Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. A couple months ago, in women's

college basketball, the University of South Carolina Gamecocks lost to Yukon in the national

championship game. It was a pretty brutal loss, the kind where the TV broadcast was

showing the winning team celebrating courtside well before the game was even over.

Don Staley, the gold medal winning Olympian and former WNBA player, is the head coach of the

Gamecocks. She's got a new memoir titled Uncommon Favor, all about her life and her career

in basketball. And in it, she calls herself a sore loser. I feel like you kind of have to be to compete

at this level. And it's not as if this championship loss didn't hurt. But as she tells Empire's

and Wonder Summers, she does have to respect Yukon for being the more dominant team. She talks

more about it up ahead. Today, people know Don Staley as a resident of South Carolina. In fact,

there's now a new statue of her in Columbia where she's coached the University of South Carolina

women's basketball team to three national championships following her own Hall of Fame career

as a player. But if you ask her, she'd tell you she's from Philadelphia.

I grew up in the projects, and if you weren't from my neighborhood, you would probably think

it's probably the worst place to raise children. Whereas if you were from the neighborhood,

you felt like you needed and wanted nothing.

She says that the community at what's now known as the Raymond Rosen Manor created as

nurturing an environment as anywhere, including some tough love.

If you were outside of your household and an adult in the neighborhood saw you do something

that was not appropriate, they had the honor and privilege of the neighborhood saw you do something that was not appropriate. They had the honor

and privilege to put us back in line. As a college basketball coach, Don Staley is now often the

adult figure in the room. She's written a new memoir called Uncommon Favor, Basketball, North Philly,

...