NASHVILLE — While I was covering the NCAA summit on the Val Ackerman white paper on women’s basketball yesterday, all verbal hell broke out across the street at Bridgestone Arena.
Geno Auriemma was in the building, so there you go. But he wasn’t the instigator this time.
The long-simmering feud between the UConn coach and Notre Dame’s Muffet McGraw boiled over during the official NCAA news conferences, a perfectly explosive segue for tonight’s national championship game between the undefeated Huskies and Fighting Irish.
After McGraw was asked by a reporter if any civility could be re-injected back into what has become an extremely heated rivalry, she said simply: “I think we’re past that point.”
Naturally, Auriemma’s response was a lot more long-winded and sarcastic. A snippet:
“I could sit here and list 10,000 coaches that don’t interact with each other whose rivalries are intense. This is a function of women’s basketball. Sometimes we act like girls, like we’re supposed to go to dinner every night.
“We’re supposed to play each other, try to beat each other’s brains in, try to win a National Championship and compete like hell, Muffet and Geno, and then we’re supposed to get together afterwards and go have a bottle of wine. That’s just not going to happen. So, stop asking us why it doesn’t happen.”
For some, this is the stuff of media (and comedy) gold. For others, it’s cause for earnest hand-wringing:
So here we go with the sequel to ‘Pat versus Geno.’ It’s ‘Muffet versus Geno,’ as the coaches in Tuesday night’s NCAA women’s basketball championship game will be set up as bitter adversaries whose supposed personal animosity is a big part of this Women’s Final Four.
Is it real, or is it manufactured? Is it just grist ground by a media group that includes some who don’t closely follow women’s basketball all season, but come to the Women’s Final Four hungering to feast on the expected Auriemma quote smorgasbord?
Well, I thought it sounded real, and I don’t think this is a “set up.”
Like most of America watching SportsCenter on Monday, I saw the video clip of Auriemma’s passage cited above, including a profanity that was edited out from the transcript.
Potty language aside, is any of this such a bad thing?
The suggestion that sniping between two high-profile coaches is taking away from the majesty of an historic game is nonsense. If anything, it’s an appetizer to what is easily the most anticipated women’s college game in years, and perhaps decades.
Mel Greenberg, who created the first women’s poll in the late 1970s, Tweeted out last night that he thinks this game is “the most significant ever for sport topping first meeting of UConn-Tennessee in 1995.”
Think about that for a minute. The one person in the media who’s seen it all, from the time Geno and Muffet were college-age kids on the Philly hoops scene Mel knows so well, has placed that kind of significance on one game.
An NFL writer I follow on Twitter said this morning he’s looking forward more to this game than UConn-Kentucky, then scolded all the “douchebag men tweeting to me obnoxious sh– about women’s basketball…this is why you’re douchebags.”
Even the relaunched Five Thirty Eight site weighed in on the UConn-Notre Dame game, sticking to numbers and not mentioning personalities.
In fact, most of what’s been written and said about this game has been about the game. The dust-up came the day before the game. Should the barbs be ignored because what was said is supposedly a “sideshow” or a distraction?
Please.
Ambitious, successful, competitive people often have feuds. They don’t get along. They argue and cajole and sometimes say bitter, petty, nasty things about one another, sometimes for public consumption, and almost always in divorce court.
In sports, in the business world, in politics, in most every kind of human relationship this happens. It’s in our nature.
In my time in the women’s game — about 25 years or so — I’ve always sensed a very strong desire to present the sport as exceedingly pure and wholesome, in which everybody’s happy, smiling and in harmony with one another and the cause they’re promoting.
To some, anything in which the skills of the players and the quality of basketball they play isn’t elevated above all else is a disservice to the game. Or the cause. Or whatever.
This is a game, folks, not a cause. It’s supposed to be fun, a show, and a spectacle. Especially a national championship game.
As Indiana Fever coach Lin Dunn has been saying most of this weekend at the WBCA convention, urging coaches to get out and market the hell out themselves and their programs:
“You are in the entertainment business.”
I can’t think of a more entertaining way to get started than what Geno and Muffet have served up. Intentional or not.
