LAS VEGAS — This conference is special enough to Lindsay Gottlieb that she can still recall her first-ever game coaching in it at the drop of a hat, almost 20 years ago, back when Pac-12 was Pac-10 and the end was nowhere near.
She was a bright-eyed 27-year-old then, her first foray into the conference under coach Joanne Boyle at Cal. As Gottlieb told it, Boyle’s dad got sick one week and she had to go home, leaving Gottlieb in charge for a no-biggie game: Cal’s rivalry game at Stanford against legendary coach Tara VanDerveer. Cal guard Alexis Gray-Lawson scored “30-something,” Gottlieb remembered (indeed, she dropped 30). Cal lost.
Almost 20 years later, Gottlieb put her final stamp on the soon-to-be Pac-2, dissolved in a whirlwind of a few years of conference mismanagement and schools jumping ship for TV-deal money. Red-and-yellow confetti painted the hardwood at MGM Grand in Vegas after USC won the last-ever Pac-12 women’s basketball tournament, Gottlieb beaming ear-to-ear and posing for a picture with the championship trophy with young son Jordan, this beautiful life a college athletics conference had given her.
“It has meant everything to my professional career,” Gottlieb said, after USC’s 74-61 win over Stanford. “Quite honestly, it’s meant almost everything in my personal life. I met my husband while coaching at Cal. It’s all I’ve known professionally for a New York kid.”
Make no mistake, though. Sunday — and the week-long tournament as a whole — brought an odd Vegas-infused sort of mourning, the trumpets of student bands blaring in the MGM Grand just a couple hundred feet from the cigarette smoke wafting from slot machines, the national anthem for USC-Stanford performed solely in double-neck electric guitar by a man wearing flame-themed face paint.
But this was, still, a funeral.
Pac-12 women’s basketball, as the world knows it, is dead. Gone. Going out with a true Vegas show, a scintillating tournament this past…
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