Thanksgiving

I’m sitting in an airport, waiting for a delayed flight to take me back to California. It’s been a long trip. Perhaps it would have felt shorter if Stanford had won one of its games. As is, it has been a busy and long four days. I’ll be glad to be home. And suspect our players will be too. No more travel for me until Dec. 20.

My image of Knoxville will always be of orange—orange everywhere. The hotel staff wears orange shirts, orange throw pillows decorate the lobby, the hotel bar is named the Orange Martini—their specialty drink is the Big Orange, which is also the label visible in Thompson-Boling arena where Stanford played the University of Tennessee. The attendance at that basketball game was over 13,000 of orange-clad folks. And then many orangely decorated cars and thousands of orange fans assembled everywhere for the football game the next day.

For a refreshing change of color, I saw our Kate Starbird’s “30” jersey at the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame (see above). Good luck to our current 30 to get there too. But this is me in a historic fort’s stockade—and I think our 30 felt this way with UT’s 3 wrapped around her during the game.

Folks ask me whether I had a good Thanksgiving dinner; I respond, “Turkey sandwich in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.” Folks also ask whether I saw my family for Thanksgiving; I respond, “They were in the hotel and at the games with me—my basketball family.”