In the months before he died in January 1993, athletic director Stan Sheriff had a visionary outline of what a University of Hawaii path to Pac-10 membership could look like.
In 2001, UH President Evan Dobelle trumpeted a 60,000-seat replacement for Aloha Stadium in West Oahu as a building block toward potential Pac-10 membership.
Tom Apple, in his first comments to the media as Manoa chancellor-designate in 2012, alluded to a grand goal of eventual membership in what had, by then, become the Pac-12. “I won’t go dreaming about where we might be, but there is a really good conference out on the West Coast that it would be wonderful to be part of eventually,” Apple declared as UH President M.R.C. Greenwood beamed.
Fast forward to 2019 and the start of this college football season in 30 days that will mark a period that is about as close as UH is likely to get to a long-cherished dream of membership in the Pac-12.
What coaches and fans have come to tongue-in-cheek refer to as UH’s “Pac-12 schedule” within a schedule kicks off Aug. 24 with Arizona at Aloha Stadium. It is followed by a Sept. 7 meeting with Oregon State at Aloha Stadium and a Sept. 14 visit to Washington’s Husky Stadium.
It will be the first time UH has played three consecutive games against opposition from the Pac-12.
Two weeks before the Rainbow Warriors will put a ball in the air in their own league, the Mountain West Conference, they will have played a quarter of the Pac-12. Nobody else in the country outside the Pac-12 will play such a concentrated patch against the conference. Only Brigham Young will also play three Pac-12 opponents.
When Gov. John A. Burns in the 1960s first set out his vision of Hawaii competing on a major college level, he zeroed in on the Western Athletic Conference for a home, seeing it as the best match of like institutions.
But decades later, as UH was achieving some success while nearly filling 50,000-seat Aloha Stadium and the national landscape began shifting, the then-Pac-10 emerged as a new, down-the-road goal.
With TV increasingly driving college football and expansion, UH needed something beyond its time zone and limited 72nd media market size in the U.S. to make it attractive to the Pac-12.
One idea was that if UH could recruit enough good athletes from Asia to build the beginning of an overseas TV following it would have a niche besides travel subsidies to pitch to the Pac-12 when expansion was on the table.
But that, like the perpetually full 50,000-seat home to a team that regularly won titles while knocking off the big boys, never materialized.
What UH is fortunate to have now is an opportunity to test itself against a range of opponents from the Pac-12, a Power Five conference.
In Washington the ‘Bows find a team picked to contend for the Pac-12 North title with Oregon. In Oregon State there is an opponent projected to finish last in the same division. Meanwhile, Arizona is forecast to finish fifth in the Pac-12 South.
It will afford an early, up-front look at where UH stands and where it needs to improve before getting down to MWC business in the Sept. 28 conference opener at Nevada.
And, maybe in the process, a brief glimpse of what life might have been like.
