SPM Talks With Diana Taurasi

By Jim Niendorff: SPM IL Writer
Posted Sunday, June 29, 2008

ABOVE: Diana Taurasi with President George W. Bush. Cappie Pondexter and Kelly Miller look on. Photo by Karen Hermann. BELOW: Diana during a home game. Photo by Jamie Hines.

With the Phoenix Mercury recently in Chicago to play the Sky, SPMsportspage caught up with WNBA and Mercury star Diana Taurasi before the game.

SPM: First off, happy belated birthday.

DT: Thank you.

SPM: What piqued your passion for basketball as a kid? Did your parents play at all? Or what really interested you?

DT: No, not really. My parents, my dad grew up playing soccer and it was just one of those summers where parents wanted to get us out of the house, sign you up in an MJB, which is a league in Southern California, and I just played ever since.

SPM: You really flourished under Coach Westhead’s system. You certainly have had no let up with Coach Gaines. Could you compare their coaching and your experience with Coach Auriemma at Connecticut?

DT: It’s a little bit different, a different style of play. Obviously, in Connecticut in college it was still more of learning the game, learning how to make people better, how to make your self better. So I learned that aspect the most from Coach Auriemma, how to be a really be a good teammate and a leader. And in the pros, Coach Westhead is a professional coach. He knows how to get the best out of his players. And the same with Coach Gaines, he’s a little bit more open.

SPM: To what do you attribute the Mercury’s early season struggles?

DT: You know what, early season, you may not have any time in the off season -- a few wins and losses that could have gone either way. I think all of those things kind of iron themselves out in the course of a season, whether you are going to be good or not. We showed flashes of being a good team and then we showed flashes of not being a good team, so we have to weed one of those out.

SPM: Conversely, over the past few games the team has played a lot better. Can you talk about that?

DT: That just comes from playing a little bit more together. The style of play that we are trying to do takes time to even get in that condition mentally and physically, and we didn’t have training camp, so we are trying to do it over the course of real games.

SPM: With you playing the off season in Russia and throughout Europe, how do you maintain your mental edge coming back here and playing in the WNBA every year?

DT: I try to trick myself into every setting being different. When I am in Russia that gets me excited for those eight months. When I come back here, it’s the summer and my home town and my home country. I am excited to play with my teammates again when I am here in Phoenix.

SPM: I read Coach Auriemma’s autobiography, for which you wrote the foreword, and he discusses in the book a situation in your senior year, I think it was after the Notre Dame loss, where you kind of went in and poured your heart out to him. With you being such an extroverted and effervescent personality, do you find yourself perhaps letting your coach and teammates see more of your pensive side than you do the fans?

DT: I’m very vocal. I think the only way to be a good teammate is to be vocal and to be positive and that’s what I try to do. I’m not one who is going to -- how can I put it -- get too concentrated on myself, because that’s not how you become a good player and that’s not how you are going to get your team to play well. So, I am all about everyone else’s successes, and you know I go out there and try to do my best.

SPM: And with the battle of the blogs between you and Sue Bird, were you both that competitive at UConn?

DT: It was actually nice because we got to play together. We are two competitive people, something as dumb as arguing over who was the 22nd President of the United States. I would die and say it was Woodrow Wilson when it could have easily not been, but I’ll defend my opinion until the death.

SPM: When the Mercury met with President Bush, I think it was on Monday, what was it like receiving a kiss from the President of the United States?

DT: You know, G-Dub, we go back. I feel like I have known him for a long time. I’ve been there three times already and when we were walking on stage behind the scenes, he came over and was like ”Diana, I know you’ve been here before.” I mean, he’s a cool dude. Once you are in a situation where he can be sociable and you see the natural side of him, the human being side of him, you know he’s a cool dude, he really is.

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