Dixon’s tragic death contrasts loss of legends
Ex-Army coach sad tale compared with passing of Auerbach, Nelson
 Stephan Savoia / AP file Maggie Dixon led the Army women's basketball team to the NCAA Tournament, but died tragically a month later at the age of 28. |
Maybe it’s best to remember Maggie Dixon on her players’ shoulders rather than at West Point Cemetery, although that grave site also says much about the Army basketball coach.
She brought life and spirit and grit to the academy, a burst of color cutting through the parade of gray uniforms along the Hudson River.
Her resume, measured strictly in wins and losses, doesn’t seem like much. But in a year in which sports lost some of its titans — men whose legacies have been long secure — Dixon struck a chord that reverberates for any athlete (or coach) dying young.
Consider that Red Auerbach, the Boston Celtics’ coach and executive who shaped the NBA for generations and left a trail of cigar smoke in arenas across the country, died this year at 89. Or that Byron Nelson, the beloved “Lord Byron” who ruled golf with his peerless swing and is immortalized with a bridge and statue at Augusta National, was 94.
Or that Lamar Hunt, the Kansas City Chiefs’ patriarch and a modern NFL pioneer who gave the Super Bowl its name, was 74. Or that Bo Schembechler, the Michigan coach who symbolized as well as anyone the hold of college football on a fall afternoon when teams come running out of the tunnel, was 77. Or that Buck O’Neil, the legendary Negro leagues great for whom recognition came way too late, was 94.
Dixon never got to hear her name whispered in reverential tones. She never went to banquets in her honor. She never made a Hall of Fame speech. She never saw statues of herself unveiled. She never got to tell grandchildren about games played long ago, the details embellished by the years.
Maggie Dixon never even made it to 30. She was 28.
“She made everyone around her a better person,” brother Jamie Dixon, the Pitt basketball coach, said at her funeral. “She made me a better person. I’ve said this before: When I grow up, I want to be just like her.”
The sister and brother became a story line of last season’s NCAA tournament, the two of them on separate sidelines. She had taken over a mediocre women’s team at Army shortly before the season. The team won nine of its last 11 and captured the Patriot League crown with a 69-68 victory at home over Holy Cross to get to the NCAAs for the first time. Dixon was paraded around Christl Arena like a potentate.
A first-round loss in the NCAA tournament followed, a blowout by Tennessee, but the exuberance never diminished.
A month later, everything changed. She collapsed at a friend’s house, and before long the medical examiner’s office released its findings: an enlarged heart and valve trouble, perhaps the cause of an irregular heartbeat.
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“A couple of girls have been to her grave,” captain Jen Hansen said. “Just to say hi.”
Dixon was not the only one in sports in 2006 leaving much too soon.
Kirby Puckett, the buoyant face of baseball when with the Minnesota Twins, was 45, his Hall of Fame career cut short by glaucoma. Journeyman pitcher Cory Lidle, his season with the Yankees having just ended, died at 34 when his small plane smashed into a Manhattan high-rise.
Randy Walker, the 52-year-old football coach, left the Northwestern campus grieving. Susan Butcher, the trailblazing Iditarod queen, was 51. University of Miami lineman Bryan Pata was shot dead at 22 outside his apartment.
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