Keith Phoenix graduated from ºüÀêÊÓƵ University School of Law. He has had a very successful career. He is a friend of the ºüÀêÊÓƵ University athletic department.
He is a good enough friend that he has two tickets on the floor at the basketball arena. Not in the first row, but on the floor. From there, he gently chides the referees. “You’re better than that,†he says when one makes a questionable call against the Billikens.
Sometimes during a break, the refs come over and chat.
Phoenix knows the coaches. The athletic director is his friend. The university president will stop and say hello.
The most successful program in the athletic department is the women’s soccer team. Under coach Katie Shields, it has made the NCAA tournament the last six years.
Several years ago, Phoenix called Shields to offer his condolences after the team’s season ended with a tournament loss. You’ve had a great year, he said. We’re feeling down now, she said. Anything I can do, let me know, he said.
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A couple of days later, he got a call from Athletics Director Chris May. He suggested that Phoenix buy the team dinner. That would be a nice reward for the season, he said. Phoenix is a former president of the Missouri Athletic Club. He hosted the dinner at the club. Very swanky.
A year later, May said that one of the players asked if they were going to have another dinner.
So they did.
Then somebody from the men’s team asked if they could have a dinner.
Thus was born the Phoenix Championship Dinner. Any team that wins a conference championship — regular season title or post-season tournament— gets a dinner at the MAC.
The women’s soccer team had their latest dinner Monday night.
Phoenix called and said he had an extra ticket. I sat next to Shields. She grew up in California. Her mother was a kindergarten teacher. Her dad taught high school English. Shields went to Harvard and was an All-Ivy-League goalie. She graduated in 2006 and went into coaching. She wasn’t yet 30 when May offered her the head coaching job. She is now in her 12th season as head coach. She has turned SLU into a national power.
Last year, the team advanced to the Sweet Sixteen.
As befits the host, Phoenix addressed the team before dinner. He spoke about regret. Act now to avoid it later, he advised the young women. He said he recently lost the most important person in his life.
When I met Phoenix years ago, he was married to Ginny Herrmann. She was a surgeon. Also, an angel. If it is possible to err on the side of kindness, she did. One winter day coming out of church, she noticed a woman without a coat. She insisted the woman take hers. Unfortunately, her car keys were in her coat.
She worked at ºüÀêÊÓƵ University Hospital and then at Siteman Cancer Center. She was a beloved figure. She did breast surgeries. She assured her patients that they were not alone. You are part of a big club nobody wants to join, she would say.
She joined that club herself three years ago.
By that time, she and Phoenix were divorced. They had no children. The divorce was his fault, he said. When Ginny died last October, Phoenix was not mentioned in the obituary her siblings prepared. He was not in the receiving line at her wake. He was, as an ex-husband, on the periphery.
But he was still in love with her, and she, perhaps, with him. He saw her almost every day for the two years of her illness. They used to go out for dinner even after she had lost her appetite. She preferred neighborhood bars to fancy restaurants.
He was, at the end, a faithful and loving ex-husband.
I watched from afar and thought it was a story fit for Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez. Love in the Time of COVID.
Phoenix did not go into any of this during his talk to the team. He directed his remarks at them. Appreciate the people you love, was his message. Call your parents, he said.
The team gathered for a photo after dinner. They looked like a sorority, I thought. That’s what they would have been when I went to college. Women’s sports were an afterthought at best. And the fact that women were even in college was considered progress. When my mother was young, women didn’t go to college.
How quickly things have changed. SLU did not have a women’s soccer team until 1996.
After the players had left, the rest of us gathered in the bar. What a nice night it had been, everybody agreed.
By the way, all 30 young women on the roster came to the dinner.
Of course, the ground is shifting in collegiate athletics. Schools, or boosters, can now pay athletes. Women’s soccer is still on the edge of that. A few of the women at SLU have financial deals, but none is making much, athletics director May told me. Think hundreds, not tens of thousands, he said.
But soccer is getting more popular all the time. The pursuit of players could get expensive. It’s easy to envision a future when athletes won’t get excited about a dinner.
Right now, it just seems so pure. By the way, these young women are not just elite athletes on a nationally ranked team. They’re smart. The grade point average for the SLU women’s soccer team is 3.7.
I spoke with Phoenix the next day. He asked if I remembered there had been a delay getting the young women together for a photo after dinner. Sort of, I said.
It turns out several of them were on the phone talking to their parents, he said.