Utah is home to Azzi now

Trivia question of the day: Name the only Utahn on the ESPN.com women's college basketball 25th anniversary team.

Hint: It's not Natalie Williams.

It's Jennifer Azzi. Although she was raised in Tennessee and played college ball at Stanford, Utah is claiming her. Or rather she is claiming Utah. Either way, it's a match. She's local and can prove it by pronouncing Tooele and Manti with nary a moment's hesitation.

And she's not leaving Salt Lake anytime soon.

"The quality of life here is amazing," she said this week. "I love the fact that I can go out my front door and hike, walk, bike. It's a breathtaking place. . . . It's just a big playground.

"I went for a walk the other day up City Creek Canyon, further than I'd gone before. There was nobody there. It was just spectacular. Then I can go back to my house and see the city."

Not to mention the symphony, ballet and opera. This winter she attended the "Messiah" sing-in downtown.

"The audience," she said, "blew me away. Everyone was in tears."

Go ahead and ask the former Starzz guard about Utah. It won't take long to get her talking. The state hasn't seen a promoter like this since Tom Welch and Dave Johnson. You might say she's a fixture. She knows a person can get great winter squash soup and ahi tuna at The Metropolitan, knows where to find a parking spot at the U. She can drive straight to the intersection of Ninth and Ninth without so much as a single wrong turn.

She even knows that when people say Macey's, they're not talking about a department store.

"I discovered I have a great life here in Salt Lake," she said, "so here I am."

This is where she is also: on ESPN.com's list of best collegiate players in the past quarter century, alongside Sue Bird, Cheryl Miller, Rebecca Lobo, Sheryl Swoopes, Diana Taurasi, Teresa Weatherspoon and the like. Her name appeared on the elite list last week, accompanied by this endorsement: "The long line of Stanford superstars begins with Azzi. . . . And long before Nicole Powell put the triple-double in vogue for the Cardinal, Azzi did it."

It's true. One of the reasons fans could turn on TV Monday night and catch the Connecticut-LSU women's game on ESPN-2 is because of Azzi. She and others on the Top 25 list got people watching and talking.

Azzi said when she played on the Olympic team in 1996, former Georgetown coach John Thompson addressed the group.