Douglas one of diamonds in rough

Updated: October 3, 2009, 5:02 PM ET

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By Mechelle Voepel
Special to ESPN.com
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(Editor's note: This column was first published on March 17, 2001, as part of ESPN.com's women's NCAA tournament coverage. Purdue went on to reach the Final Four that season, losing to Notre Dame in the national championship game.)

A year ago at this time, most of us outsiders didn't know just how much Purdue's Katie Douglas was dealing with.

Katie Douglas, who averages more than 15 points a game, is the heart and soul of the Boilermakers.

We knew her father had died while Douglas was in high school, and that friend and teammate Tiffany Young had been killed by a drunken driver the summer following the Boilermakers' 1999 NCAA title.

We knew the burden of scoring and team leadership had fallen to Douglas with the graduation of Ukari Figgs and Stephanie White-McCarty. We knew Douglas had some injury problems during the 1999-2000 season.

We didn't know her mother was dying of cancer.

Douglas, her friends say, isn't the type of person whom you sit down with and say, "How's it going?" and her life story comes pouring out.

In fact, she seems more the type of person with whom you could be trapped with in a broken ski-lift gondola for 56 hours -- and you still wouldn't hear her life story.

(Can't quite remember the name but there was a movie like that -- it might have been as tacky as "Dangling by a Thread" -- on TV a couple of decades ago that made you so sick of these whiny morons in the gondola you weren't going to be heartbroken if they went plummeting to the ground. Except Patty Duke, of course, whom I wanted to somehow survive the plunge unscathed. They probably got rescued, but I turned it off before then.)

At any rate, Douglas and Purdue lost in the NCAA second round at home to Oklahoma last year. Which is a memory that probably will linger just a bit for the Boilers at 9:07 ET Sunday when they face always-dangerous LSU at Mackey Arena in West Lafayette, Ind.

Douglas, the versatile lefty who was as much a key to that '99 Purdue title as anybody, was named an Associated Press first-team All-American earlier this week. She has done a diary for ESPN.com this season, and USA Today's Dick Patrick did a nice profile on her a few weeks back.

So, she's definitely gotten some national exposure. But you still come away feeling like there's much about Douglas that she keeps hidden away. Which is just fine -- perhaps that makes her even more interesting.

She is quite funny, in a low-key-Kate-Starbird-understated way. Earlier this year, she mentioned that the Boilers had taken the Myers-Briggs test, and that it revealed her to be pretty stable and constant. Which meant?

"I guess I'm not in danger of developing a split-personality disorder," Douglas said.

She should have a fine WNBA career if that's what she wants to do. For now, like all the other seniors still playing, it's all about this tournament. But let's hope we see a lot more of Douglas in the summers to come.

Mechelle Voepel, a regular contributor to ESPN.com, can be reached at mvoepel123@yahoo.com. Read her blog at http://voepel.wordpress.com.