Love is in the gym

Sports scribe and WNBA star prove love conquers all

This past Friday, at the NBA All-Star Weekend bash, my colleague from Sports Illustrated, the wonderfully engaging columnist, Steve Rushin, was sitting next to Rebecca Lobo, the 1995 NCAA women's basketball Player of the Year from the University of Connecticut, at an assembly featuring Charles Barkley. The topic: How athletes and sportswriters don't get along nearly so well as they used to -- which they surely don't.

Rebecca leaned over to Steve and said, "Well, we're doing our part."

You see, sometimes, even now, athletes and sportswriters -- a few of them -- do get along. Rebecca and Steve will be married April 12th, with a reception at the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. to follow. Happy Valentine's! As far as I know, at least on a national level, only twice previously have we had an American athlete actually drop down in class to marry a wretched sportswriter. Pauline Betz, a champion at both Forest Hills and Wimbledon, married Bob Addie of The Washington Post, and Julie Krone, the Hall of Fame jockey, is married to Jay Hovdey of the Daily Racing Form. Never, it seems, has a male athlete married a female sports reporter.

Apparently, no guy's ego would allow him to share the same bed with someone who could publicly criticize him.

Actually, in a sort of Tracy-and-Hepburn tradition -- do you see a Lifetime cable movie in this? -- the Rushin-Lobo romance began when they met in New York at an Upper West Side bar, and she promptly took him to task for something snide he had written about women's pro basketball. "How many WNBA games have you seen?" Lobo asked.

"Well, none," Steve replied.

"Then how can you write that?" Rebecca responded.

"Hey, I'm a sportswriter," he said. "That's what we do."

So, Lobo invited Rushin to a New York Liberty game -- the team she was playing for at the time -- and love soon bloomed. Steve is from Minnesota, and so Rebecca gave him a Kirby Puckett 1984 retro shirt for his last birthday. Later in the evening, wearing big No. 34's jersey, he proposed. As a an athlete, Rebecca obviously knew the way to a sportswriter's heart.

But then, while nobody ever wants to use the word in sports, there truly is a lot of "love" present. People really do love their teams -- even and often, perhaps, too much. Some college alumni, particularly, care more for their college teams than their college.

Anyway, we call people who root for their team "fans." That's derived from "fanatics." It replaced the 19th century terms "cranks," for baseball, and "the fancy", for boxing. We also call sports fans "supporters," which I've always thought was a bit forced. No, supporting isn't enough. You have to love in sports. It just sounds too sissy or weird to say a team has lovers. So, we call them fans.

And may you find a love in sportsland, too. So, Happy Valentine's Day to Rebecca and Steve and to all of you who watch games with someone you love or who love a team with a good bit of your whole heart.

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to SI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He is a longtime correspondent for HBO's Real Sports and his new novel, An American Summer (Sourcebooks Trade), is available now at bookstores everywhere.

 

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