In 1984, Mulkey's writing was gold

      For five months in 1984, Kim Mulkey was on our team -- the Shreveport Journal sports department. 

     Just as in every phase of her life, she was very good at what she did. She could have been a sportswriter.

     (Don't laugh. It is a noble profession. And don't you forget it. Somebody has to do it. 

      Her spectacular four-year basketball career at Louisiana Tech finished -- with a fourth consecutive women's Final Four appearance -- Kim was entering the next phase: Trying to make the United States women's basketball team for the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

      She made it ... and helped her team win the gold medal. 

      And during the journey -- the tryouts, the team selections, the practices, the exhibition games, the trip to LA, the Opening Ceremony, the time in the Olympic Village, and the Olympic competition itself, she told the story ... in the Shreveport Journal. 

     In 14 segments, beginning April 19, "Kim Mulkey's Olympic Diary" appeared on the Journal sports pages. 

     Here is the promo for the start of the series:

     Kim had played for U.S. teams in international games for three years and had been one of college basketball's best women's players during that time. So she was a natural for the tryouts. 

     She was a natural for the Journal, too.

     The idea was generated -- as were many stories in the paper in those late 1970s/1980s years -- by the paper's editor, Stanley Tiner. 

     We took it from there ... and so did Kim.

     Believe me, it took some effort on her part. She had to write out, or type, her stories, and then make a call to the Journal sports department and, as I recall, dictate her words to us. On our end, it meant typing it into our computers and preparing it for the next day's editions.

     We had the easy part. Kim could write. She needed very little help, maybe a little editing here and there. Of course, her stories were excellent ... good reads, in newspaper terms.

      She was, after all, a summa cum laude college student; the sportswriters at the Journal were not.

     So it was time-consuming for Kim, between her basketball tryouts and travels.

      As I recall, her pay was a few million dollars short of what she's made as the women's head basketball coach at Baylor (and now LSU), or even a few thousand dollars short as an assistant coach for 15 years at Louisiana Tech.

     I think she did it for the good of the country ... and the Journal. It was a free ride.

     It was a pleasure to team up with her, and I remember that Journal readers enjoyed her stories. By then, she had been the "darling" of Louisiana Tech women's basketball fans for four years, the little point guard with the pigtails. The  big winner, the champion.

     Truth is, she had fans, too, in the Journal sports department (see Jerry Byrd's column) and also The Times, where our friend Jim McLain covered the Lady Techsters' story for many years.

     So her stories were gold for us, and the U.S. team -- coached by Pat Head Summitt, by then not quite the legend she would become at the University of Tennessee -- earned its gold by beating South Korea in the title game (remember, Russian athletes boycotted the LA Games in '84).

      Kim wasn't the only Louisiana Tech player to mine that gold. So did center/forward Janice Lawrence.

       (Lawrence was the Final Four's "Most Outstanding Player" when Tech and Mulkey won a second consecutive national championship in 1982. The Lady Techsters lost to Southern California, led by Cheryl Miller, in the 1983 championship game, 69-67, and 1984 semifinals, 62-57.)

     Here is how Kim ended her final "Olympic Diary" story, which ran in the Journal on August 8, the afternoon after the previous night's gold-medal game and ceremony:

       You probably know the rest. A lot of her dreams have come true ... and now, at LSU, there are more dreams and more goals. 

       The Journal is no more, having folded in 1991. Kim Mulkey's story rolls on ... and it's been a golden adventure.