Denise put the ham on the table at six sharp. UCLA was up twenty-two at the half and I hadn’t stood up since tip. She said grace over an empty chair. I said grace over Lauren Betts pulling a second defender to the block and kicking it out to the corner like she’d been doing it since Nixon. Different denominations, same holiday.
Seventy-nine to fifty-one. On Easter Sunday. In a national championship game. I have watched a lot of basketball in my life, and I am here to tell you that the beating UCLA put on South Carolina yesterday was the closest thing to a public execution the NCAA has staged in the modern era, and I’ve seen the 1990 championship game, which is saying something.
Now, before we go any further: South Carolina is a program. Dawn Staley has forgotten more basketball than three of the podcasts I’m forced to overhear at the diner know collectively. This wasn’t a bad team getting exposed. This was a good team running into a buzzsaw on the wrong Sunday of the calendar year, and the buzzsaw happened to be a six-foot-seven post player with better footwork than most centers I coached against in the ’80s who were grown men with mustaches.
I called Ray Kowalczyk at halftime. Ray coached girls’ varsity for thirty-one years in a district that thought the girls’ program was a line item. I said, Ray, are you watching this. He said, Duke, I’ve been watching this since Cheryl Miller. I said, fair. He said, you know what the difference is. I said what. He said, they’re allowed to be good now. Nobody’s telling them to be nice about it. Then he had to go because his grandson was FaceTiming him about a bunny.
Here’s what I loved. Not one UCLA player, after the whistle, did the thing where they run to a camera and point at a logo. Nobody pulled a phone out of a sock. Cori Close hugged her staff for about a full minute like a woman who’d been trying to win this thing for twenty-two years, which she had. The confetti fell. Nobody plugged an app. Nobody thanked their sleep coach. It was, and I’m reaching for a word I don’t use much anymore, dignified.
The sideline reporter did ask Betts what it “means for her brand,” which is a sentence Coach DiMaggio would have driven his Buick into a tree to avoid hearing. DiMaggio used to say a player is a player and a product is a product and you can tell which one you’ve got by whether they’ll set a hard screen when nobody’s filming. Betts set about forty hard screens in that game. Zero of them will trend. All of them won a championship.
The men’s game is tonight and I will watch it, and I will complain, and there will be a graphic on the screen the whole time telling me how many points somebody needs to hit for a parlay I did not place. But I want to say, on the record, in ink, that the best basketball game I saw this tournament, and the best coached, and the best played, and the least embarrassing, was played by a bunch of twenty-year-olds on a Sunday when the rest of the country was arguing about whether the deviled eggs had enough paprika. UCLA didn’t just win. They played the game the way it’s supposed to be played, which is like it matters and like the other team is standing right there.
Ray called back after the buzzer. He said, Duke, are you gonna write something nice for once. I said I might. He said don’t strain anything. Then his grandson took the phone and told me about the bunny.
Denise reheated the ham in the microwave, which she says is a sin and did anyway. She’s bringing the leftovers to her sister’s tomorrow. She says her sister listens to a podcast about ham.