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| Kay Yow was diagnosed with breast cancer 13 months before the 1988 Seoul Olympics. |
BY TIM PEELER
© Coman Publishing, 2013
NOTE: This is a story written for The Wolfpacker for the 25th anniversary of NC State coach Kay Yow leading Team USA to the gold medal at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Her story of determination to overcome that disease and to assert the U.S. national team's dominance over the Soviet Union can never be shared enough.
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RALEIGH, N.C. – Lynn Barry remembers getting the call in the middle of August 1987.
NC State women’s basketball coach Kay Yow, who had just been named the head coach for the U.S. Olympic team, was on the line, telling the national team’s governing committee chairman that a routine checkup had revealed Yow had breast cancer.
Immediately, Barry began to come up with a mental list of possible replacements. After all, this was breast cancer, and this was serious. And the Olympics were only 13 months away.
“I had no idea what we were going to do,” Barry said.
Before the call was over, though, Yow had already assured Barry, the assistant director of USA Basketball and the person in charge of organizing the women’s squad for the Seoul Olympics, nothing would get in the way of fulfilling her longtime dream of leading Team USA to an Olympic gold medal.
“I don’t think Kay ever thought she would not be able to coach the Olympic team,” said younger sister and former NC State All-American Susan Yow, who was one of Kay’s two assistants on the 1988 squad. “She just never thought that way.”
Twenty-five years ago, the Americans repeated in winning Olympic gold, but it was a Yow-inspired victory that completely changed international women’s basketball. Sure, the U.S. won the 1984 gold medal, under the direction of Pat Summitt, with Yow as an assistant.
But the Soviets, who hadn’t lost to the Americans in more than a quarter century, didn’t participate. It took Yow’s persistence – the same positive stubbornness she used to overcome cancer – to defeat the USSR. In 1986, Yow was named the head coach for the U.S. national team that would compete in both the Goodwill Games and the World Championships. Both events were held in Moscow.
The Americans whipped the Soviets by more than 20 points in both events, ending 29 years of futility against America’s biggest international rival, outcomes that were so stunning to the home team that both the head coach and several Soviet national team players were dismissed afterwards.
Over the next two years, Kay and Susan Yow and the team’s other assistant, North Carolina head coach Sylvia Hatchell, traveled the world to scout the Soviet team, watching 30 games in Yugoslavia, Spain and Malaysia. Why was it so important?
In 1974, when she was still the head coach at Elon, Yow had coached a team of American all-stars that lost to the Soviet Union 114-41, a loss she never forgot.
She spent the next 15 years honing her international skills, coaching in the 1979 and ’81 World University Games in Mexico and Yugoslavia. She took a select American team to Cuba in 1981 and coached in the Pan American Games in Venezuela in 1983. Summitt picked Yow out of a pool of U.S. coaches to be on the coaching staff for the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, but the Soviets boycotted, just as the Americans had done for the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
After winning the two championships in 1986, Yow was determined to complete the mission she had started to make the U.S. the most dominant team in women’s international basketball.
But, as Yow like to say, God has a funny sense of humor. Not only was she diagnosed with cancer, going through a radical modified mastectomy that removed her right breast and 20 lymph nodes, but her mother, Lib, was also diagnosed with lymphoma.
“What I remember was her determination in the summer of 1987 to be well enough to coach in 1998,” said NC State athletics director Debbie Yow, Kay’s younger sister. “The decision to have a modified radical mastectomy was made, in part, to best ensure that could occur. The cancer would be eradicated and she would be free to move forward in her life's work, including serving as head coach of the Olympics.”
Susan Yow thought their mother’s diagnosis might have an even bigger impact on Kay than her own surgery. Susan almost stepped aside as an assistant to be with their mom through her nine months of successful treatment.
“Kay just told me, ‘Let’s see how it goes,’” Susan said.
So the team, starring Teresa Edwards and Cynthia Cooper, took off on an intense spring training schedule that bounced them from Raleigh to Colorado Springs for training camps and to Myrtle Beach and Columbia, S.C., from exhibition games. By the time they showed up in Korea wearing their “Sole Goal, Seoul Gold” T-shirts, the team was prepared to win.
As for her own illness, Kay never let it affect her coaching, even though she was taking 18 different vitamins a day and her doctors were keeping a close eye on her health. To her, however, it was secondary.
“By the time we got to South Korea, her cancer was a nonissue,” Barry remembers. “She was sometimes a little tired, but every Olympic coach who is under that enormous pressure, no matter what sport, feels that way.”
And, as it turned out, Lib Yow’s cancer went into remission, and even though she and husband Hilton Yow could not attend the Olympics in Seoul, they watched all five victories on television from their home in Gibsonville, N.C., including the 102-88 win over the Soviets in the semifinals as Katrina McClain scored 27 points and Cooper scored 26.
Two days later, the Americans beat Yugoslavia for the gold, something Georgetown coach John Thompson and the U.S. men’s team failed to do.
But Yow, with all of the emotional stress from the previous 18 months, was exhausted.
“Ten years from now, I might look back at ’88 as the best of times,” Yow said. “I loved it. But I gave everything I had to give and as a result depleted myself. The pressure, the intensity of it all, takes it out of you. There’s only one way to explain it: It’s the Olympics.”
Susan Yow believes winning that gold medal – out of all the many great things her Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame sister did in her life – ranks in the top two or three. The only thing that would have ever surpassed it would have been winning a national championship at NC State.
“What was most important to her about winning the gold medal was being able to share it with everyone,” said Susan Yow, who is now the head coach at Queens College in Charlotte. “She was able to come home and share that with the entire U.S. basketball community.
“And that’s what would have made her happiest about winning a national championship at NC State – a chance to share that experience with her Wolfpack family.”