Who knows what this says about America’s pop culture or Utah, but sports have played a huge role in raising Utah’s national profile during the last 50 years. Sports got the nation talking about Utahns in a way nothing else did, and Utahns, with an intense desire to be one of the cool kids in the class, loved it.
It’s an understatement to say that sports have taken on immense importance in America, for better or worse. Athletes and sports have surpassed entertainers and politicians in their influence and visibility in pop culture (you can decide if this is a good thing) — not just on the field or court, but off it as well (they have also supplanted soap operas). Utah became part of it all and made a name for itself, starting in the late 1970s and early ’80s.
The state had previously made occasional appearances on the sports scene and the American consciousness. Alma Richards won an Olympic gold medal. Gene Fullmer — the “Utah Cyclone” — was the world middleweight champion. Land-speed records fell on the Bonneville Salt Flats, some of them set by a car nicknamed “the Mormon Meteor.”
BYU and Utah were elite basketball programs for a time, each of them winning national titles. Utah State’s Wayne Estes was the best college basketball player in America in 1965 and grew in myth after he was tragically killed during his senior season. The Utah Stars of the old ABA won the 1971 championship, which remains Utah’s only pro basketball championship. Blaine Lindgren and BYU’s Ralph Mann won Olympic silver medals in the hurdles.
Utahns and their teams made other occasional appearances on the athletic stage, but it was a different time. Sports did not receive a fraction of the attention they receive now. This was before talk shows and social media and “30-for-30s” and the internet and 24/7 coverage. The Deseret News didn’t even get around to giving sports its own section in the newspaper regularly until the ’80s (it was hidden inside the B Section). Games didn’t appear on TV until the ’60s (with rare exceptions). The NCAA oligarchy, for instance, restricted when and how often college games could be televised.
Slowly, the TV world — and even the sloths at the NCAA — realized there was money to be made in sports; the coverage, attention and hunger for more exploded.
Utah sports rose in the middle of it all and gave the state a face.
How did it happen?
The Utah Jazz happened. The franchise arrived from New Orleans in 1979. They were poor, downtrodden and barely afloat, but they brought big-league cachet to the state. Years later, Frank Layden, the Jazz coach who eventually became team president, observed, “Wendell Ashton (Deseret News publisher at the time) played a big role in the Jazz coming to Utah. He was 100 percent for us and he got the (Latter-day Saint) church involved with us and we got anything we asked for. I thought he was the unsung hero and didn’t get enough credit for everything he did. I remember he sent Dave Blackwell (the Deseret News Jazz beat reporter) on the road (with the team) when the Tribune wouldn’t send anybody with us. He said, ‘We’re buying ad space in every newspaper in the world.’”
Meaning that Utah’s name would appear daily in media outlets around the world.
The Jazz were a terrible team in those days and they came thiiiis close to leaving town during the early years, and would have, if not for the sheer willpower of a car salesman named Larry Miller. He leveraged his personal finances to the eyeballs — it could have ruined him — to keep the team in town because he believed the franchise would be good for the state and the culture. Fast forward to the 1997 and 1998 NBA Finals, featuring the Jazz and Michael Jordan’s Bulls. They drew 25.6 million viewers in ’97 and 29.04 million viewers for the ’98 rematch, with Game 6 rising to 35.89 million.
John Stockton, Karl Malone, Frank Layden, Jerry Sloan and Miller happened. They were the catalysts for the Jazz’s amazing rise in the sports world, from league doormat to 20 consecutive playoff appearances, fourth most in NBA history. The Jazz were relevant. They were talk show fodder. Stockton and Malone were All-Stars and Olympic champions. Utah was in the spotlight.
BYU, LaVell Edwards and the Quarterback Factory happened. BYU was another doormat when Edwards, the new football coach, had a brilliant, if not long overdue, idea: Since his program couldn’t recruit the blue-chip football players required for a running game — the mode of attack, in those days — why not finesse opponents with inferior talent? Why not throw the ball? If they couldn’t run over people with fast running backs and big linemen, they would pass around, over and through them.
This was revolutionary thinking at the time, strange as that seems now. Only three things can happen when you pass, and two of them are bad, Ohio State coach Woody Hayes famously said. Anyway, the forward pass launched a golden 30-year run under Edwards and played a big role in ushering in the passing game that has overtaken the game at all levels. The Cougars captured audiences with their success and their style of play.
BYU became known as Quarterback U. Gifford Nielsen, Marc Wilson, Jim McMahon, Steve Young, Robbie Bosco and Ty Detmer set ridiculous passing records. Detmer would win the Heisman Trophy. McMahon and Young would lead NFL teams to Super Bowl victories and Young would win the NFL’s MVP award two times.
“(McMahon) was throwing the ball for thousands and thousands of yards and the rest of college football was running the split T or the Veer,” Young would say years later, recalling his years as a backup to McMahon. “We were so far ahead of everyone. We were just abusing the system because we were so far ahead.”
The Cougars were at the height of their powers from 1979-1985, when they amassed a won-lost record of 77-12. Along the way, there were bursts of magic. In 1980, they won the “Miracle Bowl,” overcoming a 20-point deficit in the final four minutes and scoring on a 41-yard pass on the final play. They won the 1983 Holiday Bowl with a trick play in the final seconds — a touchdown pass from halfback Eddie Stinnett to quarterback Steve Young. Then there was this:
The 1984 national championship happened. In 1984, BYU gained national attention by running the table, winning all 13 of its games. The Cougars seemed predestined. They won five games by a touchdown or less in improbable ways. Near the end of the season, they rose to No. 1 in the national polls late, much to the shock and horror of football fans and media who said their schedule was too weak for such a lofty ranking. It wasn’t just the winning that drew attention to BYU; it was their flair for the dramatic, their pass game, their 11th-hour wins and the controversy that grew around their contention for a national title.
Their ascendance to No. 1 generated a heated discussion on the national sports scene, led by TV host Bryant Gumbel, who called BYU Bo Diddly Tech. The 1984 Holiday Bowl suddenly became the national championship game, BYU v. Michigan. In that game, injured quarterback Robbie Bosco limped back into the game and led a length-of-the-field drive, ending with a touchdown pass to Kelly Smith with 1:23 left in the game. Voters had no choice but to crown them national champions. They were the only unbeaten team left standing.
Danny Ainge happened. BYU was prominent in another arena during this time and grabbed similar attention. While McMahon was setting more than 70 NCAA records on the football field, he had a counterpart on the basketball court. Danny Ainge led BYU to 25 wins and, like McMahon’s Miracle Bowl Hail Mary pass, he had a signature play. Down by one against Notre Dame in the Sweet 16, Ainge took the inbounds pass and weaved through the defense the length of the court to make a layup at the buzzer. He was named national Player of the Year, then drew more attention by electing to play Major League Baseball instead of basketball (only to join the NBA later).
The University of Utah “BCS busters” happened. Or should we say the rise of Utah football, first under Urban Meyer, then under Kyle Whittingham, happened? For years, college football was held hostage by the BCS (Bowl Championship Series), the latest in a series of schemes designed to restrict access to the relevant bowl games and the national championship to their own blue bloods (not unlike today, under a new system). It worked. No non-BCS team was invited to a BCS bowl the first six years.
Then in 2004, Utah crashed the party. The Utes were 11-0 and, like BYU a decade earlier, they couldn’t be ignored. They became the first team from a non-BCS conference to play in a BCS bowl. They routed Pittsburgh in the Fiesta Bowl 35-7 to strike a blow for college football’s middle class. Four years later, the Utes were unbeaten again and shouldered their way into another BCS bowl. This time they were given a bigger stage — the Sugar Bowl against powerhouse Alabama. The Utes again routed the competition, this time 31-17. They finished the season No. 2 in the national polls.
Utah was perhaps the most influential team in forcing the BCS to change, and in 2013, the BCS system was abandoned. The Utes became an elite program in football under Meyer and Whittingham.
Rick Majerus happened. What Meyer and Whittingham did for Utah football, Majerus did for Utah basketball, beginning in the ’90s. He coached for 13 full seasons — between time offs for illness — during which the Utes qualified for the Sweet 16 four times, the Elite Eight twice and the Final Four once. They played Kentucky in the 1998 national championship game, leading with 12 minutes left but ultimately losing.
When Majerus wasn’t attracting attention with his teams and their victories, he got it through his personality, which was as big as his waistline. He was funny, wildly profane and thoughtful, and on postgame shows, he might talk about zone defenses or sunsets, academics and literature, and the media ate it up.
Andrew Bogut, Alex Smith and Keith Van Horn happened. Bogut and Smith were the No. 1 overall picks of the NFL and NBA drafts, respectively, in the same year (2005) and Van Horn was the No. 2 overall pick in 1997. That earned a few magazine covers.
Winning the 2002 Winter Olympic bid happened. That was in 1995 and the news put Salt Lake City in the international news for seven years, most of it good, some of it not so good. Salt Lake City put on a model Olympics and had lots of eyeballs looking at its city and venues. The Games attracted an estimated 2.1 billion viewers from 160 countries — 189 million in the U.S. — during 27 hours of coverage. But …
The winter Olympic bid scandal happened. News broke that Salt Lake City’s organizing committee had been providing gifts and financial incentives to IOC members. It had been part of the bidding process forever, an unspoken quid pro quo arrangement that was expected by the IOC. This was the way international sporting bodies did business (see FIFA). But suddenly it was The Scandal of the day, Salt Lake City was cast as the bad guys, and the IOC looked askance at Salt Lake City as if to say, What have you done? Anyway, it was the topic du jour for weeks.
The arrival of two more major league franchises happened. Real Salt Lake and the Utah Hockey Club gave the city professional soccer and hockey. RSL won the 2009 Major League Soccer championship, beating the Los Angeles Galaxy and David Beckham in a penalty shootout in front of 46,000 fans in Seattle, not to mention a TV audience.
Big-time conference membership for BYU and Utah happened. This put them in the big leagues, officially. Utah was invited to join the Pac-12, then BYU was invited to join the Big 12 and, following the collapse of the Pac-12, Utah joined the Big 12, as well. They gained TV sets and a much bigger audience.
Jimmermania happened. He was a star basketball player at BYU, but much more. He become a pop culture phenomenon in 2011. Raps were written about him. He appeared on national magazine covers. You couldn’t turn on talk shows without finding a discussion about Jimmer (everyone called him that, no last name necessary, like Cher and Bono). He played a Feb. 8playground game, casting up shots from everywhere this side of the parking lot, the precursor to Caitlin Clark. He averaged a nation-leading 28.9 points per game. He was named everybody’s national player of the year. The Cougs rode him to a 32-5 record, losing in overtime in the Sweet 16. All eyes were on Jimmer and BYU that year.
Record-beating distance runners happened. Five Utah preps have been national cross-country athletes of the year. Two high schools have finished 1-2 in the national rankings. Loaded with local kids, BYU has become the premier distance-running school in the country. It had its birth in 1984, when three BYU alumni swept the three distance races in the U.S. Olympic track and field trials in Los Angeles. It continued in the next decade, when BYU women won four national collegiate cross-country championships. It has continued since then. The BYU men’s and women’s teams have each won two NCAA cross-country championships in the last six years, with both of them winning the title in 2024. Seven current and former BYU distance runners qualified for the 2024 U.S. Olympic track and field team, all of them competing on the world’s biggest stage in Paris.
That’s the way it’s been for the past few decades — Utah has raised its visibility via the football field, basketball court, soccer pitch, track, snow and ice.