by Lisa Leslie
Color had never been an issue with me. I had been around people of different backgrounds all my life. I did not look for differences between whites, Mexicans, Italians, blacks, and people of other heritages. Our skin colors were different, but so what? I believed we were all God’s children. That was the way my whole family thought. Two of my aunts had husbands who were white. Our family had a mix of biracial couples and children, so for me, race was never really a big deal. I had never felt racism personally before, but it hit home now.
The comments from the crowd and the behavior of the referees were already a shock, but then the game started to get physical. Coach Scott visited with the refs in hopes of getting them to keep the opposing team from roughing me up. While they stood there talking, one of the hometown fans in the stands yelled to the official, “Come on. Let ’em play.” My mother, who was standing right there, heard the ref turn to the man and say, “Do you really think a black man is going to get a call in this arena tonight?”
That is what we were up against in Shelbyville that night. We lost the game 72–43, and I was heartbroken. It was one thing to go in with the #1 ranking and lose the first game to Vigor High. They beat us and that hurt, but in Morningside’s loss to Cannon County, we got cheated! It was blatant! What made things so much worse, though, was the racist fans. I still cannot believe the things that they yelled at us. I will never understand the venom that came out of their mouths. Maybe the people of Shelbyville were good, caring people who just took their sports too seriously, but based on the way they treated us, they were horrible excuses for human beings.
I remember crying and asking Coach Scott, “Why did you bring us here?” I could not comprehend what had taken place. It made me confused about life. Why were we there? Why did that happen to us? I remember it like it was yesterday. How could something like that happen in 1989?
Coach Scott sat us down, and he apologized to us. I think he was in shock, too. We were all baffled, and at that point, all we wanted to know was when our flight was going home. We wanted to get out of there as soon as possible, and I could not wait to leave Tennessee.
The morning that we left Shelbyville, there was no free breakfast, no free newspapers, and no fancy coach-style bus waiting for us. Instead, we rode a raggedy old school bus to the airport. When I got on the plane, I swore that I would never go back to the state of Tennessee. I should have known that Shelbyville was just one small town and that not everybody in Tennessee was racist, but that entire experience made me so sick that when I got home, I just climbed into my bed and stayed there.
It was not long before Pat Summitt called me. I told her right away, “I am not coming to Tennessee,” and I explained to her exactly why.
Pat’s response was very sympathetic and sweet. She assured me that Knoxville was not like Shelbyville. “Lisa,” she said, “it’s a whole lot different here.”
All I could say was, “Pat, I am really sorry. I like you guys. I respect your program, but I could never play for people who are racists. I just could not. I would not even want to be a part of a program that had to deal with hate like that. I don’t know what to tell you, Pat. I will never come back to Tennessee.”
Time has passed, of course, and I have been back to Tennessee, but I will never forget what happened to me there. It is the only time I have thought about my race when I played a sport. I just want to play, and I want to be good. And I want to play with other people who are good. To me, race is irrelevant. The ball does not have a face on it. You play with your teammates, and you play against your opponent, but Shelbyville was the first time I saw people make the distinction.
The University of Tennessee was immediately crossed off of my list of prospective colleges. That left Long Beach State and USC as my final two choices. At the time Long Beach had the better team, but to me, USC had the better lifestyle. Basketball vs. lifestyle? It was a tough decision. I had to look at the big picture. I wanted to get into broadcasting, and USC was strong in that department, but just when the scale tipped in favor of the Trojans, Long Beach State offered Coach Scott a coaching position. That meant if I joined the 49ers, I would get to keep my high school coach with me. This made things really complicated for me. I loved Coach Scott. The man was truly like a father to me, and Long Beach State was going to give him the opportunity to move up to the college ranks after coaching high school basketball for so many years.
My heart told me to go to Long Beach State and stick with Coach Scott. When Coach Stanley called from USC, I told her that I was planning to join the 49ers because they had offered Coach Scott a job. Honestly, I was feeling pressured, because I knew that Coach Scott’s job offer from Long Beach State was contingent upon my signing to play there. All of a sudden, my coach’s livelihood was in my hands. The man had done so much to help me over the past four years, and I wanted to help him. Wasn’t I obligated?
Coach Stanley said, “Don’t do a thing. I’ll get back to you.”
Amazingly, a coaching position for Coach Scott was also open at USC. I was ecstatic. Long Beach had a lot of strong points, but when it came right down to it, I did not want to go there. I really wanted to go to USC and I really wanted to play for Coach Stanley and I really wanted Coach Scott to go there with me. When that coaching position opened up for him, I said, “That’s it. We are going to USC!” Everything worked out perfectly. I signed my letter of intent in the career center at Morningside, and Coach Scott had a new job. Finally, it was all decided. And it was ideal in every way.
I was going to be a Trojan, but because my SAT scores were just average, I had to go to summer school before I could actually attend classes at USC in the fall. The SATs were a real sore point with me. While I was still in high school, I gave an interview in which I said that I did not think our students at Morningside were properly prepared to take the SATs. That interview turned into a newspaper article that upset a lot of people at Morningside High and in the Inglewood school system, but I was just expressing my opinion.
When I entered high school, I set a goal to earn a 3.5 grade point average. I achieved that, but I was not really sure what I had learned in my four years there. During my senior year, I started going to an SAT prep class in Brentwood, an affluent area. Each week, our instructor would give us one hundred vocabulary words to learn. We had to define them and know how to use them in a sentence. We would get tested only on ten words, but because we did not know which ten, we had to know all of them. I was baffled when I first looked at the vocabulary words. I asked others in the prep class, “How do they expect us to know these words? Where do you learn them?”
They told me, “In the books that we read in high school.”
I had never been around so many kids before who had access to a better education than me. I could not believe how much they knew or how much they had read. They rattled off a long list of books that I had never heard of. I had read 1984, Gone with the Wind, and Lord of the Flies. I had probably read seven of the books that were on their lists, and I had read most of those on my own. They had not been assigned reading at Morningside, so I felt as if I was at an educational disadvantage.
I was not trying to make the Inglewood school system look bad. It was just the reality of my educational experience. I thought somebody needed to say something to make sure that every student had access to the right information, the right books, and the right opportunities. Some parents, teachers, and administrators took offense, but I told them that I was not saying that they were not doing their jobs. I was simply asking if the students at Morningside High School were being properly prepared not only to get good grades, but also to do well on standardized tests, which is crucial to college acceptance these days. I was not about to take back what I said.
Looking back now, I realize it was not just an issue at Morningside. It was, and still remains, a shortcoming of California’s public schools and probably of schools across the country. I think there is a serious problem with our educational system, especially in the inner citie
s. If our government ever gets serious about fixing the matter, a good place to start would be by increasing salaries for teachers.
Anyway, summer school at USC was pretty cool. It was the first time I stayed in a dorm and had a roommate. I was taking classes, learning time management, practicing basketball, and meeting interesting athletes.
When fall classes finally began, it was time to get serious about my basketball and my studies. I liked going to school, and once all the students got there, I learned something very quickly about USC. Everybody partied on Friday and Saturday. Sundays were for studying and doing homework.
Chapter 5
Trojan Wars
I entered USC as the top recruit in the nation, and when the USC sports information department found out that I could dunk, they had posters made up with pictures of me dunking a basketball. The big caption read, WHEN WILL SHE DUNK? So, there was just a little bit of attention focused on me as an incoming freshman. Coach Stanley was not too happy with the poster. She was all about winning and not much for hype. In fact, she actually limited some of the media access to me in my first season just to keep some of the heat off and allow me to focus more on basketball.
When I got to USC, Coach Stanley was in her second season as head coach of the Women of Troy. Her first team went 8–19, but she had a terrific track record of success and was one of the primary reasons I chose to enroll at USC. The woman had been an All-American point guard, had won two national championships in the 1970s at Immaculata College, and when she was twenty-three, she had accepted the coaching job at Old Dominion University (ODU) and had become the youngest head coach in the country. Coach Stanley had helped develop great players at ODU, like Anne Donovan and Nancy Lieberman, and she had turned the Monarchs into a college basketball powerhouse that won the NCAA title in 1985.
Coach Stanley spent two seasons at the University of Pennsylvania before moving to USC in 1989. She took over a Trojan women’s team that had gone from the glory years of conference championships and NCAA tournament appearances in the mid-1980s to a sub-.500 team that finished sixth in the Pac-10.
Coach Stanley had a reputation for being very strict and disciplined, and she could definitely be strong. But she was loving, too. If she trusted you and you were in her circle, then you would always be in her circle. The structure was good for me. I needed a strong coach who was going to help me become a better basketball player. I had experienced different coaches in the USA Basketball system, and I found that I truly loved working with passionate coaches who stressed discipline and had some intensity to them.
Coach Stanley possessed those qualities, and she would work with me after practices to improve my game. Some days, she would come in early to teach me a drill or a skill, which we would demonstrate later, when the entire team arrived for practice. She was an excellent teacher and had a deep understanding of the game, and she could communicate that knowledge to her players. She could also get in your face, and when that happened, Coach Thaxton would step in and put her motherly graces to work. She balanced out the strong and forceful personality of Coach Stanley. Coach Thaxton would take a player aside and say, “I know she gets on you, but everything is okay. Just get back in there, and do your best.” Her soothing voice and calm demeanor could be very comforting when Coach Stanley was steamed. Coach Thaxton was also our fashion police. She made sure that we dressed nicely and acted like ladies. I appreciated that. Even though I did not have the nicest, most expensive clothes, I still thought it was very important to dress well and act appropriately, especially when we traveled as a team.
Not all of my teammates agreed with the dress code. Some wanted to dress casually, and some were downright bummy. It was clear that they did not correlate our team’s image with that of the school. But it seemed like a clear, straight line to me. Besides, I liked the transformation from my persona as a Wonder Woman athlete to my normal, regular self, which usually felt more like Lucille Ball. I liked the difference.
But we somehow managed to get along well. The team was a melting pot of personalities, races, and backgrounds. But we were more alike than we were different, and everyone was pretty friendly.
In my first game at USC, I scored thirty points and pulled down twenty rebounds. We beat Texas, and my career with the Trojans was under way. There was a lot of hype surrounding me, and plenty of expectations, too. In our first season, the Women of Troy posted an 18–12 record. That was ten more wins than the year before. We finished third in the Pac-10 and got all the way to the NCAA West Regional in Las Vegas before Long Beach State—the school that I had passed on—beat us 83–58.
In my first college season, I led the nation with nineteen points and ten rebounds per game, and I was honored to become the first Pac-10 freshman to be named first-team All-Conference and NCAA Freshman of the Year. Those were great individual awards, but the Trojans still had lots of work to do as a team.
The summer after my freshmen year, in 1991, I played for USA Basketball in the World University Games in Sheffield, England. It was a sixteen-team tournament that featured Spain, Canada, and the Soviet Union. Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer was my head coach again, and I got to play with Ruthie Bolton, Suzie McConnell, and, of course, Dawn Staley. We had a lot of top-notch talent, and we beat Spain in the gold medal game, finishing with an 8–0 record and outscoring our opponents by an average of forty-two points per game. That was a pretty good way to spend my summer vacation.
I loved the responsibility I felt to contribute to a first-rate team. Having grown up with so many adult responsibilities—especially taking care of Tiffany—it took a lot to make me feel burdened or pressured. I thrived under the weight of expectations that I could play well.
Back in Los Angeles, Coach Stanley was trying to build the USC program back to national prominence. If my family’s cheering alone at the games could have done it, it certainly would have. Everybody came to my USC games. Mom, Dionne, Tiffany, Aunt J.C., Craigie, Uncle Ed, the whole gang. And they were the loudest, most animated group there. Dionne even used to come hang out with me on campus sometimes. We were trying to have a normal sisterly relationship with one another, and it was nice going to parties with her or just coming back to my apartment to cook and talk. I was enjoying my freedom away from home and away from having to take care of Tiffany. Mom was being a full-time parent, and everyone was happy. Oddly enough, when Tiffany came to spend time with me, she was now the younger sister trying to assert her independence and act older, and I was now the irritated big sister who had to put her back in her place and remind her who she was talking to.
The whole family loved the sport, and they respected Coach Stanley’s attempts to make the USC team better by bringing in excellent talent and emphasizing hard work, teamwork, and Trojan pride. She was very protective of us and wanted our women’s team to have its place in the USC athletic world. That was no easy task due to the pecking order that existed at the university. Men’s football was the highest priority, followed by men’s basketball, and if you looked really hard, you would find women’s sports somewhere well down the list.
It was an uphill climb in the “good old boy” society on campus, so our coach was very territorial about the team’s practice sessions in the gym. She got agitated when people barged into our workouts, and she got really upset when campus tours marched through. Tours were forbidden in the gym when the men’s team practiced, but they were allowed to come in and disrupt our training sessions.
A lot of times, men in the athletic department acted as if the women’s teams did not matter. There were many situations when we were disrespected as a team. To me, that was one of the most disheartening things about playing college basketball, and Coach Stanley was not the type of person to just stand still and take it. She was not a subtle person, and at times, she did not seem to care much about political correctness, but the coach did everything that she could to defend our program. It was like using a nail file to carve out a niche for women’s basketball. But she was determined to
do it, even if it had to be one scratch at a time.
As a team, we were taking baby steps, but we were moving in the right direction. In my sophomore season, I averaged over twenty points and eight rebounds per game and shot 55 percent from the field. The Women of Troy won twenty-three games that year and moved up to second place in the conference. We got back to the NCAA tournament, and this time, we made it to the West Regional finals in Seattle before losing to Stanford, the eventual national champs. The Associated Press ranked USC number twenty-three in its final poll. I was picked first-team All-Pac-10 again and was named All-America by the U.S. Basketball Writers Association and Basketball Times. In my mind, individual honors were great, but they were not what college basketball was all about.
Off the court, things were looking up, too. I was really comfortable with my body. The awkwardness that I had felt as a girl was gone. Now I was a strong, fit, shapely woman. And though my athleticism usually made me more of a homegirl among the guys than a love interest, I found myself head over heels in love for the very first time.
Marcus* and I were practically inseparable as freshmen. We started out as the very best of friends, and progressively, we got more serious about one another. He was an athlete, too, and he seemed to understand me—the on-the-court me and the off-the-court me. Being in a loving, stable relationship brought a lot to my life, and I was happy to have it.
In May of 1992, I got invited to the U.S. Olympic Trials in Colorado Springs. There were fifty-six ladies there, each of us hoping to make the team that would play in the Barcelona Olympics that summer. I was nineteen years old, the youngest player ever invited to try out for the U.S. Olympic squad, and I was competing against the likes of thirty-two-year-old Lynette Woodard and thirty-three-year-old Nancy Lieberman. I also had to battle three excellent former USC players: Cynthia Cooper, Pam McGee, and Cheryl Miller.