By Mel Greenberg
If former Connecticut star Diana Taurasi never picks up a basketball again, the five-year countdown to membership in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., will immediately get under way.
However, the Phoenix Mercury's triumph over the Detroit Shock on Sunday in Auburn Hills, Mich., to claim their first WNBA title automatically gave Taurasi membership in a far more exclusive group dominated by former stars of Huskies coach Geno Auriemma.
Taurasi has become the seventh woman and fourth ex-UConn notable to earn symbolic trinkets for capturing NCAA titles, Olympic gold medals, and WNBA championships.
The other former Connecticut stars to earn the distinction are Sue Bird, Swin Cash, and Kara Wolters, who earned her membership card by sitting on the bench, for the most part, of the 1999 WNBA champion Houston Comets.
Sheryl Swoopes and former Houston great Cynthia Cooper became the first members in 1977 when the Comets won their first WNBA crown in the pro league's inaugural season.
Cooper already owned a gold medal from the 1988 games in Seoul, Korea and and NCAA special ring off the 1984 title with Southern Cal during the "Cheryl Miller" era.
Swoopes torched the scoreboard for Texas Tech in the Women's Final Four in 1993 to earn a collegiate title and then was part of the Olympic golden girls of 1996 at the Atlanta Games.
Wolters played on the unbeaten and first UConn national champion in 1995. After playing in the short-lived American Basketball League, the center was drafted by Houston for the 1999 season. She spent the summer of 2000 with the Indiana Fever, but also got picked for the USA squad that took a gold in Sydney, Australia.
Former Notre Dame star Ruth Riley and former Huskies notable Swin Cash became trifecta members in 2004 when USA beat Australia for gold in Athens, Greece.
Riley began earning her qualifications with the 2001 NCAA title, while Cash got her first NCAA championship ring in 2000 at the Wachovia Center here in Philadelphia. The two reached their WNBA achievement as members of the 2003 Detroit champions, a feat they repeated a year ago.
Bird also earned a membership card with that USA squad in Athens. She already had NCAA titles as a classmate of Cash at UConn., and in 2004 she helped lead Seattle to the WNBA title.
As for some honorable mentioning and maybe a little more, former Texas star Andrea Lloyd Curry was part of the 1986 unbeaten NCAA winners and then was with the 1986 gold medal group. She also won two pro titles with the Columbus Quest under the former ABL, an achievement that probably should be equalized to WNBA success.
WNBA Seattle Storm coach Anne Donovan, who will head the USA team next summer in Beijing, China, starred at Old Dominion and won a national title at Old Dominion in 1980 under the former Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) in the pre-NCAA era.
She was a member of the 1984 gold medal winners in Los Angeles and got a second gold metal in 1988. Her WNBA title occurred as a coach of the Storm in 2004.
Detroit's Katie Smith was on the 2003 Ohio State NCAA runnersup to Swoopes' Texas Tech team. She won two titles with the ABL's Columbus Quest and played on the gold medal winners of 2000 and 2004.
Until the former Buckeye star got her WNBA crown following a late-season trade the previous summer from the Minnesota Lynx, Temple coach Dawn Staley had been the only player to participate in NCAA, WNBA, ABL and Olympic title games.
Having spoken of Cheryl Miller, she would have achieved Donovan's combo trick first, had not Phoenix, which she was then coaching, melted down in Game Two of the then best-of-three championship series in 1998 against Houston. The Comets went on to take the their second
She already had 1983 and 1984 NCAA rings with Southern Cal and an Olympic gold medal from 1984.
There are a bunch of others falling short of the trio achievement. Former New York Liberty star Teresa Weatherspoon won a gold in 1988 and an NCAA title the same year. But New York lost several WNBA title series during her pro career.
First-year Phoenix general manager Ann Meyers won an AIAW title with UCLA in 1978. But the USA team in their first Olympics in 1976 in Montreal earned a silver to the then-power Soviet Union squad. And the former all-American was denied a second shot in 1980 when former President Jimmy Carter ordered the United States' boycott of the Games in Moscow.
Incidentally, the 1998 Phoenix team that almost claimed that WNBA title had Bridget Pettis as a player. On Sunday, she finally got a chance to spray the bubbly as an assistant coach with the Mercury.
-- Mel
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