In memoir, Chris Hill looks back on 31 momentous years as Utes AD
In 1989, when Chris Hill, the athletic director at the University of Utah, was in the process of hiring the best, and most ungovernable, basketball coach to ever anchor a bench in the state of Utah, he pulled out a yellow legal pad and in longhand sketched out a contract as he wa
In 1989, when Chris Hill, the athletic director at the University of Utah, was in the process of hiring the best, and most ungovernable, basketball coach to ever anchor a bench in the state of Utah, he pulled out a yellow legal pad and in longhand sketched out a contract as he was flying to Seattle to finalize the deal.
Knowing Rick Majerus’s proclivity to use, shall we say, rather colorful language from time to time, Hill inserted the above-noted provision.
True story — and he still has that original yellow pad to prove it.
The Majerus contract is just one of three decades worth of stories the most accomplished AD in University of Utah history has captured in his memoir, “Thirty-one Years In The Front Row,” that was released this week, just in time for Father’s Day.
For the better part of the last two years, Hill has racked his memory, assembled his memorabilia and huddled with former Deseret News sports writer Brad Rock and his top aide at the U, Liz Abel, to capture, through story-telling, an era of University of Utah athletics that transformed what had been a middle-tier D-I school into one of the most admired athletic departments in the country.
From 1987 through 2018, Hill and the Utes embarked on a building phase unlike anything in the school’s history. One that saw tens of millions spent on new facilities, including a total makeover of Rice-Eccles Stadium, a trip to the NCAA basketball tournament championship game, two undefeated BCS-busting football teams and the Utes first admittance into a power conference when it joined the PAC-12.
And yet, when he was first hired as AD in October 1987, Chris Hill was the unlikeliest of candidates to steer the Ute ship.
His credentials amounted to directing a nonprofit and raising money for the Ute booster club. He’d had a grand total of eight jobs, one of them as a house painter, in 14 years since first coming to Utah in 1973 as a graduate assistant to head basketball coach Bill Foster, the coach he’d played for at Rutgers. “I was an Irish Catholic left-wing Democrat from New Jersey,” Hill recalls. “When I got here I’d never met a Mormon.”
