THE SEOUL GAMES / DAY 7 : Women’s Basketball : Troubles Give Yow a Reason to Do More

If anyone has a reason to shut off the alarm clock in the morning, pull the covers up over her head and shut out the world, it’s Kay Yow. Let’s just say that this hasn’t been the best year of her life.

Just over a year ago, not long after Yow was named coach of the U.S. women’s basketball Olympic team, her doctor told her she had breast cancer. Four months after having her right breast removed in a modified radical mastectomy, Yow found out her mother had lymphoma. Subsequent to that, Yow had her first losing season after 12 consecutive winning ones at North Carolina State, 10 of them with 20 victories or more.

But Yow has a thousand philosophies, at least, and one of them is: “Successful people don’t go through life, they grow through life.” So, Yow is here with her U.S. basketball team, making sure she keeps a promise she made to herself before the operation.

“I’m going to meet every person from every nation I can,” she said. “It might sound corny, but fellowship is what these Olympics are supposed to be, and it wouldn’t make any sense not to approach it that way.”

Follow Yow around for a few days and you find she means every word. She may have met more strangers and learned bits and pieces of more new languages than anybody in Seoul for these Summer Games.

Ask Yow about her first losing team at N.C. State, the one that had a soccer player starting because of so many injuries, and she says, “It’s my favorite team.” Ask her about fighting cancer, and she brings up a book by Rabbi Herschel Jaffe entitled “Why Me? Why Anyone?”

“I think of the giant sequoias in California,” Yow says, “and how when the storm comes, the roots get deeper in order to survive. My own roots seem to be deeper now, and I want to stand tall and firm.”

Andrea Lloyd, one of the U.S. players who is getting to know Yow for the first time, calls her coach “neat. She’s the most enthusiastic and at the same time sincere person you could come across.”

Yow’s story is aytpical for a successful, big-time college coach. After graduating with a degree in English from East Carolina, Yow wanted a job teaching at a high school in North Carolina. The principal liked her and agreed to hire her on one condition: She’d have to coach the girls’ basketball team.

Yow had never coached, didn’t want to, didn’t have any special aspirations to, either. But the principal remembered her as a hot-shot player from Gibsonville High in the late 1950s, and thought she could do the job.

Yow wanted the job so badly she said yes. She hit the library and found every coaching book possible. She also attended every clinic she could find.

The first two years, her teams went 45-5. Her coaching life became a bit more predictable thereafter; she went back to Gibsonville for one year, advanced to Elon College for four seasons, and was hired at N.C. State in 1975-76.

Ever since, she has won consistently. And she has done it pretty much without offending anyone, stepping on anyone’s toes. “When you come from a this-is-the-way-it’s-going-to-be program, she is a breath of fresh air,” former USC star Cynthia Cooper said recently. “This isn’t a young team, I’m 25 years old. We all seem to have a person-to-person relationship, not, ‘I’m the coach, you’re the player.’ ”

Susan Yow, Kay’s sister and an assistant coach for the U.S. team, says this approach can cause an occasional problem. “Sometimes (during the college season), if there is a situation that might require discipline, she’ll call me (at Drake University) and say, ‘Susan, what you would do?’ I’ll go a long way, but Kay will go to the very end. She’ll exhaust herself she’ll go so far. She just absolutely can’t stand tension. She would tell you that confrontation is something she does not like.”

Yow’s openness, even with people she hardly knows, is reknowned. “I guess I do put myself in a vulnerable position,” she said. “People could take advantage of that, and I guess a few have. But that’s the way I find best for me to live. I just love people.”

Somehow, that’s all translated to the players, especially the ones on this team. “She genuinely wants to listen to every view,” Lloyd said. “If someone wants to offer a better way to do it, she’ll listen. I think she’s the best possible coach for this team because we’re at a point in our lives (average age nearly 24) where we need freedom, and not the structure of college players.

“It’s really neat to work or play for somebody like that who’s so positive. It’s rubbed off on us,” Lloyd said. “When I first heard about her cancer, last summer at the Pan American Games, you immediately feel sorry. But when you see how positive she is you say, ‘Cancer, what cancer? How can this lady have cancer?’ ”

Yow is a religious woman, and her enthusiasm caused a minor stir a couple of years ago. As head coach of the 1986 U.S. national team that won gold medals at both the Goodwill Games and the FIBA World Championships--those were the first victories by the United States over the U.S.S.R. in international play--Yow did more than pick up a few victories.

She had some friends who wanted her to bring Bibles into the Soviet Union. Yow obliged, and the U.S. basketball federation told her it was “inappropriate behavior.” That’s about the only subject Yow is relatively quiet on, although she did say recently, “I wasn’t trying to convince anybody of anything. I just believe people should have the right to pursue any interests.”

Of course, Yow is pursuing her interests. Sometimes, basketball gets in the way. “I’m such a people person, it’s hard for me to stay in touch with the daily demands of my office,” she once said. “To be organized, to answer correspondence, return phone calls and fill out paperwork . . . I’d rather be talking with people.”

Yow was asked if she ever woke up feeling sorry for herself, if she feels that life has picked on her unfairly. And Yow had a saying for that, too. “When life kicks you,” she said, “let it kick you forward.”