Dawn Staley and Jennifer Azzi did cartwheels. Lisa Leslie cried. Everyone hugged and jumped around.
But the most amazing sight in the American post-game celebration lasted for just a few seconds, and you had to be looking for it: Tara VanDerveer actually smiled.
And this wasn't just a perfunctory I-have-to-smile-now lifting of the lips. It was a full-blooded, I'm-a-happy-person smile -- and it could have lit the Georgia Dome all by itself. Now Tara VanDerveer may be more fun than a barrel of monkeys in private, and wears lampshades on her head while dancing across the room chugging an Anchor Steam (though we're not betting the car payment on it), but in public, she's what one would call a task-oriented individual. Of course, that Atlanta smile didn't last long, but in the dark of night it probably creeps up and grabs her, because she knows just how great a job she did with this team.
Sure, Lisa Leslie had a super game in the finals, but when Leslie first came to the national team, she had a reputation as a soft, selfish player who would take 15-footers all night but never go inside and do the dirty work necessary to win.
Almost all the players had a little bit of baggage coming in, from big egos to less-than-spectacular work ethics, but under VanDerveer's relentless guidance, they were molded into the finest team in the world -- and maybe the finest team ever. And it was not coincidental that the Americans saved their best for last. That was pure coaching genius, and VanDerveer deserves more of the credit than she's getting, at least publicly.
In the highest echelons of the basketball world, though, VanDerveer is being eyed with more and more respect. In fact, there are rumors the NBA might be interested, and given her Olympic performance, they could be true.
What VanDerveer did is what an NBA coach has to do: Manage the huge egos that inevitably go hand-in-hand with major talent.There are some successful female coaches who also do that, but we can't see them coaching men (just as there are some men who couldn't translate their success to the women's game). VanDerveer, though, could make the jump.
No player, male or female, can doubt her credentials. No player, male or female, will intimidate her. And, most important of all, she doesn't need the job. She can always find a Division I school that would crawl over the remnants of a shattered backboard to get her, and so it's not as if some J.R. Rider is going to make her back down.
It would probably make more sense for VanDerveer to coach a Division I men's team, but why should she, unless it was a top-25 team? The NBA, though, would be a challenge that would be tough to turn down -- and if she were smart enough and lucky enough to land with a franchise that had a chance to win, she'd be as good as anyone.
Sure, game-coaching in the NBA is twice as tough as in college, but VanDerveer would make that adjustment in no time. The real issue would be respect, from her players and from the fans. Given her success, and her style, she's a natural to make the jump. And what else does she have to prove in the women's game?
OK, NBC sucked.
Now that we've got that out of the way, let's move on. NBC lost millions in 1992 with its triplecast and made hundreds of millions with its two-week gymnastics show in 1996. From NBC's angle, this Olympics was a huge success, regardless of what women's basketball fans (or soccer fans or archery fans or fans of everything but gymnastics) believe. The reason? People watched the ads that went along with the shows, and the sponsors were happy. Ka-ching.
But here in the Net, we have a plan that should make everyone happy -- and it's very simple to do.
The germ of the idea is this: Spread the Olympics out over a whole year in the same locale.
First, let's look at it from the perspective of the individual sports: There's a two-week tournament sometime in an Olympic year that brings the best in the world in a given sport to a given area. With three or four sports in each two-week span, each will get a lot more publicity and a lot more attention. Cable could show all the women's basketball games, for example, because they wouldn't be competing against men's games or volleyball or gymnastics. The schedule would be designed to maximize exposure so that there would be one very popular sport (women's basketball) teamed with some lesser lights (archery and yachting) for two weeks, and then another set of sports would move into town.
From the media standpoint, this is great stuff. NBC could have every final on the weekend, and slot two or three primetime shows in during the week full of their fluff features and goofy attempts at being funny. Cable networks could show all the preliminaries (which is how ESPN and CBS divide up the College World Series) and then NBC could move in for the ratings kill.
From a coverage perspective, newspapers and magazines would find it much easier to give credit where credit is due. They could devote more space to each sport, and give fans more of what they want.
And speaking of fans, they win big too. They'll have Olympic finals every weekend for six months or so, and they'll have plenty of chances to see the Dream Teams and rhythmic gymnastics.
As for the host cities, it's a blessing. Instead of cramming millions of people into a city for a couple of weeks, they could spread out all those tourist dollars over several months -- which would mean the transit systems would work but the money would still come in.
Yes, there would be a loss of that Olympic spirit for the 10,000 Olympians and a loss of the convention of IOC hangers-on, but the advantages clearly outweigh the disadvantages. And we'd have been able to see every women's game on some cable station somewhere, and Yelena Baranova would be more than just a high-scoring rumor.
At Net headquarters, we're real happy with this idea, but we know it will never happen. But if the sky falls and it does, remember you heard it here first.
And now for the ritual roasting of NBC -- plus a new plan
