“	I gave all I have. I have one more run at the national championship and that's it. I love this school. ”
		— La. Tech coach Leon Barmore

Most of his life has been here in Ruston, La., a small Southern town between Shreveport and Monroe, a place a lot of semi trucks pass through on their way to somewhere else.

For Barmore, it has always been home. Almost always. A former Kansas City Star colleague, Mike Vaccaro now of the Newark Ledger-Star, did a wonderful piece on Barmore in 1998.

He wrote how Barmore had defied Thomas Wolfe's famous line about not being able to go home again. Because Barmore had never left.

Followed by a typical bit of Barmore deadpan humor: "Not true. I spent four years in Bastrop."

That brief time of 1967-71, when he coached high school boys basketball in not-far-away Bastrop, is the only time Barmore hasn't lived in Ruston. You think about that when you drive into this town, how there isn't anything about it Barmore doesn't know.

You wonder if he even sees it anymore because it's so familiar.

You stand outside the Thomas Assembly Center on Friday afternoon, the weather so pleasant, the dogwood trees in bloom, everything s-o-o-o-o still and quiet, so much a sweet postcard of the South -- and you think about how many times Barmore has walked in and out of this building.

Is there any school other than Tech that's known more for women's basketball than any other sport?

Sure, Tech was once a cradle of quarterbacks, including Terry Bradshaw. And Karl Malone is the most famous men's basketball alum. But it's the women's program -- 19 of 19 in NCAA Tournament appearances, 10 NCAA Final Fours, two NCAA titles, one AIAW title -- that defines Tech.

And it's Barmore who defines the women's basketball program.

After Bastrop, he coached at Ruston High before coming on board Sonja Hogg's staff as an assistant in 1977. He was elevated to co-head coach for the 1982-83 season, and then took over alone in 1985-86 when Hogg left.

A couple of times over the years, Barmore has applied for the Tech men's head coaching job. But that never happened. He not only helped build but then maintained one of the best women's basketball programs in the country, keeping Tech near the top long after some once-dominant programs had faded into memories.

When he walked into what appeared to be a routine pre-NCAA news conference on Friday afternoon after Tech's practice, he joked with some reporters he knew. Then he and players Tamicha Jackson and Betty Lennox answered questions for several minutes.

At one point, Barmore looked a little tense and distracted, as if he wished the news conference were over. But that's not an unfamiliar look from him -- you never got the feeling that talking to the media was a real joy in Barmore's life.

Not that he did a bad job of it, just that he could as easily have done without it. Barmore has long thought his team wasn't treated with enough respect by the media, just as he has felt the NCAA selection committee too often did wrong by Tech in seeding. And whether he said it in so many words, Barmore thought that was because the selection committee didn't like him.

When someone asked Friday if Tech was being overlooked to win the title, Barmore answered that was nothing new.

But you wonder who it is that overlooks Tech? Are these people who doubt Tech sort of like the dingbats on "Quincy," who every week didn't believe it when Quince told them that there was something suspicious about somebody's death?

Who else would doubt Tech? Who cares if they beat a lot of teams in the Sun Belt by 300 points? Haven't they come to play every year in the NCAAs?

It's one thing to say the selection committee is unfair to you -- at times, you had to agree that it looked that way, most especially in 1996 -- but overlooking Tech? Who with a brain would do that?

So I decided I'd wait until after the formal news conference and try to catch Barmore alone for a second to ask if he really, truly thought that or if that was just a good motivational ploy.

But, as you're probably well aware by now, there would be no chatting with Barmore afterward.

He said, "If there are no more questions, I have a statement I'd like to read," and it was as if a little lightning bolt hit the room.

You could almost hear the thought popping into the heads of the dozen of so media members in the room: "Oh my God, he's retiring!" Lennox and Jackson looked at the floor, knowing what was coming next. Later, they would explain that Barmore had told his stunned team just minutes before coming into the news conference.

These two -- as poker-faced as the coach himself -- never gave it away for an instant. Now, they listened to a man both said they had never really seen show much emotion. His voice broke. He tried all those things that you do when you are fighting tears: bite your tongue, rub the side of your mouth, bite your lip, open your eyes wide.

No use. Tears came, his voice trailed off. Funerals and saying goodbye in sports are among the very few places where it seems men feel they can cry. You wish they'd let themselves do it more often and that society wasn't still poisoning boys' brains and telling them the absolute lie that tears and strength are mutually exclusive.

"It hurt me to see him cry," said Lennox, a tough kid who's not exactly Tammy Faye Bakker herself but was wiping her eyes afterward.

But it's supposed to hurt when you bid farewell to something or someone you care about. Tech has been so much of Barmore's existence. It's painful to let go. His players felt that pain.

Barmore got through his statement, saying he felt that now was the time to say something to let Tech administrators have time to figure out his replacement. Recruiting is everything in college hoops, of course, and Tech will have to figure out something fairly quickly.

He said he would answer no questions about the retirement until after Tech was done playing this season. He said it in such a way -- and Barmore is not someone you trifle with when he's upset -- that not a single reporter followed him when he bolted from the room.

Instead, they gathered around Lennox and Jackson, who did a commendable job of explaining the team's emotions.

Lennox has said in the past that one of the reasons she likes Barmore is that he's all-business. Lennox said he didn't try to be her pal, he was the coach. She wanted it that way.

Yet she, Jackson and other Tech players will tell you that Barmore is, as Jackson put it, "Not anything like he comes across. He's a warm guy."

Lennox said that after Barmore yells at somebody in practice, "He'll come back with his calm voice and talk to you."

As for what made him decide to retire, Jackson and Lennox said they didn't know. Lennox jokingly suggested, "Maybe the girls are giving him gray hairs more."

Barmore agreed to a five-year contract extension last fall. There was some talk that it didn't sit so well with former Tech star and longtime assistant Kim Mulkey-Robertson, who is 37 and whom many have assumed would take over for Barmore someday.

Whether that was the case or not, it will be interesting to see how the replacement process goes. Women's basketball salaries have increased dramatically since Barmore took over as head coach. Can Tech be competitive salary-wise for a new coach?

Will someone like the eternal "best-candidate-out-there" Mickie DeMoss, a Tech grad, be pursued? Would Tech have enough money to get her? Would she ever really leave her Tennessee assistant's position? How much would Mulkey-Robertson freak out if she didn't get this job after 15 years as an assistant?

All that, plus the outcome of the final NCAA chapter for Barmore, remains to be seen.

And while Barmore said he didn't want the story of Tech in this tournament to be about him, that's certainly a lot of what it will be.

Kansas' Marian Washington is here in Ruston for the subregional. You ask her about what her 27-year career at KU has meant, and Washington will tell that the most important thing has been helping young women.

She speaks from the heart, as do many women coaches, about how much it means to see women supporting women, how crucial it is to teach girls becoming women about self-confidence.

Most male coaches in women's basketball don't seem to talk much about any of that. They usually seem uncomfortable discussing it. Maybe it's because they did not have the experience of growing up female. Maybe they don't understand it. Maybe they do understand more than they realize but don't know how to verbalize it.

Most will tell you, "Hey, I don't care if it's men or women, I'm just coaching basketball."

Sure, but coaching means more than that. Whether Barmore or Vandy's Jim Foster or UConn's Geno Auriemma or other male coaches think it or not, they have helped many, many women grow. They may not put it in those same terms that a lot of female coaches do, they may not acknowledge all the same emotions.

But let's not ignore the world we live in. So much of women's sports progress has taken place in the last 30 years.

A woman had to disguise herself to run the Boston Marathon, and when the marathon director found out, he tried to tackle her. That was in the late 1960s.

Bo Schembechler ranted against women receiving athletic letters because it would be an insult to his football players. That was in the 1970s.

In spite of a full house at the Rose Bowl and the biggest TV audience to watch a soccer game in the United States, some men insisted absolutely no one cared about women's soccer or any women's sport for that matter. That was last summer.

Further, studies show that the most poverty-stricken group in the United State remains African-American women. People don't want to talk about how many millions of them have no dreams, how they have babies when they are children themselves, how the poverty cycle goes on and on.

Yes, it means an awful damn lot to coach women's basketball, or any women's collegiate sport.

You don't have to think about the social issues or even acknowledge them. Committing your life to something says you think it's important.

Barmore graduated from Ruston High School in 1962. Do you think back then it would have occurred to him that he would spend so many years teaching and helping young women? In particular, young black women, some of whom would never have had the chance to go to college were it not for basketball?

There were several young women in Thomas Assembly Center on Friday who would tell you without any maudlin emotion or contrived idealism that Barmore meant something in their lives.

Even if it mainly was with X's and O's, with an insistence on discipline, with a demand for performance.

Said Lennox, "I hate to see him leave."