Shannon Green lives on

Connie Green often goes for days without thinking about her daughter. Sometimes longer than that. She has three other children to keep in mind, seven grandchildren to track and a husband of nearly seven decades to tend to at their home in Big Sandy.

Unless it's summer and the Greens have relocated to their ranch east of town, hard against Centennial Mountain. "The ranch is beautiful, but it's little," she says, before offering up that it's 2,500 acres. Little is a relative term for Green, now 88, who grew up on a ranch of 120,000 acres southeast of Big Sandy.

It's no longer there, but the Green's ranch once housed a makeshift basketball court, built by hand by Shannon, Lawrence and Connie's third of four children. She needed to work on the ranch each summer, rather than attending the week-long sports camps held in town. So she came up with a solution.

She dug the hole, erected a pole and hung a hoop, then spent hours pounding the dirt until it resembled the hardwood floor at Big Sandy High School, where she was an all-state player her final three years as a Pioneer. Every morning on the ranch began the same way. "She was going to be the best," says Connie.

It's one of the memories that crystalizes in Connie Green's still-sharp mind when asked about her daughter, who died 37 years ago last month from the results of a rollover accident, when traveling late at night between the ranch Connie Green grew up on and the family ranch east of town.

She was a Lady Griz basketball player at the time. She'd finished one year in Missoula and was days from starting her sophomore year and playing another season for coach Robin Selvig, who was going into his fourth of what would be a 38-year career coaching women's basketball at Montana.

Determined is the word Connie Green comes up with to best describe her daughter, and it comes after a significant pause as she considers the best choice. She continues, "It was her way or the highway. She and I went head to head. And her (two older brothers) weren't going to tell her what to do."

She was a force of nature, was Shannon Green, five-feet, five-inches of boundless energy that found time for pep club, science club, speech club, drama club, Pioneer Club, Pioneer Patrol, basketball, track. The list continues, but you get the idea. And that energy? It didn't divide. It brought people together.

"She was always my idol," said a high school teammate on the day of Shannon Green's funeral, in August 1981. "When I first started out playing basketball, I'd say, I can't do it. Shannon would say, Yes you can. She never once was negative. I was proud to be on her team."

About the only thing that could hold her down was the seatbelt of the truck that overturned that night, when Green flipped off the dark, county road to avoid a deer, violating one of her parents' two rules. Be home by midnight. And don't dodge to miss a deer, not on gravel.

She survived the accident, found by family friends in the dark, predawn hours, suspended in place in the cab of the truck by a seatbelt she couldn't unlock. Everyone thought she'd be fine when she arrived at the hospital in Big Sandy. But she wouldn't see noon.

It's been nearly 40 years since her death and the memories of Shannon Green come as easily for her former teammates as they do for her mom.

Cheri Bratt Roberts, who was a freshman with Green on the 1980-81 Lady Griz team, remembers Green's strawberry blond hair and freckles. Sue Habbe, a sophomore that season, recalls everything about the phone call she got from Doris Deden, another freshman.

"I was at home. No one else was there. I was staying with my parents that summer up Grant Creek," she says. "I remember her exact words."

And she remembers the ride to Big Sandy, in a station wagon with Selvig at the wheel, Habbe and Deden in the very back seat, the one that faced backwards. It made her sick to her stomach. Or maybe it was the thought of going to her soul mate's funeral.

She remembers walking into the church and the open casket, and what her teammate looked like and what she was wearing. It was an early service, at Connie's insistence. She wanted the hour hand on the clock going up -- toward heaven -- not going down. It might have been 10:30 or 11.

Roy Lackner, Green's coach in both basketball and track at Big Sandy, spoke. Green was an all-state basketball player and graduated with the Montana Class B records in the 880-yard run, the mile and two mile. Lackner claimed none of it came naturally.

"Shannon did not really have natural athletic attributes. She was perhaps the least-gifted athlete I have ever seen," he said, likely drawing laughter from a packed, mourning church that needed it, as one of the town's favorite daughters lie motionless -- lifeless, which was so not Shannon Green -- before them.

"But everything she ever did was done with plain hard work. I'm not taking away from her when I say least-gifted. But rather, I want to point out her deeper qualities of dedication, desire, hard work and perseverance. I have never known another person like that."

But Shannon Green wasn't a one-off. She was the great-granddaughter of Cornelius John McNamara, who was born in Vermont in 1853 and moved west as a twenty-something in pursuit of a challenge and new life. He found it in north-central Montana.

He began working for Charles Broadwater, one of that century's most famous Montanans, and when large chunks of former reservation land opened in 1880 for cattlemen to settle, Broadwater, McNamara and Broadwater's nephew, Thomas Marlow, got in on the action.

In 1888 the North Montana Cattle Company was established on more than 120,000 acres of land southeast of Big Sandy. A dozen years later McNamara married Agnes Miltz. In 1905 Clifford McNamara, Connie Green's dad, was born.

When Marlow died in 1938, when Connie was running around the ranch as an eight-year-old, her family bought out Marlow's interest and changed the operation's name to the McNamara Cattle Company.

And soon Connie McNamara came of age. "The Havre boys used to come to Big Sandy, and that was a big deal for Big Sandy," says Connie, who attended Marymount College, in Tarrytown, N.Y.

Home from college one summer and with "the boys" fighting in the Korean War, she was urged to write a letter to anyone she might know who had been drafted. She knew Lawrence Green, one of the frequent visitors to Big Sandy from Havre, so she wrote him a letter.

And a classic courtship of that era, fast and to the point, commenced. He wrote back that he'd like to take her out when he returned, whenever that might be. "Before I knew it, he was home and he called me. We went out and before I knew it, we were married," she says.

They worked in Havre first -- she was teaching student nurses, he had a service station -- until Connie's dad called and said he needed help on the ranch. "My husband is a cowboy from the word go," she says, so they moved.

They worked on the ranch until 1955, when the McNamara Cattle Company was sold and became what it is known as today, the IX Ranch. (It's available for sale right now for $58 million should you be interested.)

Lawrence Green would go to what is today MSU Northern in Havre and get a degree in English, the subject he would teach at Big Sandy High for 30 years. Connie directed Big Sandy Activities, a center for people with developmental disabilities, until her retirement.

They had four children, and the family would spend the school year living in town and the summer working at the ranch they had purchased from Lawrence's uncle, hard against Centennial Mountain, all four Greens learning the requisite skills to lend a helping hand, from riding horses to cattle vaccination.

First came John, then Harry. Shannon was the first daughter, Stefani the second, and the girls couldn't have been any different. Stefani was the perfectionist, Shannon more instinctual. Both excelled in sports, both loved music.

"Stefani had to make sure everything was exactly right. She played everything by the note. Shannon would go on her own little way," says Connie, who saw the result of that inherent conflict at a school concert.

"Stefani just stopped in the middle of the whole thing and looked at Shannon. Please. Follow. The notes. Shannon. Right in the middle of it."

But she never did simply follow the notes, in any sense. She would be out the front door at 6 a.m. on any particular day, in any particular weather, to get in her run, often seeing Dr. Murphy, who would be on his morning walk and would be the one to declare Shannon Green dead on Aug. 24, 1981.

She played organized sports with the boys before ever being on an all-girls team, and no matter the team, one thing was a constant. "She just wanted to win. No matter what," says Connie.

And she wanted to go to school at Montana. But it was the summer now, after her senior year. She was accomplished enough in both basketball and track that Northern wanted her. So did Montana State.

But Montana had Selvig, and Vicki Heebner, of Three Forks, was going to Bozeman, and Green didn't want to play with Heebner. She wanted to play against her.

The family would have been at the ranch the evening the call Green so desperately wanted to receive sent the phone ringing.

"Right in the middle of dinner, and it's Robin," recalls Connie. "He asked if he could talk to Shannon. She gets on the phone and goes, 'Yes, yes, yes, absolutely, yes, yes, yes. Okay, goodbye.'

"She said, 'That was Robin. He wants me to be on the team.' She was so excited."

Selvig, a small-town-Montana guy himself, from Outlook, was only a few years removed from coaching girls' basketball at Plentywood High. He knew small town didn't mean small talent. He would build a basketball dynasty following that very principle.

"I knew all the Montana kids, and I thought Shannon was going to be a good player," he says. "She was super athletic and a hard worker and fun to be around because she was so positive. She was impossible not to like."

Montana was coming off a 19-10 season in Selvig's second year in Missoula. His third team would be led by seniors Jill Greenfield, Barb Johannsen, Sandy Selvig and Annette Whitaker. The team had four freshmen: Bratt, Deden, Green and Shari Thesenvitz.

"It was a little bit of a mystery in those days, because you didn't know that much about the other recruits," says Bratt Roberts.

Deden and Bratt would be the team's second- and third-leading scorers behind Greenfield as Montana went 22-8. Green played in 17 games and had more assists (20) than points (14). And her team defeated Heebner's Bobcats twice that season.

"She was a very giving person, which carried onto the court. She maybe didn't play in all the games, but in practice you could get a sense of who she was. She was very giving. She was very generous on the court as well as off the court," says Bratt Roberts.

After the season and the school year, Green was torn. She loved the ranch, but she had found women wired just like her on the Lady Griz, one in particular: Habbe. She remained in Missoula for most of the summer.

"We hung out a lot, she and Doris and I. We became good friends. We shared the love of working out and working toward something. We played basketball any chance we got," Habbe says.

Green was back home in August, helping out at the ranch, when Connie got a call from Art and Audrey Roth, then the managers of the IX Ranch and friends of the Greens.

They had an exchange student from England staying with them, and they knew Shannon was back in town, so they wondered if she could take him out and show him a good time.

He'd never seen a baseball game, so Green drove to the IX Ranch, picked him up and drove to Havre. She wanted him to experience American baseball.

The two house rules were in effect that night, of course. Be home by midnight. Don't swerve to avoid deer. Just drive right into them. It would have gone against Green's big-hearted instincts, but it was the safest way to get around the county roads outside Big Sandy.

Because Green didn't follow the latter, she broke the former.

"She was always home by midnight. When she didn't come home, I thought, For heaven's sake, this is weird," says Connie. "Finally about 2 (a.m.) I called Audrey and said, 'Shannon's not here.'

"She told me Shannon had left more than two hours ago and should be there by now."

The Roths got in their vehicle and started driving the route that Green would most likely have taken. Within two miles of the ranch they spotted the truck. It was upside down. Shannon Green had been trapped inside by her seatbelt for more than two hours.

Green was conscious and extracted when emergency personnel arrived on the scene. The Roths called Connie, and the Greens began making their way to town. They intercepted the ambulance on the way and followed it to the hospital.

Green was alert and talking, and more than anything she was apologetic for crashing her dad's truck. She had broken one of the house rules.

"She told Lawrence, 'I'm sorry I wrecked the pickup.' He said, 'Shannon, that's fine. You're going to be fine.' And she said, "Yes, I am,' " recalls Connie.

The stories diverge from there. Selvig says he heard she had been pinned in the truck by the steering wheel against her legs and a blood clot developed. It would release in the hospital, not long after Green was given a good prognosis.

Habbe remembers it being an embolism in her heart, while Connie Green says she believes something broke loose when her daughter was hanging upside down for so long and whatever it was ultimately made its way to her lungs. None of it matters really. It doesn't change what came next.

Connie Green left her daughter's side at 8 a.m., with everything appearing to be fine. She got a call at 11 a.m. and was asked to return to the hospital. When she arrived, Dr. Murphy told her Shannon was gone.

She was so convinced her daughter would be coming home -- and soon -- that she didn't know what he meant. "I asked him, 'Where did she go?' " says Connie.

Did somebody miss something? Could they have done a more thorough examination? And would it have revealed anything or made a difference? What if she'd been taken to a larger hospital, one with more resources?

Connie Green heard all those questions and more after her daughter passed away. She entertained them but ultimately found solace in her faith. "I don't know. I don't know what the difference would have been. I think when God's ready for you, He just takes you."

It was a life cut short. Too short. Shannon Green wanted to play point guard for the Lady Griz. She knew her time was coming. She wanted to go to medical school and become an orthopedic surgeon, dreams that would go unrealized, evaporated into mere memories that morning at the hospital in Big Sandy.

Bratt Roberts is now a mother of three, all Division I athletes. Ben played baseball at Washington State and one year of football for the Grizzlies. Liv was the 2017-18 Mountain West Conference Player of the Year as a senior at Wyoming. Mitch is a redshirt freshman on the Montana football team.

She took the news hard as a teammate of Green's. She views it all differently now, more through the eyes of another mother, Connie Green. And it's even more unsettling.

"Now that I have kids, I understand the horrific nature of losing a child that her parents must have felt at the time. You don't even want to think about it," she says.

So she can appreciate even more the gesture of most of the Lady Griz piling into that station wagon and driving toward Big Sandy, each with their own thoughts, each at an age when death had probably not touched them yet in such an intimate way.

In they walked, about to face that which they dreaded, because seeing Shannon Green in a casket would make it real for the first time.

"I didn't think they'd all come," says Connie. "We were out in a hall. They all went by and gave me their love. It was very touching.

"It wasn't easy. I can talk about it now because it's been a long time, but I still miss her. We all miss her."

It wasn't long after the Lady Griz returned to Missoula that the program announced its plan to add a third team award to MVP and Outstanding Defensive Player. It would be the Shannon Green Most Inspirational Player award.

The first year it was given out, following the 1981-82 season, it was presented to Habbe. "I wanted it," she says. "I strongly wanted to be connected to her name."

She will be forever, both in award and in her heart. It was a friendship that burned short and hot. They only knew each for a year, but when you discover someone like that, someone so much like you, you hold on to them with everything you have. Even when it's taken from you.

Habbe and Green were both awarded letterman's jackets after the 1980-81 season. It wasn't until later, after Green's death, that someone pointed out to Habbe how neat it was that they personalized each jacket, with a person's name stitched right there in the pocket.

She examined hers. She had been given Shannon Green's by mistake. And it was a perfect fit. Two friends, divided by death but never in spirit.

University of Montana Athletics

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