{"id":29788,"date":"2011-02-18T08:37:39","date_gmt":"2011-02-18T13:37:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=29788"},"modified":"2011-02-28T09:24:01","modified_gmt":"2011-02-28T14:24:01","slug":"bird-at-the-buzzer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2011\/02\/bird-at-the-buzzer\/","title":{"rendered":"Bird at the Buzzer"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"<p>Sue<\/a>
Sue Bird shoots during the 2001 Big East Championship game. Photo provided by the Division of Athletics<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The 2001 Big East women\u2019s basketball championship game between UConn and Notre Dame was the second of three match-ups that season. It would end as the Huskies\u2019 only win that year against the Fighting Irish, who handed UConn a 92-76 defeat in South Bend during the regular season and then closed the door on Geno Auriemma\u2019s team in the Final Four, before winning their first national championship.<\/p>\n

Standing in the cold Storrs night outside Harry A. Gampel Pavilion following the Huskies\u2019 78-76 victory, sportswriter Jeff Goldberg turned to his colleague from The Hartford Courant,<\/em> Matt Eagan, and said, \u201cI think we just watched the greatest women\u2019s game ever played.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI was thinking even after that moment it was the kind of game that someone would write a book about,\u201d Goldberg recalls. \u201cI never thought [that person] would be me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"<p>BirdA decade later, Bird at the Buzzer; UConn, Notre Dame, and a Women\u2019s Basketball Classic<\/em> (University of Nebraska Press, 2011) is Goldberg\u2019s tale of that dramatic game, a tight back-and-forth struggle in which the playing career of All-American Shea Ralph ended with another knee injury, a freshman from California named Diana Taurasi fouled out, and Sue Bird brought the Huskies back by scoring the game\u2019s last five points, including a buzzer-beater that won the championship.<\/p>\n

To hear an audio clip of the shot that clinched the game, click here<\/a>.
\nThe author will sign copies of the book at the UConn Co-op on Saturday, Feb. 19 from noon to 2 p.m., before the UConn-Notre Dame game at Gampel Pavilion, and then following the game. (A discussion with Jeff Goldberg about his book will air Saturday at noon on WHUS 91.7 FM and online<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

The night of the memorable game, Goldberg was covering the championship as a freelance writer for The Chicago Tribune,<\/em> the Courant\u2019s sister newspaper, whose reporters were unable to fly to Connecticut because of a snowstorm that had disrupted air travel. The storm also caused a leak in the Gampel Pavilion dome, causing a delay during the Big East semifinals the previous evening.<\/p>\n

\u201c[The Chicago Tribune<\/em>] needed to have someone cover for them and I drew the assignment. I was really glad I did,\u201d he says. \u201cGampel was really alive … It had that sort of tingle feeling that you get. For women\u2019s basketball, this was a night really unlike any other.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goldberg, who went on to cover Husky women\u2019s basketball from 2001 to 2006, says that during the 2000-2001 season, the UConn-Notre Dame rivalry had momentarily surpassed that between the Huskies and Tennessee. Led by Ruth Riley and Niele Ivey, Muffet McGraw\u2019s team matched up against Auriemma\u2019s team, which included All-American seniors Shea Ralph, Svetlana Abrosimova, and Kelly Schumacher; juniors Sue Bird, Swin Cash, Asjha Jones, Tamika Williams, and Kennitra Johnson; and two freshmen, Diana Taurasi and Maria Conlon.<\/p>\n

Even with Abrosimova suffering a season-ending foot injury earlier in the year and then Ralph\u2019s injury during the Big East Championship, the Huskies made it to within one game of repeating as NCAA champions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat 2001 team, I would argue, was their greatest team,\u201d Goldberg says. \u201cBut it was the only one of that five years [2000-2004] that didn\u2019t win a national championship. Before the injuries, it was the most talented team they ever had; even after Sveta went down, they still were loaded. That they could endure a season-ending injury to an All-American, then another season-ending injury to another All-American, and still go to the Final Four \u2026 We saw what they did the following year.\u201d<\/p>\n

The next season, Bird and company ran off a 39-0 season, the first of three consecutive national championships.<\/p>\n

In writing the book, Goldberg spoke extensively with players and coaches from both teams, watching the game with almost all of those involved to help jog memories of nearly a decade before.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey needed the visual memory to kick in,\u201d he says. \u201cFor most of them, it was the first time they had seen the game since it was played. As fans, we love to re-watch these games; they show up on ESPN Classic. The players move on. They\u2019re always looking forward. But for one day, it was the first time for almost all of them that they had watched the game.\u201d<\/p>\n

He says for the Notre Dame players, it was an often poignant way to relive a small part of their championship year.<\/p>\n

\u201dThat was the greatest season of their lives,\u201d he says. \u201cThey won the national championship that year. For Niele Ivey to look back and see a slice of that season, even though they lost the game, she thanked me for allowing her to relive that year. It was a special year for her. She was from St. Louis, which is where they won the national championship.<\/p>\n

\u201cI also had a lot of fun with Diana and Sue, because there were some controversial calls toward the end of the game. At the time, they would have sworn they were the aggrieved party from the officials. Even Sue, after seeing the visual evidence, swears she did not turn the ball over with about 30 seconds left. It\u2019s kind of forgotten that before she won the game, she lost the ball out of bounds. She swears Niele Ivey touched the ball last. We replayed that thing like the [Kennedy assassination] Zapruder film, and she still insists that was not her turnover.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goldberg says that while the intense competition during the game and the dramatic shot by Bird for the win are memorable, the injury to Ralph, now a UConn assistant coach, remains etched in the minds of most of the 10,000 fans inside Gampel that night.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was such an eerie, awful feeling,\u201d says Goldberg, who was seated along press row where Ralph fell injured to the floor. \u201cNot just because everybody knew what she had been through, but Shea Ralph for those first 13 minutes had finally rediscovered the player that had made her an All-American and the Final Four MVP the year before. She had a really rough season in 2001. In the Big East tournament she had regained her greatness. She was the old Shea, and then in a heartbeat it was over in awful fashion. It was witnessing the death of a career of a beloved figure because of how tough she was and how much she had overcome. Then she comes back out after halftime and she\u2019s got the brace on her leg, very heroic. It raised the emotional pitch of the game even higher than it already had been, because it became about winning it for her. You can\u2019t script something like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even after the eventful season had ended, Goldberg says some of those involved would continue to understand the small margin between success and failure, and how fate is determined.<\/p>\n

McGraw includes winning the2001 national championship among the luck she had that year. After winning the title, she had a hole in one in golf during the summer. As September began, she headed out on a recruiting trip to Boston to see Nicole Wolff, an accomplished player who attended Milton Academy and is the daughter of then-Boston University men\u2019s basketball coach Dennis Wolff, a UConn alumnus.<\/p>\n

McGraw was scheduled to fly to California on the morning of Sept. 11, preferring a nonstop flight out of Boston. But Kevin McGuff, her young assistant coach, insisted that she join him in Providence to fly together. He ultimately prevailed, so she canceled her reservation on United 175. While sitting in their seats on the tarmac, their flight was recalled to the airport terminal, where they learned that McGraw\u2019s original flight was one of the planes flown into the World Trade Center in New York City.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven 10 years later, she still really didn\u2019t want to talk about it,\u201d Goldberg says. \u201cI think she still seems haunted by it. Who could blame her? It\u2019s the fragility of life, one minute you\u2019re on the top of the world cutting down the nets, and the next it could be taken away from you in an instant.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A sportswriter’s new book tells the inside story of the 2001 Big East Championship game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[55],"class_list":["post-29788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-23 13:53:23","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29788"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30209,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29788\/revisions\/30209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29788"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=29788"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=29788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}