In the last 10 days much of the basketball world has descended on The Strip — from the NBA Summer League to Paul Pierce cooling out with his family to Brandon Jennings locking up a straight-to-Europe, forget-college deal to the arrival of our latest Olympic Dream Team.
Everyone, including Bill Self, is here or has been here in the last few days. And I’ve got stories that I might share later.
But today I want to rant. You know I like to rant.
OK, this story isn’t about some well-known superstar or someone with a strong local connection. It’s just a complaint I want to share about how the world works, and how we disrespect people and their accomplishments without giving it a moment of thought.
Clarissa Davis-Wrightsil is in Vegas this week with her traveling AAU team, TeamXpress. If you follow women’s college basketball, you probably remember the name Clarissa Davis.
She was one of the best players of the 1980s. As a true freshman — and as the third person off the bench — she carried the University of Texas to its lone national championship in basketball, ruining Cheryl Miller’s final collegiate game. In the 1986 Final Four, Davis totaled 56 points and 32 rebounds in two games and won the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player award.
Clarissa Davis won the Naismith Trophy for player of the year as a sophomore and a senior. A two-time All-American, Davis probably would’ve won the player-of-the-year award three times, except a knee injury kept her from playing her junior year. She was a member of the 1992 U.S. Olympic team that won a bronze medal. She had a long, distinguished career overseas and joined the WNBA in 1999. In 2000, her hometown San Antonio Spurs hired her to oversee their effort to land, launch and operate the city’s WNBA franchise. Her mission accomplished, she returned to Austin to consolidate work and home life (Davis and her husband own a business in Austin) and join Jody Conradt’s University of Texas coaching staff in 2005-06.
Clarissa Davis-Wrighsil’s basketball resume is flawless. She excelled on and off the court, graduating from Texas with a degree in broadcasting.
Unlike Kevin Durant, her jersey number isn’t scheduled to be retired any time soon.
I like Kevin Durant. He was a phenomenal college player for one season. But when I read last week that Texas was going to retire his jersey, I thought, “What in the hell is that school thinking?”
You don’t retire a player’s number who visited your campus. Kevin Durant didn’t win a damn thing at Texas. Durant’s Longhorns finished third in the Big 12 and bowed out of the NCAA Tournament in the second round. We know Durant didn’t graduate from Texas.
What Durant did during his one-and-done season is score a bunch of points. You don’t hold that up as the ultimate standard of excellence. Not in college.
I don’t care that he won the Wooden Award. Men’s college basketball is so watered down by early defections that Durant’s player-of-the-year award doesn’t carry the weight that Lew Alcindor’s or Larry Bird’s or Michael Jordan’s or Danny Manning’s or Clarissa Davis’.
As fate would have it, I ran into Davis-Wrightsil at the MGM Grand on Monday. She and her basketball team were strolling through the casino, and her cousin introduced us. Davis and her husband run one of the best summer basketball programs for girls in the country. Every high school girl who has started and completed Davis’ four-year program has received a basketball scholarship.
