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Monday, April 2
ND's Riley a different person on the court
By Mechelle Voepel
Special to ESPN.com
So you have this image of Notre Dame's Ruth Riley -- that she's
intimidating, has a temper, is sort of like T-rex in green and gold.
Ferocious. Yo, clown: Get out of Ruth's house while the getting is good.
Maybe it's because Riley likes to block shots, which used to get her
in foul trouble a lot. And the thought was you could make her mad, get
into her head, hound her into taking herself out of the game.
"I think I played pretty immaturely the first couple of years,"
Riley said.
|  | | Notre Dame center Ruth Riley is the main reason the Irish are playing for the national championship. |
Riley fouled out eight times her freshman season, but then just seven
times combined her sophomore and junior years. This season, as Notre
Dame goes into Sunday's championship game vs. Purdue, Riley has fouled
out just twice.
And that T-rex stuff? Riley's personality is actually more like Little
Foot's grandmother. That would be the docile, plant-eating kind of
dinosaur, in case you haven't spent time with rugrats in recent years
and watched every "Land Before Time" video.
"I'm pretty laid-back and easy-going," Riley said Saturday at the
media fest in St. Louis. Still, she added, "I'm a different person when
I step on the court."
So does she pull on that headband like some kind of samuri-warrior
garb? Does a transformation happen: from small-town quiet girl to
tough-girl superstar?
"That's exactly true," teammate Kelley Siemon said. "On court, she
is loud with her play. Off court, she's not like that at all."
Riley said Saturday that she grew up not in teeny-tiny Macy, Ind., but
actually outside the town.
"It has a post office," Riley said of Macy, "and that's about it."
She mentioned that teammate Niele Ivey visited her house once, and it
kind of frightened her. "Yeah," Ivey, of suburban St. Louis, said.
"It was way in the back of the cornfields."
Maybe Ivey had seen "Children of the Corn" too many times. In fact,
that might have been running through coach Muffet McGraw's mind when she
went on a recruiting visit to see Riley.
"We were driving and thought we were lost in the middle of nowhere,"
McGraw said. "And then finally the house appeared."
Riley grew up loving the movie "Hoosiers," of course, and was
recruited by Purdue, too, but made her decision pretty early to go to
Notre Dame.
Riley helped the Irish get a big NCAA second-round upset of Texas Tech
on its home floor in Lubbock in 1998, her freshman year. Then the Irish
were back in Lubbock for the Midwest Regional semifinals, where they
lost to Purdue.
In 1999, Notre Dame lost in the second round to LSU. Last year, the
NCAA loss came in the regional semifinals against Texas Tech.
And then Riley and Notre Dame came into this season with onlookers
believing ... and not believing. Yes, the Irish were very good. But
could they get past the Beast of the Big East, UConn? Notre Dame never
had, and then going into the team's biggest game of the regular season --
Jan. 15 vs. UConn at home -- Riley had twisted her ankle and Siemon had
broken a bone in her hand the game before.
It didn't seem karma was playing fair -- Notre Dame had a sellout crowd
and an ESPN audience, but how could it beat mighty UConn with Riley and
Siemon ailing?
Well, other than Siemon's free-throw shooting that day, everything
those two did was right. That 92-76 victory confirmed in everyone's
minds that the Irish really could do it this season.
And the surreal national semifinal game on Friday vs. UConn -- where
the Irish went from 16 points down near the end of the first half to
winning by 15 -- showed how mature Riley really is now.
She looked tentative in the first half, and scored just three points.
In the second half, she had 15.
Going into the Final Four, McGraw had said of Riley, "I think she is
so successful because, one, she is a very intelligent player and, two,
because we have so many great players with her."
When you're 6 feet 5, of course, everyone just expects you to be good.
You're not given much quarter for mistakes. Nobody feels sorry for the
big kid.
You look at Riley's body after a game, though, and it's that of your
classic post player: One of her knees is bloody, she has bruises on her
shoulders and arms, her hands and the area around her wrists are covered
with scratches and various other red marks.
It's proof of how hard she works during a game to get open. How much --
despite the so-called laid-back personality -- this game means to her. In
the Notre Dame media guide, she finishes the sentence: "Nobody knows
how much I ..." by saying "want to get better."
Well, we know now.
Mechelle Voepel of the Kansas City Star is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. She can be reached via e-mail at mvoepel@kcstar.com.
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