Point Wasn’t Lost on Them

SAN ANTONIO —  College sports can be filled with ugliness and jealousy, with cheating and no more attention paid to academics than a wink and a nod. ESPN did a big piece on gambling and college sports to welcome us to this Final Four weekend.

Sad.

And so was seeing how Bob Knight has refused to acknowledge the immense and wonderful accomplishment of the underdog Hoosier men, the players who had come to Bloomington, Ind., because Knight had asked them and who had stuck up for him when he was at his worst. Thanks, Bob, for erasing any good feelings about what you had done at and for Indiana University.

But then Oklahoma and Connecticut ran onto the court at the Alamodome Sunday night for the NCAA women’s final and 29,619 people stood and cheered. The Sooners and the Huskies are teams filled with seniors who had built things, good things, amazing things, worthwhile things. Seniors who probably will all receive college degrees.

The seniors from Oklahoma built a program where there wasn’t one and will be remembered in Norman for their determination and exhilaration and for being the first Big 12 team at a women’s Final Four and for being the only team this season to scare Connecticut.

And the Sooners did scare Connecticut. Don’t doubt that.

The seniors at Connecticut were building perfection, constructing history, advancing on toward their destiny. The Huskies finished a 39-0 season by winning the national championship game over Oklahoma, 82-70. Think that’s easy? No matter how good you are, when everybody expects you to win by 30 every night, that’s pressure.

The pressure showed. Sue Bird, one of the seniors, the player of the year, the best point guard going, couldn’t stand still, even at the solemn part when she was holding the tattered World Trade Center flag and trying to sing the national anthem and then she couldn’t slow down enough to shoot well.

Bird and the other three Connecticut seniors--Swin Cash, Asjha Jones and Tamika Williams--had gone to Storrs because they wanted to be like the 1995 Connecticut team, the one with Rebecca Lobo and Jennifer Rizzotti that went 35-0 and won a national title. Some goal, perfection. Some achievement.

“I won’t believe history or the undefeated part,” Williams said, “until I am 35 or 36 years old and my kids are 7 or 8. I’ll tell them I played with some of the greatest players, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

“I didn’t want this to be an easy game. I wanted to make it a game. I am sure everyone enjoyed it.”

The game was not beautiful, but it was emotional and played at a frenetic pace. Connecticut had 21 turnovers. For the first time this season, the Huskies didn’t make a three-point shot. With three minutes to go, Connecticut led by only six points. It was close because the Sooners had five seniors who would not quit making plays.

Stacey Dales, the star, had come from Canada, a skinny thing with a great first step and the need to be part of the foundation of something. She didn’t want to add to a legend. She wanted to make one. LaNeishea Caufield, so quiet she needs to be poked in the side to speak up, came from little Ada, Okla., even though she had been a budding star when the state university almost dropped the program.

Rosalind Ross has played on a right knee braced tight because it pretty much has no ligament left. Jamie Talbert signed on because no one else much asked. Shannon Selmon decided to join them because her father, Dewey, and her two uncles played football at Oklahoma and if you’re a Selmon athlete you go to Oklahoma.

Dales couldn’t stop crying after the game. She wanted to tell us what it felt like to be part of the first Oklahoma women’s basketball team in a national championship game. But she couldn’t. It was too hard.

Dales pointed at Coach Sherri Coale and choked out, “For me, Coach--she’s pretty awesome ... I’m upset that I’m going to have to leave these guys and Coach because she’s taught me a lot about basketball and more about life.”

Life for these seniors will not be filled with millions of dollars earned from basketball. Bird and Dales will play in the WNBA, but not for millions. Some of these seniors might coach someday, but not for millions.

All of them will celebrate this moment, though, the winners and the losers.

Bird, Williams, Jones and Cash dove into a pile and howled collectively. This, of all their 39 victories, was, in its way, most impressive. They had withstood the pressure, imposed on themselves and by Oklahoma. They fought in a physical, grinding game and gave better than they took. They shot 52.6% from the field and outrebounded Oklahoma, 44-25.

An hour after the game, Dales had dried her tears and was snapping a photo of the scoreboard. She is wise. What happened to her was not a loss but a victorious journey and she will, in a day or a week or a month, take away only the good.

And so should the rest of us. A college sport that filled a dome for a weekend was not all about the money or the agents or the egos. It was about the seniors who walked out together, from Oklahoma and Connecticut, ready for the future and well prepared for it.

Diane Pucin can be reached at [email protected].