By Amy Hays/Contributor to the Journal
An exhibit of Kim Mulkey’s 2023 National Championship season at LSU hangs in the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame Museum in Natchitoches, Louisiana. Rightfully so, considering Natchitoches is the small town where the movie Steel Magnolias was filmed.
Kim Mulkey is a steel magnolia personified.
If you have never seen the movie or play, then you may not know what that means. In Natchitoches, the term is understood as part of the local vernacular. A metaphor for the contrasting imagery associated with a tough metal and a delicate flower.
A steel magnolia is thought of as an independent woman who faces adversity with strength and dignity. Just like the sturdy steel frame of a fragile magnolia tree.
When you watch Mulkey on the sidelines of a game or listen to her speak in a post-game presser or radio interview, you know that she embodies a combination of toughness yet kindness.
She loves basketball, she loves winning, but most of all she loves her players and her family. Her players are her family, and she states that often. She is a doting mother and grandmother, but also a devoted coach to young, impressionable athletes.
Society wants us to believe that women can’t be both strong and gentle at the same time. But in the South that is the way women are raised. We are taught to fight like hell for what we believe in. We are taught to be compassionate and tender-hearted. And we can be both of those things at the same time.
In a world where women should be equal to men in all areas. That is most certainly not true when it comes to sports. Women have been marginalized spectators watching as men have made millions of dollars and achieved celebrity status as professional athletes.
Mulkey is still the same person she’s always been but since taking the head coaching job at LSU, opportunities have started to change. She gives her players the freedom to be themselves and they have excelled at becoming entrepreneurs in the new world of NIL. Together they have helped to elevate the game of women’s basketball to a level that could never have been dreamed of even a few years ago.
According to ESPN, 12.3 million people watched the Elite 8 game on Monday night between LSU and Iowa. It was the most watched college basketball game ever on ESPN platforms.
Ironically, this broke the previous ratings record for women’s basketball of 11.84 million in 1983 when USC beat Mulkey’s Louisiana Tech team in the NCAA Championship.
Despite such success and progress, the media have critiqued her every move. Talked about her clothing choices, dug up her family history, nitpicked her coaching, made assumptions about her political and personal beliefs, criticized her personality, and now, even questioned her allegiance to the American flag.
Mulkey can withstand the millions of daggers that are thrown at her because her armor is made of steel. She had to overcome obstacles at a young age in the male-dominated world of sports and continues to have to defend herself and her female players nearly 60 years later.
Our only hope should be that she can pass the strength and resolve that she embodies onto her young players.
The relentless media seems to have taken a Clairee (Olympia Dukakis) line out of the movie to heart, “If you can’t say anything nice about anybody, come sit by me.”
But as any true Steel Magnolia would say, “Bless their hearts.”
Contact Amy at AmyHaysJSLLC@gmail.com.
