Yow a role model to remember
Jan 24, 2009
The announcement over the public address system at Cameron Indoor Stadium, where fans were urged to observe a moment of silence, elicited an audible moan, part surprise and part dismay. It did not matter that the crowd came to watch a men’s basketball game, or that the teams involved were from Maryland and Duke.
Kay Yow’s appeal -- the genuineness of her manner, the consistency of her faith, the courage demonstrated in her long public battle against breast cancer – was universal. So, too, was the sense of loss when she died on Saturday.
We don’t talk much these days about emulating sports figures. We’ve learned better. Athletic success is no guarantee of character or generosity of spirit. But Yow, 66, was a happy exception to the rule of our disappointment.
Sandra Kay Yow, a native of Alamance County, was a high school English teacher and librarian who moved up the coaching ladder to take over the nascent N.C. State women’s basketball program in 1975-76. At Elon and then N.C. State, she led teams to more than 700 victories. Her Wolfpack squads won four Atlantic Coast Conference championships. Over the years she earned 20 NCAA tournament bids, got to 11 Sweet Sixteens, and in 1998 took the Pack to the Final Four.
Her most recent NCAA visit, in 2007 while visibly fighting cancer, became a stirring story of coach and team overcoming adversity, along the way bumping off second-ranked North Carolina and top-ranked Duke. “I don’t think I’ll ever experience another year as gratifying, no matter what,”Yow said later, a slightly musical lilt inflecting her Southern twang. “I don’t think a national championship would beat that.”
Yow also led U.S. women’s national squads to victories over the Soviets in the mid-1980s when such results ratified the quality of the American game. Then in 1988, having beaten back breast cancer for the first time, she directed the U.S. women to an Olympic gold medal in Summer Games that included the powerful Soviets. “She’s a very peaceful person,” UNC’s Sylvia Hatchell, one of Yow’s Olympic assistants, said in 1988. “She’s very easy to work with. She’s open-minded. She’s pretty flexible. She’ll listen to you and do whatever it takes to get the job done.”
Kay Yow was not one for excuses or complaints. She was straightforward and, in our current vernacular, disinclined toward drama, whether working the sidelines, arguing for more respect for women’s basketball, or sharing with strangers the tribulations of her struggles with a deadly disease.
Very little changed in Yow’s manner over the years, even after she became one of the few women inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. To the end, according to her friends, including sister Debbie Yow, director of athletics at Maryland, the N.C. State coach was motivated by her love of her team, and of basketball.
“She genuinely loves people,” Debbie Leonard, a long-time competitor and friend, said this week. “She loves to have a good time, likes to have fun. She finds the best out of just about any situation she’s in. She finds the best in it and people recognize it and like her back.”
A few years ago, between bouts with the disease that would ultimately kill her, Yow confided that her situation was “still scary, because the cancer can always resurface.” But, she said, she had learned to take life as it came, the moments too precious to waste.
“Every time I’m not on an immediate task, I just relax, and just enjoy listening to a tape, reading a book, watching a show, just going to dinner,” Yow explained. “I just try to make all those activities as enjoyable as possible.”
Yow was open about fighting her disease, a topic of discussion that had been nearly taboo when she was growing up. Soon she became synonymous with battling breast cancer, enlisting the ACC, the Jimmy V Foundation, and ESPN in publicizing efforts at awareness and a cure. Oddly, she was the latest in a distinguished line of N.C. State basketball coaches felled by the disease, joining Everett Case and Jim Valvano, for whom the Jimmy V Foundation is named.
Perhaps someday we’ll look upon the ways in which we treat cancer as the equivalent of barbaric practices such as blood-letting. But for now, surgery and devastating radiation and chemotherapy are the order of battle. Yow employed every tool at her disposal, including an unorthodox dietary regimen.
This past October, she attended the ACC’s preseason event to promote women’s basketball. Gaunt and pale, Yow wore white cotton gloves, her cancer treatment having burned her hands. Her feet and throat were also scorched. Yet she came to discuss her thin, inexperienced team, to spend time with her colleagues, and to savor a future in which she most avidly wished to participate.
A point of pride with Yow and her players was the cover of this year’s N.C. State women's basketball media guide. The photograph features the coach seated in a director’s chair, ball in hands, while players lie about her in the shape of a breast cancer awareness ribbon.
The uniforms are pink rather than N.C. State red. And, while numerals differ from player to player, the names on the backs of the jerseys do not. Every woman is “Yow,” aptly linked with each other and with the central figure who rises above the group as role model, fighter, and pioneer.
