. They finished 35-3 overall, went 17-1 in the Pac-10 Conference, earned a No. 1 NCAA seed. They ascended from No. 17 in the Associated Press preseason poll to No. 1 within the season’s first month, and they remained among the top three teams until March Madness began.
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“We look back on it and we say, ‘We’re the ones that started it,’ ” Tolbert told SN. “It was the start of Arizona’s – I don’t know if dominance is the right word. Over the last 40 years, Arizona stacks up with just about anybody in college basketball.”
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Elliott grew up in Tucson and remembers attending a Wildcats game while a sophomore at Cholla High. He was not yet an established varsity player, so he wasn’t being recruited. He and a friend got tickets to sit in the upper reaches of McKale. That did not last for long.
“I was a basketball junkie, so I watched all the games on TV. Not Arizona games. I watched ACC basketball and Big Ten,” Elliott told SN. “But I went to an Arizona game that year, and it was the end of the year, and there were about 200 people at the game. And that might be overstating it.
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“We were way up there, and we were the only people up there. The usher came up, and they moved us all the way down to the second row. Because there was no one there. At the end of that year, the coach got fired. They were 1-17 in the Pac, 4-24 overall. Coach Olson came in and said, ‘Buy your ticket now; it’s going to be the hottest ticket in the city.’ I said, ‘This old dude is crazy.’ They couldn’t give tickets away.”
When Elliott began playing a lot in high school and revealed himself as a promising prospect, Arizona began to recruit him and presented an invitation to attend a game.
“And sure enough, I went to a game … and it was packed.”
The Wildcats had made only three NCAA Tournament appearances in their history when Olson arrived from Iowa to become head coach in 1983. They doubled that total after his first four years, but each of those teams lost in the tournament’s opening round.
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It was the ’88 team that showed what was possible.
Cook, a 6-9 shot-blocker, came to the Wildcats in 1985 from Van Nuys, Calif., and was a junior on the Final Four team. Tolbert had played briefly at UC Irvine and then starred for a year at Cerritos College.
McMillan was big for his position at the time, a 6-6 senior shooting guard whose scoring role declined from the previous season. That was because Kerr returned for his senior year after missing all of 1986-87 recuperating from knee surgery to repair an injury that occurred while Olson coached him to a gold medal in the FIBA World Cup.
“Lute was amazing,” Elliott said. “He gave every one of us our foundation. He gave Steve his foundation in basketball. He gave me my foundation. Jud Buechler, Tom Tolbert, so many players that played in the league that now are coaches: Luke Walton, Jason Terry. He really taught us the game. He was a genius.
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“He was was the type of coach that he’d sit in the stands there and we’d scrimmage, and he’d stop the scrimmage and tell every player what he did the last five possessions down the floor. So many of us, we owe so much to him. I think he really got me as a player, and it really showed in how he let me be a little bit freer in my junior and senior year, and I’ll just be forever grateful.”
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Arizona’s 1987-88 season began in Alaska of all places, against an unlikely opponent in Duquesne. It was one of only five games between the two programs. It also was my first game as a full-time college basketball beat writer.
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In my fourth year as a sportswriter at The Pittsburgh Press, I finally got the chance to cover the sport that was my dream, and the opening games of the Dukes’ season were at the Great Alaska Shootout. No one understood quite what was coming on the day after Thanksgiving. Final score: Arizona 133, Duquesne 78. That remains the Wildcats’ single-game scoring record. Tolbert converted 11 of his 12 field goal attempts.
“Oh, that was a slaughter,” Tolbert told SN. “I remember Lute being almost embarrassed on the sideline. I mean, he couldn’t put any more players in. Everyone was just making every shot, no matter who he was. It was like he was on the bench going, ‘I wish we would miss a couple shots. This is ridiculous.’ ”
The final two rounds delivered more glamorous opponents, but only a bit more competitive. The Michigan team that a year later would win the NCAA title – Glen Rice, Rumeal Robinson, Terry Mills, Loy Vaught – entered ranked No. 9 but fell to Arizona in the semis, 79-64.
“They had an elite basketball team,” Mills told SN. “Steve Kerr, Cook, Kenny Lofton … Elliott was just an elite player who could play multiple positions. I played with him in Detroit. I played with Buechler in New Jersey. I tell people Kenny Lofton was a handful for us, and they’re like: The guy that played baseball? Yeah, that guy.
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“They really had a wagon. If that was something that launched them, they’ve been on the right track ever since.”
In the final, the Wildcats faced the No. 3-ranked Syracuse Orange, led by Derrick Coleman, Rony Seikaly and Sherman Douglas, all of whom had fallen just short in the NCAA title game against Indiana just seven months earlier. Arizona won, 80-69.
Two weeks after returning home, the Wildcats traveled to Iowa and took down the No. 3 Hawkeyes, 66-59. Before December was up, Arizona got a Duke squad at home that would end up in that year’s Final Four and won, 91-85. With four victories against legitimate Final Four contenders, Arizona elevated to the top of the polls.
“It didn’t become a burden. We had a target on our back, and I think we were young and really naive enough not to realize how much,” Elliott said “We embraced it. We took pride in being the first team from Arizona to become the No. 1 team in the country.
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“Years later, Billy Packer, the CBS announcer, said we had the best November and December in the history of college basketball.”
There was one more significant non-league game, against an Illinois squad that was ranked No. 13 and a year away from truly becoming the Flyin’ Illini: Nick Anderson, Kenny Battle, Kendall Gill and Steven Bardo were all sophomores or juniors. Arizona won by eight. The Pac-10, which produced only one other NCAA Tournament team, proved not at all challenging; the Wildcats went 17-1.
The first four March Madness opponents fell by a combined 107 points.
Tolbert thought the Wildcats were “destined to win a national championship.”
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Problem was, Oklahoma was doing much the same to its opponents in the Southeast Region. And the Sooners had four future NBA payers. And the Wildcats committed an uncharacteristic 15 turnovers. And Kerr shot 2 of 13 from the field and missed 10 3-pointers. And they struggled with the Sooners’ frontcourt size. And, against a team with essentially no depth, they did not make Lofton, Buechler, Turner and Mason an issue.
“They were really good,” Tolbert said. “And we just did some stuff we didn’t normally do. I threw the ball away a couple times on the press, missed a couple shots. There was no way Steve would ever shoot like that in a college game again. It was just one of those freak occurrences. That said, I would have given it to him again and again and again. That’s who he was. Stuff like that happens. That’s why sports is the greatest unscripted television there is.
“It’s funny. I’ve never watched that game. I know Steve’s never watched that game. Steve hates talking about that game. I’m like, ‘Come on, you’ve got to get over it a little bit. It’s like 40 years.’ I’ve gotten over it for the most part. I’m just not watching it, because I know how it ends.
“Yeah, there’s going to be a good team that loses this weekend: Arizona-Michigan. Both those teams are deserving of a national championship; someone’s going to lose. Someone’s going to be sitting around talking to someone like you 40 years from now.”
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The story didn’t end on that night in Kansas City, for the ’88 Wildcats or their figurative progeny.
For the next 15 years, Arizona made every NCAA Tournament and never was seeded lower than No. 5. One of those teams, the 1996-97 group that opened the tournament with a No. 4 seed, won the school’s only championship in overtime final against Kentucky. The program has missed March Madness just four times in the 37 years since the ’88 squad established the standard.
And the 88ers have spread their impact on this sport (and others). Kerr became a five-time NBA champion as a player with the Chicago Bulls and San Antonio Spurs and has won four more titles as coach of the Golden State Warriors and an Olympic gold medal in charge of the USA Basketball squad at Paris 2024.
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Elliott won a title with San Antonio in 1999 and has been the analyst on Spurs TV broadcasts for 25 years. Tolbert played seven seasons in the NBA, primarily with the Warriors, then settled in the Bay Area and became a radio talk show host for 28 years, and analyst with the Golden State radio network and now a podcast host.
Cook played parts of five seasons in the NBA and in overseas pro leagues. Buechler won three titles with the Bulls, played 12 years in the league and later spent time with multiple teams as an assistant coach. McMillan has coached Santa Rosa Junior College in California for 26 years. Mason followed the path of his father, jazz drummer Harvey Sr., into the music business. Harvey is CEO of the Recording Academy – the outfit that presents the Grammy Awards – and has worked on records by Destiny’s Child, Whitney Houston and Jennifer Hudson. Lofton played 17 seasons as a big-league centerfielder and appeared in six All-Star Games
“We were just a special group,” Elliott said. “I’ve got to tell you: We still all communicate with each other, we all still have an affection and love for each other. We just had a bond that’s unique. And a lot of people see it.
“We’ll say it on the text thread: We kicked the door in. We started it. We understand that we helped put the program on the map, gave it the roots it needed to succeed. We take a lot of pride knowing we helped start what’s going on even today.”
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