I sat down to write about Lute Olson’s retirement and was going to do the standard career retrospective post (he won games, look that shit up), we’ll miss him, &c.  Here’s the thing: it’s such a weird retirement for a public figure.  He took time off but promised to come back, then came back, but didn’t come back.

While it’s tempting to say that you or I would have handled our health or personal problems better, I think we know that’s wishful thinking.  The standards we (or at least Pat Forde) set for others in their final acts is kind of a joke.  Almost all of us will retire someday, but almost none of us will do so in a satisfying way.  Most of us will retire when we can’t make the commute anymore because of a slipped disc that never healed right, or when the people we work with stop giving us worthwhile work, or when the thought of one more condescending continuing ed seminar gives us the howling fantods to the point where we just fire off a retirement memo and hope we’ve enough in the kitty (or at least educated the shit out of our kids, so we can flip the script get our mooch on).

No matter what, very few of us will have what those of us who went to college in the late 1990’s consider to be the ideal retirement (NSFW, but you knew that):

So let’s go easy on Lute, even if we suspect he wouldn’t show us the same courtesy.  These last few months haven’t been his finest hour, but who among us can say they’d have handled it any better?