Scott Davis: Start sculpting the statue for Dawn Staley

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It’s time.

Time to put out a want ad for a sculptor. Time to start searching Craigslist for someone with carving and chiseling experience. Time to start googling the terms “life-sized, bronze, artist.”

I know it’s time, you know it’s time, we all know it’s time. It’s time to cast Dawn Staley in stone and place her likeness on a pedestal somewhere outside of Colonial Life Arena.

Champions already get rings. This champion deserves a statue.

For the record, many of us thought it was time to do this five years ago. But now? Now that she and the Gamecock women’s basketball team brought home the program’s second national championship in five years to add to a growing trophy case that includes multiple Final Fours and a tractor-trailer’s worth of SEC titles?

At this point, I’d be fine with creating a Mount Dawnmore along the side of Colonial Life, with sculptures of four Dawn faces exhibiting four different expressions.

We all know that athletic championships have been rare across the many decades at the University of South Carolina. Ray Tanner won two College World Series titles with the Gamecocks (and while we’re here, let’s go ahead and enshrine the coaching version of him on a pedestal, as well), but other than that, we’ve historically been told to accept that the sports storyline around here would always be one of inconsistency, ups, downs, mediocrity, ignominy and everything in between.

Time to rip up the old storyline and start writing a new one. Because now the story has a happy ending (Video: Students rush Thomas Cooper fountain to celebrate WBB national championship win).

That happy ending came Sunday night when South Carolina suffocated the very life out of old nemesis UConn to claim a title that had seemed destined to be theirs since the season began. The game was largely never in doubt – the Gamecocks were favored and confidently played like favorites, snatching away the Huskies’ hopes, dreams and ultimately their souls.

Just like that, and with authority, Dawn destroyed, dismantled and decapitated the myth that South Carolina is where coaching legacies go to die.

Now it’s where they go to win championships. Now it’s where they go to get sculpted.

No longer can coaches in any sport claim that they “just didn’t have a chance to win” in Columbia. Not after Dawn built a program from ashes into the envy of every women’s basketball operation in the country.

That’s what Dawn did. That’s the standard her peers can now be held to forevermore. And that’s why it’s time to raise a statue.

The Good News Girls

The late columnist Doug Larson once wrote “Bad news travels fast. Good news takes the scenic route.”

And so it seemed earlier this week that many Gamecock fans found themselves taking the scenic route towards accepting the reality that something good had happened to us, that joy had finally found us. It was almost hard to release the tension and allow gratitude to gladden our hearts. Was this really happening – a pure, unadulterated happy ending, with no tragic final act forthcoming?

You have to understand: It’s been a weird couple of years.

Since the Gamecocks won their first women’s title back in 2017, we’ve seen the gradual flameout and ultimate implosion of the Will Muschamp Era in football. We’ve watched the men’s basketball program sink into what seemed an everlasting mediocrity of .500-ish SEC campaigns, weird early-season losses and no postseason appearances, culminating in the recent dismissal of longtime coach Frank Martin. We looked on stoically as the baseball program parted ways with Tanner’s handpicked successor, Chad Holbrook, and slowly grew accustomed to the ongoing unpredictability of the Mark Kingston years.

Meanwhile, some of our SEC rivals won national titles in football and baseball. Our archrival…well, whatever. Mix in some other odd happenings around the Horseshoe – including the embarrassing end to the disastrous tenure of former university president Bob Caslen – and you can understand why the good news wasn’t so easy to process.

Through it all, Dawn Staley and her enthusiastic and captivating players provided the hope we could cling to – the rock in our hour of darkness, our port in the storm, candle in the wind, pillar of strength. How strange and depressing these last five years might have been without them.

But we did have them, and so against all odds, we’ll remember these years fondly.

Now these wild, uneven and volatile years are simply Championship Years.

Smiles on a Sunday Night

My wife and I couldn’t stop smiling.

We sat in our den Sunday night with the championship celebration rolling forward on the television in front of us, and instead of talking, we smiled. For once, words failed me. This must have been a source of relief and amazement for my wife, who is used to me chattering nervously throughout sporting events as though I’m auditioning for a job as an auctioneer.

On the screen in front of us was the face of a beaming Aliyah Boston, holding up a “National Champions” sign and smiling. Then there was the face of Destanni Henderson, looking around the arena and smiling.

Then there was Dawn Staley herself, smiling.

“So this is what this feels like,” I thought. One gigantic, undying, perpetual smile – a smile that you feel with your whole body, just the same way that you feel a kick to the shins.

In truth, I’d forgotten what it felt like.

These five years had crept by slowly. We had indeed taken the scenic route to get here.

But now we were here at last.

And the view from the top of the mountain is far more scenic than the route we took to arrive at this place.

It stretches on and on to the horizon, this faraway view of peaks and valleys and shadows and light, this view that fills us with hope and faith and endless possibilities.

Tell me what the view looks like from your vantage point after the Gamecocks brought home another trophy by writing me at [email protected].

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