Laughter, love keys to healing
The former UConn basketball star delivers keynote address at L+M’s Well Healed Woman conference
Mohegan — Playing basketball has taken Rebecca Lobo far.
The former University of Connecticut women’s basketball star has flown on Air Force One and visited the White House multiple times. She travels all over the country as a reporter for ESPN.
In 1995, as any UConn fan will remember, she led the women’s basketball team to its first NCAA title and a perfect 35–0 record. She was a member of the 1996 U.S. Olympic basketball team.
Through all of it, Lobo said she has relied on two lessons that she learned from her mom, Ruth Ann Lobo.
First, that she could be anything she wanted to be. And second, that she must have a sense of humor.
The Hartford native spoke Sunday afternoon at the Well Healed Woman conference at Mohegan Sun, sponsored annually by the Lawrence + Memorial Hospital.
The daylong conference, designed as a humorous and inspiring event for women, drew hundreds of people Sunday afternoon for a schedule of speeches and shopping, as well as a menu that included a high-heel-shaped chocolate dessert.
Past keynote speakers at the event include Suze Orman, Vickie Lawrence, Jane Seymour, Jamie Lee Curtis, Deborah Norville and Linda Ellerbee.
Lobo spoke to a packed ballroom in the Mohegan Sun conference center about her experiences as a UConn star, Olympian, professional athlete, the wife of Sports Illustrated columnist Steve Rushin and, now, as the mother of four children and a WNBA reporter and analyst for ESPN.
She said her mother, with whom she cowrote a 1996 book about Ruth Ann’s breast cancer diagnosis, instilled in her a sense of determination.
“You can be anything you want to be,” RuthAnn told Rebecca when she was a 6-foottall sixth-grader.
Sixth-grade Rebecca said she wanted to be a football player.
“Except that,” her mother responded. “Or a Yankees fan.”
The Hartford native chose basketball instead, and thrived with her mother’s support, even when there was no girls team to play on.
RuthAnn Lobo told the coaches of the boys team at school to let Rebecca play, and not to take it easy on her because she was a girl.
“If you’re yelling at them, you’re yelling at her,” Lobo remembered her mom saying.
Lobo also remembered a time RuthAnn, who died in 2011, heard that Rebecca’s teacher had chided her for spending too much time with the boys in her class and not “dressing like a girl.”
RuthAnn marched her daughter to the principal’s office, and Rebecca was transferred out of the class.
“She was furious,” Lobo remembered Sunday. But she learned a lesson: “It doesn’t matter what you wear, it doesn’t matter who you spend time with, as long as you’re the person you want to be.”
RuthAnn still found time to laugh, Lobo said. She remembered her parents racing each other to the mailbox — an odd family tradition that entertained the family for years.
“They found a way to have fun and have gut-busting laughter...as they were going to get the mail,” she said.
When RuthAnn was diagnosed with breast cancer, she sat her daughter down in the stands after a basketball game and broke the news.
“She said, ‘Everything is going to be OK, don’t worry. Your dad’s not a breast man, anyway,’” Lobo remembered.
Lobo has tried to apply her mother’s rules for life to her own life as a mother. Her children are 10, 9, 7 and 5, and, she said, she finds something to laugh about with them every day.
“This woman did everything not only with a sense of humor, but with grace,” Lobo said. “She led an exemplary life.”
The sense of independence and humor has trickled down from Lobo’s mother to her children.
She said one of her daughters recently looked at the family’s television set while a men’s college basketball game was on.
“I didn’t know boys played basketball, too,” she said.