Monday, July 06, 2015

Coco Vandeweghe (Niece of Kiki)

Coco
So going into the women's quarterfinals is a lone unranked player, US player CoCo Vandeweghe (pronounced Van-Da-Way).  I root for the young Miss Vandeweghe not only because she is an underdog, unranked.  Not only because she is an American (Serena Williams is still in and ranked #1 in the world).
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But Coco is the neice of Kiki Vandeweghe.
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Who?
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Kiki.  He was our star basketball player when I was a yell leader at UCLA.  Larry Brown took 1 senior and a bunch of Freshman to the Final Four.  In fact he took them within 90 seconds of winning it all.  This group had almost no experience.  Kiki was the only non-freshman starter and provided a cool head and big heart.  Sure, later he played in the pros and coached.  He is right now the VP of Operations at the NBA, but to me he will always be the calming, smiling face of UCLA basketball in the Larry Brown era (short as it was).
Kiki (from Sports Illustrated - see the fuzzy blond with the megaphone behind his left hand I could find my way into any picture).