It's Rivalry Week on ESPN, which includes the Connecticut-Tennessee women Part II in Knoxville. So about this rivalry business ...
|  | | Kelly Schumacher, left, and UConn have a two-game win streak over Michelle Snow and UT. |
Some might say it started with Cain and Abel. (Incidentally, if that outfit -- Adam and Eve and kids; I never caught the last name if they had one -- isn't proof of the inherent dysfunction in families, nothing is.)
However, I'm not going to pretend to know a lot about this, not having a very distinguished record in Sunday School class.
It was something to either daydream through or sneak out of, the latter being the case whenever it appeared there was a danger of missing an NFL kickoff on TV. That was the good part of living two minutes from church. Plus, the teachers never cared if I left. In fact, they seemed to prefer not having a brat around asking, "So why did all those big miracles like the burning bush and the parting of the Red Sea happen before the invention of cameras?"
My theological education pretty much ended at age 15 -- being one of those wonderful adolescents who thinks everything in life is complete garbage -- when I walked out in the middle of confirmation class and the co-pastors more or less begged my parents not to make me come back.
But I did pick up enough to know that the Cain-Abel thing was a rivalry that obviously got way out of hand.
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HE SAID, SHE SAID
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A collection of this week's quotes from Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma and Tennessee coach Pat Summitt:
Geno Auriemma*:
"I feel OK about my team. I think we're all right. I don't think we're rolling along like we are going to be, but I feel pretty good."
"What (the Notre Dame) game did was provide a glimpse of what can happen when we just go out there and play without purpose. That game kind of shook everybody, but when you live up in this neck of the woods, one time is one time too many. But hopefully we have learned from that."
"We've got a lot of guys on our team that, for whatever reason, don't seem to be able to carry things through right now. I can't put my finger on why. Why would we play that well (against Miami) and then play the way we did in the first half (against Syracuse)?"
Pat Summitt:
"We are going into the game without Tamika Catchings and that's a big difference (from our last game vs. UConn). Our individuals are playing better than they did the last time we faced the Huskies, but UConn had a lot to do with that. I have challenged our players to do a better job in the first half than we did back in December. We found ourselves in such a hole the last few match-ups with them that we were too tired to make a run. I am hoping we will be better prepared for this game."
"Clearly, this has been a good rivalry for our programs and women's basketball in general. We have to look at what's best for this program, and we are in a real crunch for games because we need to schedule other games so players like Kara Lawson, Michelle Snow and April McDivitt can return to their home areas to play. The possibility of meeting three times in one year psychologically concerns me. Sometimes the team with the better talent loses the game because they are psyched out before they step on the court."
"Every time we play we want to win. February 1 is not a time to place added pressure on a team, but it is a great way to measure the progress we have made since the last game in front of a packed house. I am anxious to see how the individuals will respond."
* From the Hartford Courant.
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Which brings us to the rivalry about whether any of that stuff actually happened, the whole creation vs. evolution deal. And, of course, there are the rivalries within each group. The former has given us a rich world history of murder, torture, rape and slavery in the name of "my religion vs. your religion," and the latter has given us utter crap such as Piltdown man.
OK, so I haven't progressed much since 15.
Which brings us to the nature-nurture rivalry. I'm not a lot like my sisters, but we're all adopted. So it must be nature, right? But then I might say, "I'm nothing like my brother, and my parents swear they created us both, although they sometimes wonder why. So it must be nurture, right?"
Which brings us to a sibling rivalry that is documented on film: the legendary Olivia de Havilland-Joan Fontaine feud.
Joan won the Best Actress Oscar in 1941 for "Suspicion," the same year Olivia was nominated for "Hold Back the Dawn." The rivalry, though, started long before that.
The fantastic book "Inside Oscar" chronicles this sister war, which is as creepy as it is hilarious. The book quotes Joan saying that when her name was announced as the '41 winner, "All the animus we'd felt toward each other as children, the hair-pullings, the savage wrestling matches, the time Olivia fractured my collarbone, all came rushing back in kaleidoscopic imagery."
Good heavens, Melanie Wilkes broke her little sister's collarbone? Of course, if you recall the look Olivia's character gives Bette Davis'
character near the end of "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte," -- which could have turned Medusa to stone -- you could see, maybe, where Olivia might have had another side to her.
In '46, a photographer caught the scene backstage at the Oscars when Joan tried to congratulate Olivia for winning Best Actress for "To Each His Own," and Olivia turned away from her. When they inadvertently ended up on the same floor of the same hotel before the Academy Awards show 41 years later, Joan immediately moved to another floor.
Which brings us to Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, who even at the peak of their tennis rivalry could not only co-exist on the same floor but even shared food in the locker room before Grand Slam championship matches.
Which brings us to the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan-Oksana Baiul rivalries in '94. Harding's thug associates tried to put a grand slam on Kerrigan's knee but didn't manage to do enough damage to keep her out of the Olympics. Then Kerrigan, after being awarded silver to Baiul's gold by the Byzantine process of figure skating judging, uttered one of the grander slams in Olympic history when someone mistakenly told her the medal ceremony was being delayed because the kooky Ukrainian had to go fix
her make-up after her post-victory crying jag.
"Oh, come on," Kerrigan said. "So she's going to get out here and cry again. What's the difference?"
Which brings us to the former Soviet Union vs. the United States, which we used to think was going to be the rivalry that blew up the planet. Now, although it's not like the Russians are our pals, we both probably have bigger concerns about the nuclear weapons that non-superpowers have and, you know, whatever's going on in China.
Which brings us to Svetlana Abrosimova (you thought we were never actually going to get to basketball, didn't you?) and how the breakup of the Soviet Union led to folks like her being able to come live over here and do stuff like play hockey and basketball and become part of our sports rivalries.
In 1979, before Svet was born, Nancy Lieberman and Old Dominion faced the Russian national team in Norfolk, Va. And then in February 1980 -- still before Svet was born; as her legion knows, that blessed day was July 9, 1980 -- the U.S. hockey team beat the USSR on the way to eventually winning Olympic gold.
Back then, the idea of a whole state loving a Russian-born athlete would have seemed quite improbable. As would the idea of 24,000 people at a collegiate women's basketball game that was on prime-time television.
Which brings us, finally, to UConn-Tennessee. What new is there to say? Well, more than we might have expected. Who figured this would be a matchup of the No. 2 and No. 3 teams? Who figured we wouldn't get to see Tamika Catchings? Who figured that the national championship picture, even though UConn is realistically still a big favorite to repeat, would look a tad less clear cut in the first week of February than it did the first week of November?
To get ready for this game, I requested that the schools' media-relations coordinators ask some of the UConn and Tennessee folks to list a favorite rivalry -- stressing that it didn't have to be a sports rivalry.
UConn took the quirky route, offering up the likes of "ESPN the Magazine" vs. "Sports Illustrated" (Svet), Wile E. Coyote vs. the
Roadrunner (Ashley Battle), Coke vs. Pepsi (Kelly Schumacher), soup vs. salad (Sue Bird), Tiffany vs. Tangy (Tamika Williams about her sisters) and WWF vs. WCW (Shea Ralph).
Tennessee took the straightforward sports route. Catchings, who unfortunately won't play because of the freakin' ACL, picked the Heat vs. the Lakers, Semeka Randall opted for the Trail Blazers vs. the Lakers, Kara Lawson chose Duke vs. North Carolina in men's basketball (another Rivalry Week staple) and Michelle Snow picked Tennessee-UConn ... and/or UConn-Rutgers. Now that's interesting. One would assume the latter would hold true only if Rutgers scored more than 39 points.
Finally, Pat Summitt picked UConn-Tennessee, saying, "It's the best rivalry there is to watch."
No argument that it's right up there. Although, if Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine had ever had to guard each other, that would have been something to see.
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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Another chapter in UConn-Tennessee rivalry set to go
Holdsclaw: Never an easy game
Rizzotti: Hatred began brewing in 1995
UConn-Tennessee all-time results
Dec. 30: UConn tops Tennessee 81-76
Tennessee to retire Holdsclaw's jersey Thursday
Catchings' surgery set for Feb. 5
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