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CHAPTER 1

Tip-Off

Storrs, March 6, 2001

Sue Bird awoke this snowy Tuesday morning after a night unlike any other in her three years at the University of Connecticut. During the night, while a powerful snowstorm blanketed the state of Connecticut, Bird had lain under her blankets hooked up to a portable stimulus machine, electronic impulses coursing into her balky lower back in an attempt to prevent it from going into spasm any further.

The reigning Division I point guard of the year, Bird had not played the previous night, Monday, when her second-ranked teammates obliterated Rutgers 94–66 in the Big East Tournament semifinals at Gampel Pavilion, setting up a rematch with No. 1 Notre Dame in Tuesday's tournament final.

It was to be up to this point the most-anticipated game of the 2000–2001 women's college basketball season. Back in January, Notre Dame had handed the defending national champion Huskies the first of their only two defeats all season, blowing out UConn. The game, played before the first home sellout crowd for a women's game in Notre Dame's history, also marked the first time the Irish had beaten UConn in twelve tries since joining the Big East in 1996.

Now, UConn looked to return the favor, seeking to hand the Irish only their second loss of 2001, as both teams jockeyed for position heading into NCAA Tournament Selection Sunday, less than a week away.

Bird had injured her back on Sunday night, in the Big East quarterfinals against Boston College, and played just fifteen minutes, none in the second half. Bird's pain resided in her lower back, but the source of the discomfort was in her nervous system.

The consummate team player, Bird had two days earlier been named First Team Big East at the annual conference awards banquet. Bird's teammate and fellow junior classmate, the elegant and energetic forward Swin Cash, was a more worthy first-team candidate in Bird's mind, but Cash had been named to the second team.

The perceived slight to her teammate stuck in Bird's craw all weekend, her inner turmoil manifesting itself physically when she twisted her back painfully when turning to make a pass in the first half against the Eagles.

"I was stressed that whole weekend because personally, I didn't think I had a good year that whole junior year," Bird said. "It really was difficult for me to accept being Big East first team. I had a hard time with it. I was really stressed, and there's no other reason for why my back would have done that. I just think stress got to me."

Bird, like the rest of her teammates, had endured a considerably more tumultuous season than anyone had anticipated. After having blown away Tennessee by nineteen points in the 2000 NCAA championship game in Philadelphia and ending the season with a 36-1 record, virtually the entire Huskies roster returned to play another year. Further supplemented by the arrival of Diana Taurasi, the most heralded freshman in the history of the game, the Huskies were touted not just as prohibitive favorites to repeat as champions, but as the greatest collection of talent Geno Auriemma had ever coached in his sixteen seasons at UConn.

And that was saying something, considering Auriemma had already won two national championships and had been to four Final Fours in the preceding decade. Even Auriemma, the sharp-dressed, sharp-witted son of Italian immigrants, could not resist heaping serious advance praise upon his newly minted champions.

Having just led his team to a second title — in his hometown of Philadelphia, no less — Auriemma capped the victory parade through the jubilant streets of Hartford by standing at the podium outside the state capitol building and pulling a Joe Namath. Or, for the basketball purist, a Pat Riley.

"I know what we needed to do to win the first one and the second one," Auriemma told his chilly yet captivated audience, awash in Husky blue and white. "I think I know what it will take to win a third one, and I am telling you right now, in front of all these players, we are going to be back here next year with a third one. I promise you that."

Nearly eleven months later, Auriemma had discovered that the feat of repeating as national champions is more easily promised than done. Auriemma and the Huskies had exploded onto the national scene in 1995, capitalizing on the talents of national player of the year Rebecca Lobo, the fiery point guard Jennifer Rizzotti, and the explosive freshman Nykesha Sales — a Bloomfield, Connecticut, native — to ride to a perfect 35-0 season. In the title game in Minneapolis, UConn knocked off Pat Summitt's vaunted Tennessee Lady Vols 70–64, earning women's basketball the greatest share it had enjoyed, to date, of the national spotlight.

The Huskies returned to the Final Four the following season, this time losing to Tennessee in an overtime thriller in the national semifinals. While Tennessee would go on to three-peat behind Chamique Holdsclaw — who had preceded Bird as a player at New York's famous Christ the King High School — the Huskies would enter a star-crossed period in their history.

For three straight seasons, the Huskies would assemble enough talent to win the national championship, only to see those title hopes dashed by crippling injuries to key players, often occurring during, or just prior to, the six-game NCAA Tournament.

In 1997 the Huskies ended the regular season with a 30-0 record and were poised to become Auriemma's second undefeated champions in three years. But in an NCAA first-round game against Lehigh at Gampel, their freshman star, Shea Ralph, tore the anterior cruciate ligament (acl) in her right knee and was lost for the remainder of the tournament. The Huskies never recovered from the loss of their spark plug, and fell to Tennessee in the regional finals.

Before the start of the 1997–98 season, Ralph retore the ligament in her right knee and was lost for another year. In February of that season, Sales, now a senior, was closing in on UConn's all-time scoring record, trailing Kerry Bascom's mark of 2,177 by one point during the penultimate regular-season game against Notre Dame at Gampel.

But as Sales started a thrust to the basket with a chance to set the record, she ruptured the Achilles tendon in her right foot, ending her career on the brink of the NCAA Tournament.

Sales's injury is best remembered for the controversial way Auriemma — along with friend and Villanova coach Harry Perretta — conspired to get Sales the record- setting basket in the regular-season finale.

The "gift" basket, in which Sales, on crutches, was allowed to score at one end to start the game and set the record — with UConn then allowing an uncontested Villanova basket to tie the score before the real game continued — ignited a fierce national debate about sportsmanship and the integrity of records that dwarfed any publicity the women's game had ever received.

But lost in the din was the fact that another championship-caliber season for the Huskies was imperiled, and when the freshman sensation Svetlana Abrosimova, from St. Petersburg, Russia, was injured in the NCAA regional final against N.C. State, UConn's Final Four hopes came to another abrupt end.

In 1999 the Huskies were eliminated in the Sweet Sixteen for the only time in the decade between 1994 and 2004. That season, UConn was decimated by injuries to its superlative freshman class, led by Bird, Cash, Tamika Williams, and Asjha Jones. Bird's injury was the most serious: a torn acl in her left knee in mid-December.

So, by the time UConn survived the 2000 season injury-free and captured the national championship, the Huskies were left to wonder how many more titles might have been theirs if they'd had a little more good fortune.

"It's easy to look back at the seasons and say, 'If this, if that,'" Auriemma said. "The only time we lost full-strength in the Final Four was 1996. And then in 1997 we had the best team in the country, by far. By far. And then Shea goes down and we didn't handle it well. Then in 1998, Kesha goes down. Then 1999, Sue goes down ..."

In 2001 the injury curse struck again, as Abrosimova, a senior and a strong national player of the year candidate, tore the ligaments in her left foot during a 92–88 loss to Tennessee in Knoxville in early February, ending her UConn career. Only the embarrassment of riches on UConn's roster — six of the remaining twelve active players on the 2001 roster would be taken in first rounds of the wnba draft — kept UConn a legitimate national championship contender.

But now, on the morning of the Big East Tournament final, Bird's back was the latest injury scare. But Bird, who would, for the only time in her career, wear a heating pad under her jersey for a game, had no concerns.

"[Trainer Rosemary Ragle] had me on anti-inflammatories," Bird said. "I was sleeping with the machine on, doing the round-the-clock stuff. And once I got loose, I was okay. I remember the shootaround, having to warm up a lot to get moving. It's one of those things that once it gets warm, you're good."

Sue Bird was born and raised in Syosset, New York, a suburb of Long Island, as the younger of two daughters. From the beginning, she displayed an abnormally acute competitive streak. On one occasion, a teammate of Bird's in a school relay race botched the baton exchange, which caused the team to lose. Disgusted by the failure, Bird threw the baton down. She was six.

"Whether it was board games or doing things with my sister or teams that I played on, I definitely had that sore loser mentality back then," Bird said. "I just didn't like losing. It was always something that I hated, and it made me competitive. I remember that story. I threw the baton because my teammates were a little slow."

Some of Bird's intensity could be traced to her early relationship with her sister, Jen, five years Sue's senior. As a little girl, Sue often wanted to hang out and play with her older sister, but the age gap between them was too much to overcome. This would drive Sue to work even harder to gain attention.

"I think the role that it plays is unique to the typical younger-sister syndrome, because my sister was five years older and she made me competitive because she didn't care what I was doing," Bird said. "I'd be trying to play with her, and she never had time for me. It made me want to do that even more."

Sports provided an outlet. Bird excelled at both soccer and basketball, but basketball eventually won out, and she developed into one of the top players on the Amateur Athletic Union (aau) circuit, the pipeline to Division I scholarships for the nation's top prep stars.

As her game developed, so did Bird's sense of independence. Auriemma would later joke to the media, after Bird's twenty-five-point breakout performance against Tennessee in Knoxville as a sophomore in January 2000, that her New York street cred was highly suspect.

"People ask me, what about your New York point guard?" Auriemma cracked. "Yeah, she grew up on the mean streets of Syosset. I think the last thing somebody stole was a newspaper off someone's porch. I tell her the toughest thing she ever had to do was decide what sale to go to at the mall: Neiman-Marcus or no Neiman-Marcus?"

But the joke belied a simple truth. After her sophomore year at Syosset High School, Bird's life dramatically altered. Her parents, Nancy and Herschel, were in the process of getting divorced, with Herschel moving into an apartment in Queens. At the same time, Sue was on the move as well, transferring to Christ the King High School in Queens.

"I was very fortunate growing up," Bird said. "I never had to worry about the food being on the table or the clothes on my back. I was very well taken care of. My parents gave me a great upbringing. But my situation, regardless of whether it was hard or easy compared to other people, it definitely made me self-reliant. My parents were splitting up, so there was one parent one week, the next parent the other week in this little apartment in Queens.

"And at the time, I didn't have a license, the first year that I was there, my junior year. And they had to work, so I was by myself a lot. So you have to make do, find out where I was going to eat that day. I had to ride the buses everywhere. You kind of have to figure it out. I had to fend for myself and I was in a new school, and that's never easy."

Christ the King was the preeminent girls' basketball program in New York City. When Bird arrived as a junior in 1996, its most famous graduate, Holdsclaw, had moved on to play college ball at Tennessee, where she would win three straight national championships during Bird's high school years.

Bird, too, would excel at ctk, but the transition from life in bucolic Syosset to the gritty streets of Queens was challenging.

"I had never been the new kid before," Bird said. "I'd been in the same school system my whole life and that was what I knew. And to pick up and go to this new school, and on top of that, [adjust to] a total cultural difference, in terms of Syosset versus Queens, that was unique.

"Looking back on it, it's almost like an out-of-body experience, like, did I really do that? But I'm thankful for it. I was forced to grow up a lot. I was 16–17 years old and I was on my own in a lot of ways, and I think my maturity level skyrocketed from those two years."

The level of Bird's play continued the rapid upward climb. In her senior season of 1997–98, she averaged 16.3 points and 7.3 assists, leading Christ the King to state and national championships. Bird was named both New York City and State player of the year.

By the time the 1998 season had ended, Bird had already chosen to attend UConn, over Vanderbilt and Stanford. UConn had always been the favorite, but Bird began having second thoughts the previous summer, after UConn received commitments from two other point guards, Keirsten Walters and Brianne Stepherson.

"I was like, what should I do?" Bird said. "This is the place I want to go to, but maybe there's no room for me. That played a role."

Stepherson made the decision a bit easier for Bird, backing out of her commitment in August and choosing instead to attend Boston College. By November, Bird's heart finally overruled her head.

"It came down to it and you just know," Bird said. "When you know you feel right and feel comfortable with the people, you just know. I remember I had a conversation with Coach Auriemma and [associate head coach Chris] Dailey and they're like, where do you stand? This is us — that's their spiel — we're not going to change. Do you like it?

"That happened in the summer and we revisited that conversation about a week before the signing period, and the last thing coach Auriemma said to me was, 'Follow your heart,' and that was that."

Bird brought to Storrs the independent streak she developed in high school, a trait that served her well at her position of point guard.

"I think it helped," she said. "When I got to college I found out you have to have two personalities anyways. For me, I'm not always the most vocal in social settings, I can come across as shy. Obviously, that changes with age. But I was definitely more reserved, and when I got to college, I realized you can't be that way if you're the point guard. I think it helped me take on those challenges better."

Memphis, Tennessee, March 25, 2000

While UConn was winning its second national championship in Philadelphia in early April, making for the most triumphant of homecomings for Geno Auriemma, another branch on the sturdy Philly coaching tree, Muffet McGraw, was suffering.

McGraw, who completed her college career at St. Joseph's University in 1977 — just a year before Auriemma himself was hired there as an assistant to the new coach and women's basketball wizard Jim Foster — had just seen her Notre Dame Fighting Irish complete a devastating collapse in the NCAATournament's round of sixteen.

Against Texas Tech in the regional semifinals at The Pyramid, Notre Dame, led by juniors Ruth Riley and Niele Ivey and seniors Julie Henderson and Danielle Green, took a 17–0 lead, only to see the Red Raiders pull a stunning reversal and score the game's next seventeen points.

Then, in the second half, Texas Tech was able to get Riley, Notre Dame's talented, 6-foot-5 center, into foul trouble, erasing an eight-point deficit to send the Irish home with a 69–65 defeat. The loss completed a late-season fade by Notre Dame, who finished the season 33 after winning twenty straight games into late February, climbing as high as fifth in the national rankings.

While the season officially ended in Memphis, the beginning of the end came in Hartford, against UConn on February 26. Riding their twenty-game streak, the Irish arrived at the Hartford Civic Center determined to accomplish two historic program firsts: win the Big East regular-season title and, for once, beat UConn.

Since joining the Big East Conference before the 1995–96 season, Notre Dame had faced UConn ten times, and lost every game.

McGraw would always try to deflect the pressure that the blue-and-white albatross placed on her players. Only she had all ten losses next to her name, McGraw would tell the media. Her players, at any one time, might only have lost to UConn twice, maybe three times.

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Excerpted from "Bird at the Buzzer"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Jeff Goldberg.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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