KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- At Touty's African Hair Braiding, Candace Parker is entrusted to no one less than Touty herself. For seven hours Monday, the proprietor's nimble fingers danced in and out of Parker's locks, her digits undoing and then painstakingly reknotting a narrow row of braids that parted the middle of Parker's shoulder-length tresses.
It is, after all, the time of year to tighten things up. Later, the bellwether player in women's college basketball—and perhaps beyond—and her Tennessee teammates would learn their NCAA tournament fate: A No. 1 seed in the Dayton regional that begins Sunday.
But it is still hours before that as Parker sits on a back deck of Lady Vols coach Pat Summitt's home, talking in a measured pitch as a motorboat buzzes by on the river below.
Her versatility is showing. One moment, she's addressing the importance of a championship to her legacy. The next, she's minding Will, the 3-year-old son of Summitt's nanny, who is running off with an empty can dug out of a recycling bin despite Parker's protests. Effortlessly gliding through it all, interviews or basketball or ad-lib babysitting, none of it so weighty as to anchor her.
Gliding, it would seem, would not be an option in the minefield that is the Dayton regional if Tennessee is to survive. Yet as the three-time Illinois Ms. Basketball from Naperville has ascended to the fore of the women's college game in her second season, she refuses to believe she has taken ownership of one of that game's most storied programs.
"No, this is not my team," Parker says. "I feel like I'm an integral part of this team. As I go, our team goes. If I don't bring energy, we're not going to be successful."
That line of reasoning—as I go, the team goes, but it's still not my team—is about as muddy as the riverbank a few hundred feet away. This is pointed out to Parker.
"Um," she says, clearly trying to locate a good hem or haw. "You know what? To some extent, yes, this is my team. But we have too many other great players for it to be just my team. Too many other people can step up for it just to be my team."
It is a thoughtful if evasive answer. And then Parker pauses. Will is nowhere in sight.
"Did you hear a splash?" she asks.
Intensity on the rise
As soon as Tennessee's season ended short of a Final Four last season, the Lady Vols dispatched in a regional final by North Carolina, the team realistically and officially became Candace Parker's, no matter how much the lady doth protest.
If there was any doubt, it did not make the return trip over the thousands of miles that separate Knoxville from Brazil, where the women's world championships took place last September. Parker was the team's youngest member, and its only collegiate player, and she was the third-leading scorer (12.3 points per game) and second-leading rebounder (6.1 per game) for a bronze-medal team.
"It put her on a different stage," Summitt says. "She comes back here this year and her game is at a whole different intensity level."
Consequently, the attention is as well—"at a level it's never been at," according to Summitt. Parker was the SEC player of the year and is the presumptive favorite for national honors, averaging 19.7 points and 9.7 rebounds per game while shooting 52 percent from the floor.
But then there are the dunks. And then there are the howling fans that stuff hotel lobbies, a factor that has Summitt planning to add extra security for the NCAA tournament—the first time she has done that since the likes of Chamique Holdsclaw, Tamika Catchings and Semeka Randall at once played for the Lady Vols. Parker, it seems, is a one-for-three trade-in.
"The circus," Summitt says, "is back."
And as such, as perhaps the face of the women's game, she must bear its freight even as she will turn just 21 on April 19.
"There's definitely a responsibility," Parker says. "The game of basketball has given me so much, given me so many opportunities, and I want to give back to the game. I know that it's my responsibility, to give back what players before me have done for me."
WNBA-bound?
It even colors, in a manner, her approach to the untidy aspects of notoriety. Like, for example, the rumors of her possible early entry into the WNBA draft following this season.
By rule, it is possible—she would just have to graduate by the end of this calendar year, and as an academic junior, it would be within reach. But Parker never intended to leave, only publicly shooting down the innuendo recently because it bordered on distraction. Yet the need to address it did not particularly gall her—quite the contrary.
"Whatever gets people interested in women's basketball, I'll say I'm going wherever," Parker says. "I don't care. As long as people are reading and writing about women's basketball, fine."
"Now next year, after she's a junior eligibility-wise and maybe they win something between these two years, I think she may be interested," Larry Parker, her father, said recently. "Because her class will be graduating that year—the class she really is in, because she redshirted one year. So maybe she might be interested in looking at it then."
But that is all conjecture. And what will almost certainly prevent that is anything less than a national title before then.
Parker's standards will not relieve her of that burden; she shot 2-for-11 in a SEC tournament semifinal loss to LSU, scoring in single digits for the first time in her collegiate career, and the next morning she matter-of-factly took responsibility for her miserable night as the Lady Vols watched the film in a hotel suite.
And Parker is strictly clear on this: She will not put herself in the company of all-time greats, even if everyone else does, before she wins a championship.
"That's how it is always in Knoxville," Parker says. "They expect a national championship, and if you don't get one, it's deemed a failure, I guess. But that's why I came here."
'It's all business now'
Five minutes remain before the NCAA women's tournament brackets unfold on the giant screen in Summitt's pool house.
"Did you see the previews for 'Premonition' with Sandra Bullock?" Parker, lounging in a plush corner chair, excitedly asks a teammate. "It looks gooooood."
Halfway through the selection show, a promo featuring Parker plays before a commercial break.
"They told me to act hard," Parker says, and her teammates burst into raucous laughter. "I was rocking back and forth."
As the show draws to a close, ESPN breaks down the top four seeds in each region.
"Ha! Look at ours!" Parker cries with a bit of gallows humor as the graphic appears. Tennessee is joined by Maryland, Oklahoma and Ohio State in a brutally competitive lineup. Parker slaps the chair arm with her left hand, tossing her head back and laughing.
All of this is the light approach. In that same chair just minutes later, when asked about the road ahead, just a touch of necessary coldness invades Candace Parker's face. She looks in that moment, unmistakably, like the one person who can give Tennessee what it needs.
"We knew this was going to happen," Parker says. "It's funny. But it's all business now. Six games. That's all that's left."
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