Louisville's Angel McCoughtry Wins By Getting to the Point

ST. LOUIS

On the Louisville women's basketball team, they tend to skip the softy slogans and gentle mood therapies, and go straight to frank criticism. You can see the Cardinals jawing at each other on the court, led by their star Angel McCoughtry and Coach Jeff Walz, and they're not talking about paths to wellness, either. The Cardinals use their mouths the way some people use elbows.

There's something hard about the Cardinals, not hard as in cynical or unpleasant, but as in uncompromising. They don't mess around with the niceties, tell each other comforting lies about how things will be all right against top-ranked Connecticut in the NCAA women's basketball final. The blunt fact is they find themselves in a David and Goliath-type game, and the last time they met, David got skull-crushed. U-Conn. humiliated the Cardinals in the Big East tournament barely a month ago, 75-36, a score they refuse to make sound better than it was. In the locker room after that game, Walz told his team, "When you walk out of here, if your parents tell you that you did a good job, they're lying to you. Just tell them you were awful."

Walz said something similar to McCoughtry when the Cardinals trailed Oklahoma by 12 at halftime in the NCAA semifinals Sunday night. The three-time all-American did not make a basket in the half, going 0 for 7, which provoked Walz to call her an "embarrassment" to her face.

"She was bad," he said. "It was the worst I'd seen her play. So I wasn't going to walk in there and tell her it's okay, because it wasn't."

McCoughtry responded with 14 second-half points to lead the Cardinals to a breathless comeback and last-second victory over the Sooners, 61-59.

If the Cardinals somehow manage to make a game of it with U-Conn., it will be because they confronted the enormity of the task with merciless self-candor: They'll have to begrudge every point, and contend on every possession, "or we'll behind by 25," McCoughtry says. But grudging play against steep favorites happens to be something they excel at.

Throughout the tournament the Cardinals have commanded little respect, and they also had one of the worst draws: While perennial favorite U-Conn. got to play before home crowds, the Cardinals were shipped off to Baton Rouge to face LSU and later had to beat top-seeded Maryland.

"We've had the hardest road to the Final Four," McCoughtry declared. "We were off somewhere with the alligators."

McCoughtry, a Baltimore-born pastor's daughter, is the most outspokenly confrontational member of the team. She pulsates with ill-disguised feelings, a player of racing kinetic energy, she is never still physically or verbally, as a national TV audience learned when she called out ESPN analyst Kara Lawson for picking against them. "I see you Kara Lawson!" she shrieked into the camera. As an underclassman she was too emotional and unquiet to a fault, prone to throwing tantrums with the refs and berating her teammates. "She was a difficult player to like," observes U-Conn. Coach Geno Auriemma.

Her point guard Deseree Byrd was even more succinct: "She had an attitude problem."

"A little bit true," McCoughtry admits.