ALBANY, N.Y. — What’s your opinion of Kim Mulkey? I bet you have one.
And it might not be favorable. Shoot, odds are it isn’t. But odds are you know who she is.
You can’t miss her; she’s the sequined-out lady on the sideline, though rarely just toeing the line. And she’s been in the game for decades; she went 130-6 as a Louisiana Tech player and reached the Final Four every year before going on to become coach, since becoming the only person to lead two programs to national titles, including last season, when she did it with these LSU Tigers.
On Saturday, she coached a Sweet 16 game against No. 2 seed UCLA. Her third-seeded Tigers out-executed the Bruins down the stretch to win 78-69 in a thrilling opening act at MVP Arena, where most of the sold-out crowd was there to see Caitlin Clark and Iowa knock out Colorado 89-68 afterward.
That sets up a rematch. The rematch. A sequel of last season’s NCAA women’s basketball championship game. It drew a record 9.9 million viewers and was, as far as I can think, the biggest women’s sports moment in America since the U.S. women’s national soccer team won the 1999 World Cup at the Rose Bowl on Brandi Chastain’s penalty kick.
Last season’s title game was so riveting, so rousing, so needing to be debated that its ripple effects gave women’s basketball in L.A. a boost. It was like a brilliant bounce pass to JuJu Watkins and her Elite Eight-bound USC squad and to Cori Close and her talented Bruins, too.
Those teams did their own heavy lifting, to be certain, upholding their part of the bargain by going 26-5 and 25-6, respectively, USC winning the Pac-12 title and UCLA spending the season in the top 10 nationally.
Their head-to-head games in L.A. drew a record 10,657 at Galen Center and a women’s record 13,659 fans at Pauley Pavilion in some part because of the groundwork laid by Iowa and LSU – women’s basketball is a thing!
And now, with a couple more Pac-12 schools out of the way, LSU and Iowa are going to tango again Monday in an Elite Eight matchup that feels a lot like it should be a Final Four matchup – much like how UCLA’s entanglement with LSU also felt like it coulda been.
Like it woulda definitely been elite Elite Eight theater.
And like it probably shoulda gone UCLA’s way, if not for a pivotal sequence of events down the stretch, when the Bruins’ 67-64 lead with 2:46 to play unraveled as they missed layups and free throws and LSU made its layups and free throws.
“I’m gonna say we’re the better team, we just didn’t show up today,” said center Lauren Betts, one of six sophomores on what remains a promising if unfulfilled Bruins team that will be better for this experience, as much as it stinks and stings.
Despite UCLA’s consistently high billing all season, it was placed in the NCAA Tournament’s version of the “Group of Death.” They’d had to travel farthest to get here. Plus their plane was delayed en route, and they then had the earliest practice time Thursday, at what was, for their West Coast clocks, 4 a.m.
No excuses, Close said.
“We had this under our control,” she said. “We could have not been in Albany, but we lost some (regular-season) games we shouldn’t have.”
UCLA came into the season ranked No. 4, got as high as No. 2 and finished the regular season at No. 6 – before bowing out in the Sweet 16 for the fifth time in Close’s 13-year UCLA tenure, when the Bruins have reached the Elite Eight only in 2018.
“I’m the head coach. I’m responsible,” she said. “They’re young; I need to lead them in to situations where they have the confidence so we execute in those scenarios.”
As Close dutifully fell on her sword, Mulkey sharpened hers, turning another newspaper story into the story postgame.
A couple hours before tipoff, the Washington Post published the nearly 7,000-word piece that had been hotly anticipated since Mulkey brought attention to it during a recent news conference, predicting what turned out to be an in-depth and balanced profile would be a hit piece.
This time, she ripped a Los Angeles Times article that portrayed her team’s matchup against UCLA as a “reckoning” between good versus evil, saying it struck her as “sexist,” “awful” and “wrong” — and taking issue, among other things, with a gendered characterization of the women on her team being “dirty debutantes” and UCLA’s as more “milk and cookies.”
She was right. They’re all actually hoopers. Competitors. Crazy-tough kids.
Close could tell you. She took to social media and apologized for re-posting the story, saying she made a mistake and that she only wants to “be a person that is about growing our game and building up the people in it.”
Regarding the Los Angeles Times column. pic.twitter.com/kzZThRTigt
— Cori Close (@CoachCoriClose) March 30, 2024
The Bruins might be less demonstrative than some of their opponents, but UCLA’s Londynn Jones can cast a glare when a deep shot goes down, as she did Saturday. Bruins star Kiki Rice can get chatty. And, no, it surprised no one that LSU’s high-profile stars Angel Reese and Flau’Jae Johnson, respectively, had something to say to a UCLA assistant and the Bruins’ fans – because that’s all part of the show, and it’s a good show!
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The Tigers (31-5) are performers in every sense. Johnson is a rapper, Reese does modeling, yes, and they bring that energy on the court, where they’re spinning and whirling, daring and entertaining and, as the kids say, authentically themselves – and where Saturday they were fortunate to hang on against a UCLA team that is nice in the basketball sense and really is close in terms of its goals.
Closer than it’s been to true national prominence, and buoyed now by a surge of hometown support that has something to do with Mulkey and colorful contingent having helped women’s basketball capture so much of the nation’s attention. Whether you like it or not.