If the sporting award is an old-fashioned dinner, no big money

He’s such a good friend that he has two tickets on the floor of the basketball arena. Not in the front row, but on the floor. From there, he gently reprimands the referees. “You can do better than that,” he says when one of them makes a questionable decision against the Billikens.

Sometimes the referees come by during a break and chat.

Phoenix knows the coaches. The athletic director is his friend. The university president comes by and says hello.

The athletic department’s most successful program is the women’s soccer team, which has made the NCAA tournament for the past six years under coach Katie Shields.

A few years ago, Phoenix called Shields to offer his condolences after the team’s season ended in a tournament loss. “You had a great year,” he said. “We’re feeling down right now,” she said. “If there’s anything I can do for you, let me know,” he said.

A few days later, he got a call from athletic director Chris May. He suggested that Phoenix pay for dinner for the team. It 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 fancy.

A year later, May said, one of the players asked if they would have dinner together again.

Then someone from the men’s team asked if they could have dinner.

Thus was born the Phoenix Championship Dinner. Any team that wins a conference championship – the regular season title or a postseason tournament – receives dinner at the MAC.

The women’s soccer team had its last dinner on 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 father taught high school English. Shields went to Harvard and was an All-Ivy League goalie. She graduated in 2006 and became a coach. She was not yet 30 when May offered her the head coaching job. She is now in her 12th season as head coach. She has built SLU into a national power.

Last year the team made it to the Sweet Sixteen.

As befits a host, Phoenix spoke to his team before dinner. He talked about regrets. Act now to avoid them later, he advised the young women. He said he had 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. And an angel. If it’s possible to play it safe, she did. Coming out of church one winter day, she noticed a woman without a coat. She insisted the woman take hers. Unfortunately, her car keys were in her coat.

She worked at St. Louis University Hospital and then at Siteman Cancer Center. She was a popular figure. She performed breast surgeries. She assured her patients that they were not alone. “You are part of a big club that no one wants to join,” she said.

She herself joined this club three years ago.

By then, she and Phoenix were already divorced. They had no children. The divorce was his fault, he said. When Ginny died last October, Phoenix was not mentioned in the obituary written by her siblings. He was not in the line of mourners at her wake. As an ex-husband, he was more of a marginalized figure.

But he still loved her, and perhaps she loved him too. During her two-year illness, he saw her almost every day. They often went out to eat, even though she had lost her appetite. She preferred the bars in her neighborhood to the fancy restaurants.

In the end, he was a faithful and loving ex-husband.

I watched from afar and thought it was a story fitting for Gabriel García Márquez: Love in the time of Covid.

Phoenix didn’t elaborate on any of that during his talk with the team. He directed his remarks to them. Appreciate the people you love, was his message. Call your parents, he said.

After dinner, the team gathered for a photo. They looked like a fraternity, I thought. That’s what they were when I went to college. Women’s sports were a sideshow at best. And the fact that women went to college at all 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 left, we all gathered in the bar. Everyone agreed that it had been a lovely evening.

By the way, all 30 young ladies on the list came to dinner.

Of course, things are changing in college sports. Schools or sponsors can now pay athletes. Women’s soccer is still on the edge of that. Some of the women at SLU have financial contracts, but none earn much, athletic director May told me. “Think hundreds, not tens of thousands,” he said.

But football is becoming increasingly popular. Finding players could be expensive. It’s easy to imagine a future in which athletes are no longer enthusiastic about 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 are smart. The SLU women’s soccer team’s GPA is 3.7.

The next day I spoke to Phoenix. He asked me if I remembered there being a delay in getting the young women together for a photo after dinner. “Something like that,” I said.

It turned out that several of them were talking to their parents on the phone, he said.