Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Columnist Ron Kantowski: Stars aligned for Utah athletics

Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4088.

If they ever do a sequel to "My Cousin Vinny" and shoot it in Salt Lake City, Brooklyn-born Joe Pesci wouldn't have to worry about the way he enunciates "the two youths" while arguing his case in front of the judge.

He could say "the two Utes" and everybody would know who he was talking about.

The two Utes would be Alex Smith and Andrew Bogut, the two biggest men on campus at the University of Utah. In the case of the 7-foot tall Bogut, that would be literally as well as figuratively.

Smith, if NFL draft guru Mel Kiper Jr., can be trusted, and Bogut, if former Notre Dame coach Digger Phelps (and others) can be believed, may be the first players selected in the pro football and pro basketball drafts.

If that happens, it will be the first time that players from the same school are chosen first in their respective drafts. Michigan's never done it. Notre Dame's never done it. Nor UCLA, Florida or Oklahoma, or any other of the NCAA's athletic factories. What's remarkable is that itty-bitty Utah from the itty-bitty Mountain West Conference, both far removed from the assembly line, may be the first to claim the distinction.

How crazy is that? I would have believed Razorbacks would fly, or that they would start selling ice-cold Budweiser at LaVell Edwards Stadium up in Provo, before I believed the state of Utah -- more specifically, the state university of Utah -- would produce two of the most coveted players to declare for the draft.

Not only are Smith and Bogut special players, but the teams they led and continue to lead are pretty good, too.

Smith, a junior quarterback, sparked the Utes to an undefeated season and a BCS-crashing 35-7 victory against Pitt in the Fiesta Bowl. Bogut, a sophomore center/forward/guard, has spearheaded the Utes' run into the Sweet 16, which continues tonight against annual nemesis Kentucky.

Even longtime Utah fans seem amazed by the Utes' success during the past school year.

"You wonder why it came to be now, whether it's a coincidence," said KLAS-TV Channel 8 sports anchor Chris Maathuis, Utah Class of '84. "It's gotta be a coincidence, doesn't it?"

Well, judging by this year, maybe not.

Maathuis has been watching the Utes play since Luther "Ticky" Burden attached tassels to his high tops and Lee Grosscup invented the shovel pass. OK, so his dad told him about Grosscup. But he has been around long enough to know that this year has been something for the Tabernacle Choir to sing about.

While Utah has almost always been competitive on the basketball court -- it began the season ranked 10th among Division I schools in all-time winning percentage -- the football team's resurgence under Urban Meyer the past two seasons has turned Utah into the Mountain West's flagship program, especially given the recent struggles of its not-so-friendly neighbor to the south.

"It used to bug me that a lot of my buddies, a lot of my classmates (at Utah) would drive right past the Huntsman Center (the basketball home of the Utes) to watch a game at BYU," Maathuis said.

"When I was going to school there, they (the Utes) didn't do anything like this. They had a crummy little concrete football stadium and they couldn't even pack that thing."

To show how far the Utes have progressed, until Keith (Van Horn) and the Fat Man (Rick Majerus) had their nice run in the late 1990s that culminated in a loss to Kentucky in the 1998 championship game a year after Van Horn became an NBA lottery pick, Utah was perhaps best known as a gymnastics school. From 1981-86, the women's gym team won an unprecedented six consecutive national championships. Utah won four more national titles during the 1990s and is ranked No. 1 in gymnastics again this year.

The magnitude of its prowess on the balance beam notwithstanding, the only time you ever heard floor exercise mentioned in conjunction with Utah is when Majerus' doctors thought it would be a good idea.

But this is different. Utah's success on the football field and basketball court is giving it street cred with recruits as well as the guys who talk sports while sitting on a bar stool or by calling Romey and asking for a vine.

Maybe they haven't heard of famous Utah alums such as Nolan Bushnell, who launched the video game revolution with the creation of Pong and sold Atari for $28 million in 1976 -- so he could open the first Chuck E. Cheese restaurant. Or Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, which is responsible for blockbusters such as "Toy Story" and "Finding Nemo."

But they've heard of Smith and Bogut.

Pixar's latest smash is "The Incredibles," which if you put the exploits of Smith and Bogut and their teammates to animation, would be a pretty good working title for Utah's athletic renaissance.

Anyway, they've got longtime Utah fans such as Maathius animated -- especially when longtime BYU fans are in the mood for some conversation.

Dave McCann, Maathius' co-anchor at Channel 8, just happens to be a BYU graduate.

"He's one of those guys that if the BYU football team had 11 freshmen in the starting lineup, he'd still say they're gonna be pretty good," Maathius said of the good-natured needling he has been giving to his cohort.

"So it's been kind of fun this year because he's had nothing to say."

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