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When it comes to honors, Longhorns don’t treat women right
By JASON WHITLOCKThe Kansas City Star
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.
As soon as I learned Davis was a former Longhorn hoopster, I immediately asked her what she thought of Durant’s jersey being retired.
“I was kind of like, ‘Really? What’s the criteria for that?’ ” she said. “What do you have to do to be in consideration for that?”
Well, you don’t have to graduate or win much. And you obviously have to be a man.
“He may be the best player ever to go through here,” Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds told me Tuesday. “He won every award they had.”
And those awards were reward enough for a player who spent two semesters in college.
Texas has a men’s and women’s athletics department. The men’s department just announced that Durant, Vince Young and six or seven other men will join Texas’ good-old-boys network of retired jerseys.
Now, I’m going to be honest. I’m not a follower of women’s college basketball. I know Cheryl Miller, Lynette Woodard, Rebecca Lobo and the young women who played at Kansas State a few years ago.
I had to do homework on Clarissa Davis. Again, the research speaks for itself. Davis is the Danny Manning of women’s basketball at Texas. But she’s treated like she’s Angela Davis.
When Conradt retired after the 2006-07 season, Texas gave zero consideration to hiring Davis as Conradt’s successor.
“I wasn’t even given an interview to remain as an assistant coach,” Davis-Wrightsil explained.
Danny Manning could interview at Kansas to be an assistant football coach. Hell, Mangino might even let Danny call a few plays this season in out-of-conference games.
This is sexism. It’s why some women in the sports world seem angry all the time. Because stuff happens to them, and people like me never even take notice. They don’t rate for any outrage.
Texas is taking care of all its boys. Coach Rick Barnes has ushered two of his players’ jerseys into the rafters — Durant and T.J. Ford — without ever winning a national title. Durant stayed for one season, and Ford stuck around for two.
“We talked about that,” said Dodds, who told me that Durant is still pursuing his college degree. “But the great kids are not going to be playing more than one or two years (in college) … It sends a message that we take care of our people if they do the right things academically and are good citizens.”
It sends the message that you can shortcut your way to a “career” with one season, loads of professional potential and a prospective income of more than $20 million.
I guarantee you if Clarissa Davis had several multimillion-dollar contracts awaiting her, Texas would find a way to retire her jersey. Other schools will follow Texas’ lead because they will do everything they can to lure the one-and-dones to contribute money to the universities they were forced to attend for a few months.
When I asked Dodds specifically about Davis, he said that’s a question better answered by women’s athletic director Christine Plonsky, Dodds’ underling, but then he added that Plonsky has stated she doesn’t want to diminish the women’s Hall of Honor.
The reality is Dodds and the good old boys have diminished the women’s Hall of Honor and athletes such as Clarissa Davis with their serial jersey retirements.
Durant gets more respect for a few months of service than this woman gets for 20 years of giving. That ain’t right, and I had to speak on it.