Month: March 2025

As the 97th Academy Awards were underway on Sunday night, with Oscars being doled out to the the biggest celebrities in Hollywood, there was another Oscar in Salt Lake City that was shining.

Oscar Tshiebwe — a Utah Jazz player on a two-way contract who has made his name in the G League as an other-worldly rebounder and one of the most cheerful and delightful people to be around — had the best game of his young career on Sunday against the New Orleans Pelicans.

The Jazz were incredibly shorthanded on Sunday night, playing without five of their six top scorers, and although there were a lot of defensive issues that Jazz head coach Will Hardy took issue with, he made a point to say that there was a bright spot in the Jazz’s 128-121 loss

“Oscar deserves a shout out,” Hardy said. “He played incredibly hard and gave our team a really big lift. I thought he guarded Zion (Williamson) very well. His strength really showed up in those moments.”

It wasn’t the easiest assignment for Tshiebwe, playing in just his 13th NBA game and tasked with guarding someone as physically imposing as Williamson. But Tshiebwe has slowly been improving in his time with the Jazz’s G League affiliate, the SLC Stars, and gaining confidence along the way.

“He’s a beast,” Tshiebwe said of Williamson. “When he’s attacking me, I was like, I definitely need help. But I’m big too. Sometimes I forget that I’m big and strong. But when you see Zion, and you see how he’s bullying a lot of people, your mind is thinking different. But I feel like I did good on him little bit.”

Tshiebwe, who is averaging 16.5 points and 17.5 rebounds per game in the G League regular season, said that he is still trying to find his voice as a communicator, even mentioning that his college coaches use to tell him that they were shocked that such a quiet voice was coming out of such a large body.

“Oscar, he has a really tough job, because he’s not with us much, and he does such a great job with the Stars, and there’s a lot of common language that we use with the Stars, but there are a few differences,” Hardy said. “I think ultimately for him to get way more comfortable being our lead communicator on defense, he would need to be with us for an extended period of time. I don’t want to be overly critical of that. I think Oscar does an amazing job of going back and forth. And he gets thrown in the rotation tonight and gets 21 minutes and I thought he handled himself great.”

It was the most minutes that Thshiebwe has played on an NBA court and it was his most productive NBA game. He finished with 16 points and 13 rebounds while committing just one foul.

It really was Oscar night, in every sense of the phrase.

There have been a lot of great all-around gymnasts who have competed for the University of Utah over the years.

Some of the best in NCAA women’s gymnastics history, in fact.

The list includes national championship winning all-arounders like Sue Stednitz, Megan McCunniff (Marsden), Missy Marlowe, Theresa Kulikowski and, most recently, Maile O’Keefe.

But also gymnasts like Suzanne Metz, Kristen Kenoyer, Melissa Vituj, Ashley Postell, Annabeth Eberle, Georgia Dabritz, MyKayla Skinner and Kristina Baskett.

The list could go on for quite awhile, in truth. There have been a host of gymnasts come through Utah who have thrived competing on all four events, week after week.

That includes the current duo of Grace McCallum and Makenna Smith.

McCallum and Smith aren’t newcomers to competing in the all-around.

McCallum has, for a good portion of her career starting when she arrived at Utah as a freshman, competed in the all-around. Smith has been a regular in the all-around since her freshman year, too.

But this season, the two women have arguably been the best they’ve ever been at Utah — as a duo, especially.

As of Sunday night, McCallum and Smith are both ranked in the top 10 nationally in the all-around.

McCallum boasts an NQS of 39.545, good enough for No. 8 overall, while Smith is sitting on an NQS of 39.535, which slots her in at No. 9 overall, per Road to Nationals.

Both Red Rocks have scored above a 39.700 in a competition this season, making them two of only 10 gymnasts this year who have met that threshold.

McCallum is currently tied for the single highest all-around score this season — with Oregon State’s Jade Cary — with a 39.800.

Smith’s 39.725 is equal to the best performances by Oklahoma’s Jordan Bowers and Audrey Davis, as well as LSU’s Kailin Chio.

Additionally, McCallum and Smith are responsible for a combined 31 event wins this season (counting ties). That is 70% of all event wins for Utah so far this season.

Suffice it to say, McCallum and Smith are having excellent seasons for the Red Rocks, arguably the best of their respective careers (and in Smith’s case, 2025 has definitely been her best season).

Having two Red Rocks in the top 10 in the all-around nationally is a rarity, though, at least in the program’s recent history.

The last time Utah had multiple gymnasts ranked in the top 10 in the all-around nationally (through nine weeks of competition) was 2019.

Back then, it was MyKayla Skinner (ranked No. 2 overall) and MaKenna Merrell-Giles (ranked No. 8) who thrived in the all-around.

Prior to that duo (who did the same thing in 2018) you have to go back to 2009 to find an equally accomplished all-around pair at Utah.

That year, Kristina Baskett and Nina Kim slotted in at No. 2 and No. 10 overall.

That Utah hasn’t regularly had multiple top 10 all-around gymnasts isn’t surprising. It is a difficult feat for any program to pull off, even one as storied as Utah.

This season, only Utah (with McCallum and Smith), Oklahoma (with Bowers, Davis and Faith Torrez) and Florida (with Leanne Wong and Selena Harris-Miranda) have multiple top 10 all-arounders currently.

Last year, only Oklahoma and Cal managed the feat (again, through nine weeks of competition), and the year before that only Florida and UCLA pulled it off.

Interestingly, the last team to win a national title with multiple top 10 all-arounders was Oklahoma in 2017, when Maggie Nichols and Chayse Capps were No. 1 and No. 3 in the country (through nine weeks). That may say something about the importance of depth and having many capable contributors, as opposed to relying on all-around excellence.

Whether or not Utah goes on a run to win a national title this year, McCallum and Smith have been difference makers for the Red Rocks.

Utah will be ranked No. 5 in the country when the rankings are officially released Monday and much of that will be because one of the best all-around duos in the nation.

Sometime between now and June — the exact date is yet to be determined — Randy Olson will take down the framed honors hanging on the walls of his fifth floor office, soak in one final look at the panoramic view of the Salt Lake Valley below, and walk away from the John A. Moran Eye Center to join the ranks of the newly retired.

He’ll be 78 in April, so no one’s suggesting this is premature, but, still, no one’s entirely sure the building will remain standing once he’s gone.

Few, if any, institutions in the state are as entwined with one person as the Moran Eye Center is with Dr. Randall J Olson. Would it be there without him? Or would it still be a parking lot? And would Utah be home to one of the greatest eye care centers in the world?

Probably not.

“I hope you’ve got good equity in your house because I’m sure as heck not paying for it.”

That’s how the chair of surgery at the University of Utah Medical Center responded when Olson asked if he could add a third ophthalmologist to the staff. Only the chair didn’t say heck.

This wasn’t ancient history. This was the fall of 1979. A few months earlier, Olson, 32 years old and six years removed from graduating from the U. of U. Medical School, had arrived in Salt Lake to head up the hospital’s ophthalmology division. Although “head up” is being generous, as is “division.” Olson was the only ophthalmologist.

It had taken some hard talking for him just to get the job, because the med center was thinking seriously about not replacing Olson’s predecessor, who had departed for greener pastures. Eye care at the U. was losing money, a perennial drain on the system. They reluctantly gave Olson an $80,000 loan for startup operational expenses and an office so tiny it had a pocket door just so a desk could fit inside.

Yet here he was, a few months later, threat of losing his house notwithstanding, wanting to triple the faculty when they couldn’t even afford more staff.

He talked a former med school intern named Mano Swartz to hire on for below-market pay, and the first thing the two of them did was take a road trip. They loaded into Swartz’s car, a Chevy Monte Carlo, turned up the volume on the eight-track, stayed at the cheapest motels they could find and visited ophthalmologists throughout northern Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and parts of Montana.

Their message was a simple one: refer your patients to us, and they’ll get excellent care.

If the gamble hadn’t worked, you wouldn’t be reading this.

But as it turned out, word of mouth, and the doctors’ power of persuasion, proved to be a momentum turner. By the end of that first fiscal year, in June of 1980, the $80K loan was paid back and ophthalmology at the U. was in the black.

Solvency meant survival, and that meant Olson could begin to concentrate on his long-range dream: to bring world-class eye care to the Intermountain West, something similar to the facilities he’d seen while training at UCLA and LSU.

It would take volumes to detail all that’s happened in the decades since to make the dream come true — something Dr. Olson says he plans to tackle when he writes his memoirs — but suffice it to say the history is full of Olson being told “no” and him proving to be pathologically incapable of hearing it. That and generous people appearing on the scene just when they were most needed.

Most significant of these donors was John Arthur Moran, a successful investment banker and devoted University of Utah graduate (Class of 1954) who was introduced to Olson by former university president Chase Peterson.

Olson remembers what would prove to be a most auspicious event:

“We met in the president’s office. Chase was a consummate fundraiser. We had a dog and pony show for John, after which John said, ‘I like it, I want to be involved. What do you need?’ I had no idea what to say and Chase just came up with a number. He said, ‘John, we need $3 million.’ John said, ‘Can you do what you need to do to get this center up and going?’ and Chase said, ‘yes, we can,’ and I’m thinking, ‘I’m not sure if we can or not.’

“Then John asked if we would like that in installments or one single donation. Chase said, ‘one single donation,’ John said ‘OK,’ and just like that we were off and running. We broke ground in 1991.”

The first John A. Moran Eye Center, built for $17 million thanks to other donors who joined Moran, opened in 1993, a gleaming new 85,000 square foot building next to the Huntsman Cancer Institute.

In less than a decade it was too small.

Again, Moran stepped up, this time agreeing to donate $18 million toward a bigger headquarters. The donations from the old building were put back into the new one, while the Sam Skaggs and Ezekiel R. Dumke families contributed an additional $10 million each to top off the fundraising. In 2003 construction began in a parking lot south of Primary Children’s Hospital on the second John A. Moran Eye Center.

Since then, an additional 11 remote clinics have been added, along with an outreach program that provides humanitarian eye care aid throughout the world.

Today, the Moran is considered among the world’s top eye care institutions. Its researchers and clinicians are perennials on The Ophthalmologist magazine’s Power List ranking of the 100 most influential people in the industry. A business that had two employees and $180,000 net revenue in its first year now has more than 500 employees and a yearly net revenue of $90 million. It is incalculable how many eye patients have been helped in the past 46 years, just as it is incalculable to compute how much the Moran Eye Center means to the Intermountain West.

All traced back to the vision of one man.

Postscript: As the final day approaches, and the University of Utah wraps up its nationwide search for his successor as CEO, no one is surprised that Olson is using his pending retirement as a vehicle to — what else — raise money.

Brochures with his smiling face on the cover have been mailed to prospective donors near and far, hailing “a visionary” and highlighting the remarkable story of Randall J Olson and the Moran Eye Center.

“I’m trying to see that there’s a nice buffer for my successor,” says the soon to be retired ophthalmologist. “There’s so much still we want to do, so much more to accomplish.” Then, with a smile in his eye he adds, “and you know, we are running out of space.”

Ogden • One man is dead and another is in jail after a fight at an Ogden nightclub that police say began with a dispute over tacos.

Ogden police say the episode occurred Feb. 23 at an unidentified club near Washington Boulevard and 35th Street.

Police said a 56-year-old security guard at the club was “confronting” a man who refused to pay for tacos. This escalated into a fight, which ended with the customer lying in the middle lane of Washington Boulevard.

Police said the security guard and two other guards left the man lying in the street. Then, less than a minute later, a car pulled out of a nearby parking lot. The driver, police reported, turned left and ended up running over the victim. Police added that they’re unsure whether the driver of the car was involved in the fight.

The 56-year-old security guard was arrested Saturday on suspicion of manslaughter, a second-degree felony.

Read the FOX 13 story.

Note to readers • The Salt Lake Tribune and FOX 13 are content-sharing partners.

Sometimes you can feel time bend. Stand anywhere in Utah right now and you’ll sense it — 50 years of growth compressed into 20. Twenty years squeezed into five, and now another great acceleration as Olympic preparations reshape everything. We’re not just building for 2034 — we’re building for 2054.

It’s not just about building venues or widening roads. It’s about something more profound: the compression of time itself. The future isn’t coming gradually anymore. It’s rushing toward us with the speed of silicon chips and Olympic dreams, with Brad Wilson and the committee ensuring our Olympic vision aligns with Utah’s long-term development needs.

You feel it most clearly in the quiet moments. In how conversations about next year quickly become discussions about the next decade. In how plans for Olympic housing become questions about our children’s communities. In how decisions about power grids become choices about what kind of state we’ll hand to the next generation. This sense of urgency echoes in the governor’s State of the State address, where the time to build isn’t just a slogan — it’s an imperative for Utah’s future.

The Salt Lake Chamber’s “Utah Rising” initiative, led by Derek Miller and Spencer Eccles, captures this momentum, while Natalie Gochnour and the Gardner Policy Institute paint a picture of a “New Utah” emerging from this acceleration. The Legislature’s vigor for big ideas matches the scope of our challenges.

We’ve been here before, of course. The 2002 Olympics came and went, leaving behind not just venues but lessons. The most important? That the real work isn’t about the event — it’s about what happens after. The natural pause that followed those games taught us something crucial: Moments of acceleration require building beyond them.

This is why 2025’s choices matter so deeply. When we plan energy systems, we’re not just powering today’s homes but tomorrow’s innovations. When we think about housing, we’re not just sheltering Olympic visitors but shaping communities that will outlast all of us. When we build infrastructure, we’re not just connecting venues but weaving together Utah’s next chapter.

The compression of time demands something more from us now. Not quick fixes or temporary patches. Not just Olympic-ready solutions but generation-spanning foundations. The decisions we make in 2025 need to answer questions we won’t even ask until 2040.

Here’s what makes Utah different: We’ve always known how to build beyond the moment. Our pioneer ancestors didn’t just create settlements — they planted orchards whose fruit they’d never taste. They built a community whose towers would pierce skies they’d never see.

That’s the spirit we need now. Not just Olympic readiness but lasting resilience. Not just venues but visions. Not just immediate solutions but infrastructure that serves the future.

Time is bending, yes. But Utah knows how to build through its curves.

Let’s get started.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Scott Anderson is chairman of Zions Bank’s Advisory Board.

Michael Parker is executive director of Utah Impact Partnership.

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