My Lady Vols library doesn’t take up much space. Instead of shelves and books, there are boxes of manila folders, stuffed with newspaper clippings. The women’s basketball coverage, three decades worth by myself as the team’s beat writer and my Knoxville News Sentinel colleagues, fits neatly in a bedroom corner.
The library’s hours, conversely, are boundless. It was open late on Friday night and for good reason. I was browsing the archives for some Nikki McCray-Penson reading. The former Lady Vol passed away on Friday and her death landed like a roundhouse right on her former teammates, colleagues and really anyone who knew her, myself included.
I wanted to write something but not before first doing some reading.
The folders that chronicle her four seasons at Tennessee are brimming with the feats that earned her SEC player of the year twice and laid the groundwork for her presence on two gold medal-winning U.S. basketball teams and her place in two different professional leagues. She’s a member of the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame.
One of the better reads involved one of the last times I saw McCray play in person. She returned to Thompson-Boling Arena as a member of the historic 1996 U.S. national team for an exhibition against the Lady Vols. The evening turned out to be a Nikki triple feature. Along with playing, she sang a National Anthem duet with U.S. teammate Ruthie Bolton-Holifield beforehand and then said yes to boyfriend Thomas Penson’s surprise marriage proposal afterward. McCray did everything that night but pop the popcorn.
Colleague John Adams and I had another material for several stories. John did all of it justice in one column. Another Adams column from the previous season also served multiple McCray subjects. He was chronicling her All-American-like performance against then-No. 2 Stanford early in her final UT season. McCray’s best move, Adams wrote, was returning to action in the first half after falling hard and injuring her right hand. At halftime, it was determined that McCray had suffered a fractured finger.
“It hurt,” she said. “But I didn’t focus on the hand. I focused on the team.”
As talented and determined as she was, the column reminded that it wasn’t easy being McCray. She had arrived at Tennessee as a Proposition 48 student. Although she retrieved a lost year of eligibility on a retroactive ruling regarding the academic-based proposition, she then suffered a torn anterior cruciate knee ligament.
At UT, McCray first worked in the College of Education with Judy Dooley, whose sons, Tom and Todd, served as team managers. In the beginning, Judy was more like a girlfriend to Nikki, who’d leave funny notes and call Judy at night. Over time, Judy transitioned to feeling more like a proud mother.
“I may not physically have given birth to her,” Judy said. “But I couldn’t love a daughter more than I love her.”
McCray recovered from the potentially devastating injury to become one of the greatest Lady Vols. She overcame any Prop 48 stigma to earn a degree in Sports Management. She entered graduate school before her basketball career finished.
McCray likely summed up her saga in a single sentence: “I have good intentions.”
I had to read a while before coming upon that sentence. It was in a story about McCray and fellow Lady Vol Dana Johnson. They had different personalities but found common ground as teammates. I could imagine the lilting sound of McCray’s voice in saying it. In my mind’s eye, I could see her punctuating those words with her familiar smile.
That smile was her sun and it never seemed to set on her disposition. In any context, it was an endearing trait. Given her medical hardships, the quality became extraordinary. Of all her good intentions, I will remember it as being one of the best.
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Dan Fleser is a 1980 graduate of the University of Missouri, who has covered University of Tennessee athletics since 1988. He is a 2022 inductee to the Tennessee Sportswriters Hall of Fame. He can be reached at danfleser3@gmail.com.