ST. LOUIS -- Somewhere in between the 30-point games in middle school and the shot that gave her the all-time NCAA career scoring mark this season, The Legend of Jackie Stiles grew legs.
Stiles' tale is worthy of axeman Paul Bunyan or steel-drivin' man John Henry. Except, only parts of it are tall.
A guard, she stands only 5-foot-8, but she is every bit the heart and soul of Southwest Missouri State's run to the NCAA Women's Final Four. She might as well be eight feet tall with all the buzz surrounding her heading into the Bears' national semifinal game tonight against Purdue.
Not since Sheryl Swoopes swooped in on the Final Four in 1993 to lead Texas Tech to a national championship has one player caused so much commotion. As accommodating as Stiles has been, she is a reluctant star.
"It has been wild," said Stiles, who has scored an NCAA record 3,371 career points. "I still have to keep pinching myself and keep saying, `Is this really happening? Is this really me?' "
To family and friends in her tiny hometown of Claflin, Kan. (616), she is just Jackie. She chronically forgets things, like where she puts her car keys. She is polite almost to a fault. She played drums in the school band as a hobby. Most of all, she worked harder than just about anyone in Claflin to become the best at what she did.
"I guess I first saw Jackie with a basketball in my driveway when I used to babysit her," Claflin mayor Barbara Logan said. "She couldn't have been older than kindergarten. She was allowed to join in games because she could dribble."
In eighth grade, she averaged 30 points a game.
"And that was with six-minute quarters," pointed out John Mesh, who wrote the first newspaper article about her for the `Great Bend' (Kan.) `Tribune' 10 years ago.
Word spread in rural Kansas of the phenomenal shooter from Claflin. Jackie's father, Pat, remembers a rumor starting that the Stiles home contained a gymnasium.
"That was crazy," said Pat, Claflin High's athletic director. "Some things tended to get a little blown up. All she had to do was walk to the school gym. She had a key."
Her workouts became the stuff of legend. She would often stay at the gym until she made 1,000 shots.
"Reality, not myth," said Stiles' former high school coach, Clint Kinnamon. "Her routine was phenomenal. She'd come in at 6:30 a.m., work out, go to school, practice after school, stay an hour after practice, maybe eat and come back or just stay longer. I'm like, `Jack, I gotta go home. You close up.' "
State-record games of 53, 61, and 71 points in high school added to the Stiles' lore. As a junior, the 61 points came in only 17 minutes. As a senior, Stiles averaged 46.4 points per game and capped a four-year track-and-field career in which she won 14 gold medals in multiple events.
She chose Southwest Missouri State over Connecticut and Kansas State, having spent summers since the age of 12 at SMSU camps. Pat said he tried to talk her out of SMSU, telling her the Lady Bears would never reach a Final Four.
"My dad and my coach told me to sign the letter of intent [to UConn], and if I woke up in the morning and felt right about it, I could send it in," Stiles said. "Something just didn't feel right the next day. SMS was in my heart."
SMSU and Stiles were soon big news in Kansas and the Missouri Valley Conference. One night, she scored 56 points against Evansville. She had 52 against Baylor, including a game-winning four-point play. Everyone who saw her play, it seemed, had a Jackie story. Most are true, some are exaggerated. Purdue forward Katie Douglas said she needed six stitches as a result of a head butt with Stiles last summer. Stiles' toughness, she suffered a concussion against Toledo in the first round of the NCAA tournament and came back to score 32 points in an upset victory at Rutgers, adds to the lore.
Stiles has her own Web site that was designed by a technology student at Kansas State who began following her career casually. It is now a definitive source for all that is Jackie Stiles.
"She inspires a lot of people," said Jeff Gross, who designed www.webkrafts.com/stiles.
Two furniture store workers in Claflin this week were inspired to dunk themselves in a tub of mud, then eat a pork chop with their muddy fingers to win Final Four tickets in a radio promotion.
The attention, said Jackie's mother, Pam, can be a bit too much.
"She's still a Claflin girl," Pam said. "She was the basketball homecoming queen in a class of 21. She's always been the underdog, but that's not a bad place to be. She still thinks of herself that way. That's why she can't believe all this attention."