This Is as Good as It Gets for Some Great Players

I need to take a few minutes today to tell you about a remarkable woman.

She plays basketball.

She plays basketball because she loves it, because she is good at it and because it put her through college. Possibly all three.

She is a rich kid whose daddy attached a backboard to the top of the garage so his daughter could spend her days and nights shooting baskets in the driveway.

She is a poor kid who learned her game in the playgrounds with netless rims because she never had a driveway, never had a garage, maybe never even had a car, maybe never even had a dad.

She gets up early, goes to practice before or between or after classes and goes home exhausted.

She goes on trips to other cities, other states, sometimes other countries, only to come home to a professor who isn’t interested in any excuses for lagging in her school work and isn’t inclined to cover for her simply because she is some sort of hotshot jock.

She keeps going and going, even if there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, no million-dollar deal, no cereal or cola commercials, no T-shirts with her picture on them.

Nobody pays her to play basketball, and nobody ever will. Nobody slips money under a table or arranges for her to drive some dealer’s car at bargain rates.

Nobody approaches her, or her coach, for that matter, with a big-money offer to wear or endorse some new line of high-tech shoes.

The only way she is ever going to make any money in the sport she loves is to coach it, or officiate it, or to be one of those rarest of rare women who get to play scripted basketball for the Harlem Globetrotters or to be a sportscaster on TV.

No major network is going to show her team’s games in prime time.

Nobody’s office pool is going to take bets on which team is going to win her sport’s national championship.

She is never going to see her face on the cover of a national sports magazine that does give its cover to voluptuous models wearing swimsuits the size of dental floss.

She can wait and wait and wait for the day someone starts up another professional league for women, wondering if it will ever pay as much as tennis players or golfers get, or even something more than minimum wage.

She will sit back in amazement as women who work for carfare as cheerleaders and dancers for the Lakers or Knicks or Bulls are able to find jobs in professional basketball while she cannot.

No one from the NBA will dare suggest anything revolutionary--like perhaps that the 12th person of every 12-person team must be a woman, one per club, if only to create equal job opportunities, to create new heroes and role models, to further interest half the American population in a very American sport.

All she really wants is some means of utilizing her skills past the age of 22.

She knows that she is unlikely to grow up to be 7 feet 4 or to be able to palm a regulation basketball as though it were a grapefruit.

But she also knows that she can shoot and pass and dribble and run and think, same as she knows that the better the competition, the better she is going to get.

She is tall as women go, tall as Katrina McClain, tall as Cheryl Miller, tall as Venus Lacy or Lisa Leslie, even as tall as Anne Donovan; tall as some of the most dominating college players ever.

She is small as basketball players go, small as Michelle Edwards, small as Jennifer Azzi, even as small as Dawn Staley, but there are men their size playing in the NBA, picking on somebody not their own size and doing a damn fine job of it.

She is as able as Ann Meyers, as nimble as Nancy Lieberman, as skillful as Lynette Woodard, and all she needs is the right opportunity to prove it.

Day in and day out, her knees ache, her feet hurt, her ankles swell and her arms are bruised from the constant pounding of other arms around the basket--same as the men.

Week in and week out, she runs layup drills, runs wind sprints, runs laps, rides an exercise bike, practices her jump shot and repeats free throw after free throw until she could make them blindfolded--same as the men.

Year in and year out, she represents her school, wears its name on her shirt, takes pride in each victory and takes each defeat hard--same as the men.

Seldom does she shatter glass backboards, get busted for violent incidents on campus, draw technical fouls for gutter profanity or kick an opponent who is down--unlike some of the men.

Her play means a lot to her.

Her sport means a lot to her.

Her Final Four means a lot to her.

She is woman. See her soar.