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Lute
Olson's wife can work the boards too
By Rhonda Bodfield Bloom
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
 Christine Olson is the type of woman who
knows that her sons' football cleats are in
the third cubbyhole on the right in the
closet and who jokes that her friends say
her tombstone will someday state, "Here lies
the most organized woman who ever lived."
She carries a folding chair in the trunk of
her car to watch the boys' football games.
She listens to Motown.
Her favorite dinner recipe is pasta with
marinara sauce.
She thinks having dinner together as a
family is a tradition that should stick
around.
She likes her movies to be tear-jerkers.
Her biggest pet peeve? Whiners. "Play the
hand you're dealt," she said.
Tucson hasn't really had a chance to get
very familiar with Christine Olson -
formerly Christine Toretti, a divorced
mother of three who married University of
Arizona basketball coach Lute Olson in April
2003. Although she sits on the board of St.
Gregory College Preparatory School, where
her boys attend classes, she isn't yet
active in local charities or local politics.
Indeed, her cell phone still has a
Pennsylvania area code, and it was in
Pennsylvania that the couple spent Christmas
- at her 200-acre farm.
The 47-year-old is still trying to find a
balance, splitting her time between her new
life with Lute and her responsibilities as
CEO of her family business, S.W. Drilling
Co., which has 350 people and is the
country's largest privately held, land-based
natural gas drilling company.
And then there was that little race for the
White House last year, which demanded her
duties as Pennsylvania's committeewoman for
the Republican National Committee. President
Bush made 44 stops in the swing state, and
for each of those, Olson was involved in
selecting the thousands of voters who would
attend, with just a few days notice.
Tucsonans are likely to see more of the
Olsons off the court soon, as they embark on
a drive to raise $50 million for the Arizona
Cancer Center. They hope to help make it one
of the premier centers for women's cancer
research and treatment in the nation.
Lute Olson turned 70 in September, and the
couple spent a lot of time talking about
what he'd like his legacy to be. While he's
clearly proud of the basketball program he's
built, his passion is in pushing for a cure
for cancer, and Christine wants to help him
meet his goals.
"She thinks big. She's not a local person in
that sense - she thinks on a national
scale," said Setsuko Chambers, director of
the Division of Women's Cancers at the
Arizona Cancer Center.
Chambers, who started in July, was lured
away from Yale University with the promise
that there would be a more cohesive focus on
treating breast and gynecological cancers,
including ovarian, uterine and cervical
cancers.
Christine Olson, Chambers said, shares her
vision.
"She understands that it will not be cheap
and it will not be easy to do," Chambers
said. "But we're hoping with her history of
success, it's something that will come to
fruition."
Christine Olson is not unfamiliar with
challenges.
Fans have been known to try to gauge the
strength of the couple's union by noting the
number of games she has missed, or whether
she smiles when her husband wins. Such
speculation can be exasperating, she said.
"If I'm not smiling every second, I might
just be worried about how my son is doing in
English," she said. If she's not there, it's
because she has other engagements.
"Sometimes I think people think I didn't
have a life before Lute. It's not like I was
under a rock somewhere."
The simple act of trying to meld two
households is work, she said. With her
oldest son in school in London, her two
teen-age sons in Tucson had to learn to
share her with a "tough, disciplined guy."
And her youngest son, Matt, 14, didn't like
Tucson at all at first, saying it wasn't his
home. When she offered to let him stay back
in Pennsylvania on the farm, where there are
close family friends to offer support, he
mulled it over, but decided no place would
be home without her. He told her when she
was returning from a Christmas party at the
White House. That was Dec. 16, 2003 - a day
that goes down in her book as "a cool day."
Then there was the struggle to find her fit
in a community that admired and loved Lute's
wife of 47 years, Bobbi, who died of ovarian
cancer in 2001. Christine recalled Lute
telling her when they were getting serious
that it would probably be too much for her
to live in Tucson. He even offered to
retire. And when he brought her to the
McKale Center court for the first time,
which is named after Lute and Bobbi, she
could feel him watching her from the corner
of his eye.
"If you really love someone, you rejoice in
the fact that that person had a wonderful
relationship. I am incredibly sad that she's
no longer here, because she was clearly such
a fabulous wife and wonderful mom,"
Christine said. She didn't want Olson to
give up what he loved doing, so she told him
she would find the strength to make it work.
There were the occasional, self-imposed
doubts that come with being overtired or
overextended.
"There were times I felt I'm not half the
person she was. There were times when I felt
all wrong, or like I didn't belong, and
there were times when the kids would look at
me and I'd wonder if they'd rather that
their mom was here, which would be natural.
"I'm not going to say it was always easy,
but we found our way and we both feel that
God blessed us with this opportunity to
spend this time in our lives together. I
wake up in the morning and pinch myself."
So sure was she, she said, that she not only
moved 2,000 miles away from her base of
operations, but turned down a position in
the White House. She will not say which
post, because she does not want the
incumbent to know she was the first choice.
"I know what it takes to make a marriage
work, and living in Washington, D.C., was
not the right fit."
The night they met, seated next to each
other at an NCAA dinner, she had expected to
spend all night catering to a large ego.
"I thought, 'Great. This is going to be like
work, like entertaining a senator or a
congressman.' " Instead, she found a
successful man, humble about that success.
The coach may have a stiff demeanor in
public, she said, but he's actually very
funny.
"No, really," she insists, adding she laughs
all the time.
Laughs seemed a long way off when her
father, Sam Jack Jr., committed suicide in
1990. Dads are bigger than life for their
daughters, and hers was no exception. She
counts that time as her darkest.
"He was my rock. The person I leaned on. And
to have that pulled out from under me was
just devastating."
She sat down with her mother to discuss the
options. They could sell the family company,
they could hire someone to run it, or she
could run it. They decided she would take
the job. And she discovered her own
capabilities.
"As sad and angry as I get that he took his
own life, he gave me this gift of finding
myself," she said.
She wasn't unfamiliar with the business. At
11, she started her own natural gas
production company with her mother. By
college, she was managing the company's
pension and profit-sharing portfolio and
later served as the chief financial officer.
But she didn't know anything about the
operations end, and spent day after day
visiting drilling rigs and talking with
employees.
Her father, a student of Gen. George S.
Patton, had run his company like a military
organization, dictating orders top-down. She
has a different style, encouraging feedback.
It took a year to build up trust, but her
employees responded to the new freedom.
Over time, she stopped waking up in a cold
sweat, wondering if she was wrecking the
family legacy. Her youngest son may never
appreciate the role he played then. When she
took over the business, she was pregnant.
"No matter how bad things got, I kept
thinking, 'This really stinks, but in
October, I'm going to have a baby.' Matthew
will never realize how he kept me going."
She is passionate about gender-equity
issues. She talks about being among the
early coed classes at the University of
Virginia, where the guys had to get used to
competing in the classroom with the girls
they would pick up for dates. She estimates
she's helped raise millions of dollars for
nonprofits and campaigns, which earned her a
place at a table with the "the good old
boys" who weren't used to women hashing out
political deals.
"When you have money in your pocket, they
listen." In 1994, she started a retreat open
to 400 international female CEOs, which she
still holds annually.
In 1997, then-Gov. Tom Ridge asked her to
consider serving as the GOP committeewoman
for Pennsylvania. She was already raising a
family and running a business, but a friend
encouraged her, saying that with as much as
she'd done to boost women, she had to do it.
Her term is up in 2008.
She gave up day-to-day oversight of the
company in 2000 to concentrate on getting
Bush elected to the White House, donating
nearly $240,000 to GOP causes that election
cycle. Her family had been casual friends of
the Bushes - her father had raised money for
Bush's father (former President George H.W.
Bush), and she went to school with Marvin
Bush, the current president's youngest
brother.
But the woman who won a seat in student
government as a junior in high school is not
interested in holding office herself. She
prefers being in the background, helping
others.
She's unapologetic about being a strong
partisan. When the little brother of her
best friend in high school called to say he
was running for state office, as a Democrat,
she told him, "I just want you to know that
I'll do everything in my power to help you
lose." He did. When Lute hears such stories,
he laughs, saying, "And you think I'm
competitive?"
She said she's had to adapt to Tucson's
slower pace. She has so much energy that she
bounces out of bed at 6 a.m., she said,
ready to conquer something, while everyone
else is still fumbling around for the
coffee.
This year, there will be much to conquer.
The cancer drive, she said, will be "a top
priority in my life."
Meanwhile, there's still the race for the
basketball championship. She finds herself
not just caring for three boys, but 17. "The
hardest part is watching the games because
you want so badly for it to turn out well,"
she said.
Lute's autobiography should be finished by
the fall.
The couple will soon move into a new home in
the gated Finisterra community in the
Foothills and will sell the one nearby that
Lute and Bobbi lived in.
And there will be long morning hikes and
serious domino matches.
But she's not ready to say Pennsylvania
won't be beckoning.
There's that rumor, you see, that former
Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver and Hall
of Famer Lynn Swann is considering a
gubernatorial run - as a Republican - in
2006. And a good political battle is hard to
resist.
This feature originally ran in the Arizona
Daily Star
Contact reporter Rhonda Bodfield Bloom at
rbloom@azstarnet.com or at 807-8031.
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