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Little Miss Muffet McGraw represents evolution of women's game
Updated: Monday April 02, 2001 5:25 PM
Sports Illustrated senior writer Jack McCallum touches on a Hot Button issue each Monday on CNNSI.com. After you read Jack's take, give us yours. The best point guard I ever played with was named Muffet. If you got open and Muffet was running the show, you had better have your hands up or the ball would smash you in the mouth. She saw openings no one else knew were there, divined passing angles that hadn't existed a second earlier, threaded her way through traffic like a Volkswagen Beetle on a turnpike filled with semis. Muffet was about 5-foot-5 and 105 pounds and everyone in our lunchtime pickup games at Lehigh University wanted to play on her team. Sunday night Muffet won a national championship. Muffet McGraw left Lehigh for Notre Dame 14 years ago, but I'll never forget the way she played the game -- with passion, energy and especially intelligence. That's the way she has always coached, too. Compared to interest in the Duke-Arizona men's final, Sunday night's Notre Dame-Purdue matchup in the women's NCAA title game in St. Louis didn't exactly captivate the nation. But it was the climax of a tournament with terrific story lines: The unexpected exit of powerful Tennessee; a long overdue look at Southwest Missouri State's incomparable scoring machine Jackie Stiles; the savvy floor game of Purdue's Katie Douglas, who was playing to honor the memory of her parents (both cancer victims) and teammate Tiffany Young who had died in a car accident. And I, along with the Lehigh lunchtime crowd, had Muffet. Through Muffet, one can chart the evolution of the women's game. When she started playing basketball in the mid-'60s around her native Philadelphia, there was no such thing as a female gym rat. Muffet quickly became one, discovering that she had an aptitude for a sport dominated by tall males. In one way her timing was fortunate: The women's game was so undeveloped that no one suggested to her she was too small to play it. If you could dribble with your head up, you were ready to play. Muffet was a high school star in Philadelphia and went on to St. Joseph's where in 1977 she captained a team that finished No. 3 in the nation, not that anyone noticed. She graduated at about the time that a woman could first dream of making a full-time living in hoops. She won a Philadelphia Catholic League championship as a coach, played for one year in an ill-fated women's pro league, came back to St. Joe's as an assistant for a season and got the head coaching job at Lehigh in '82 when she was in her mid-20s. Muffet probably doesn't even realize how much she changed that place, earning respect for a team that was once ignored, coaching the game with vigor as well as class, schooling stiffs like myself in old Taylor Gym. Another of her lunchtime victims was her husband. Matt McGraw was the rock on which Muffet built her career, the male counterpart of the basketball wife who dies a thousand deaths behind the team bench as the network cameras roll. He's doing the same things at Notre Dame that he did with considerably less media scrutiny at Lehigh -- going to the store, cooking the dinners, telling the coach to keep her head up when things go bad. They now have a 10-year-old son, Murphy, who takes piano lessons, paints himself like a leprechaun and answers a front door that chimes out the Notre Dame fight song. They're a modern-day sitcom in waiting. Muffet and the McGraws. Luck of the Irish. My Mother the Coach. Think of the possibilities. There are selected times in this business when it gets personal, when you have something to root for as a fan, and they're the best times. Sunday night was one of those. Sports Illustrated senior writer Jack McCallum writes about a Hot Button issue every Monday on CNNSI.com.
The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
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