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What do we really recall from the past nine years?
from: sports.espn.go.com
by Mechelle Voepel, Special to ESPN.com
There are lots of lists, honors, bests, and all that kind of stuff as the WNBA's 10th anniversary season nears the All-Star Game. My editor said, "How about a top-10 favorite moments list?" and then I was mentally going through the standard things that I think most WNBA followers would include.
Except … I wanted my list to be from a true sports fan's heart. Meaning this: What do I really remember vividly from the last nine seasons? What images come to mind, off the top of my head? What honestly left an impression?
Ever watch those "I Love the (fill-in-the-decade)" shows on VH1? You see the "celebrities" saying things such as, "OK, well, the Wonder Twins were part of the 'Superfriends,' and they would say, 'Wonder Twin powers, activate!' And then …"
Much of the time, it's dreadfully obvious they don't really remember these details, they're just following a script. I decided not to do my WNBA list that way. I wasn't going to look at anybody else's list, or take suggestions or put something down that sounded good but I didn't truly remember much about.
Instead, I just typed up the 10 things that really had stuck in the old cranial lint trap.
As it turned out, some of the general-consensus "biggest moments" were on my list. But others aren't. In fact, some of these things wouldn't make any list but mine.
If you're a WNBA fan, sit down and do the same thing -- list what really stayed with you. Share it with your pals. That's what these anniversary things are for, really. We can all put in our own little pieces for the mosaic, which gets bigger as the years go by.
Here is mine:
10. Van Chancellor and the "purple" towel in the 1998 WNBA Finals
The Comets, trying to defend their title, had lost to Phoenix in Game 1. Chancellor tried a little motivational tactic. He held up a towel and asked guard Kim Perrot what color it was. White, she said. Obviously.
Then … well, this is how Swoopes explained it after the Comets won the next two games and their second WNBA title: "He said, 'It's purple,' " Swoopes said then. "If I tell you all it's purple, it's purple. If you listen to what I'm telling you, we'll win.'
"You have to understand, he's a Mississippi boy. We just sit there and wonder where all this is coming from, but you have to laugh at it and make him feel good, so that's what we did."
And they made him feel even better by getting another championship. After which Chancellor said, "Thank God for great players."
9. It's your turn, Yo
Yolanda Griffith might have had an amazing Division I career at Iowa, but that didn't happen. She sat out a year for academics, had a daughter and then went to junior college in Florida. She finished her collegiate career at Division II Florida Atlantic.
Basketball kept doors open for Griffith, though. She played overseas, in the ABL and then was the second player chosen in the 1999 WNBA draft after the ABL folded.
Griffith has always taken the pounding that goes with being an elite post player. She battled through injuries. But at age 35 in 2005, she had to realistically wonder how many chances she'd have left to win it all.
After her Sacramento team took the WNBA Finals 3-1 last September, Griffith simply said, "This has been the best season of my career."
8. JOAN JETT and her Sparks' voodoo doll at Madison Square Garden in the 2002 Finals
The WNBA is definitely not about who's who at courtside. It's not a face-time forum. Yet Jett trying so hard to put the hex on Los Angeles was a hilariously intense show of support for the Liberty.
Of course, it didn't work. The Sparks won in two games.
Liberty fans have watched a lot of "almost" and "well, maybe if …" and "oh, not again." And now, many of them might think the "voodoo" needs to be directed toward the front office.
7. Seattle at Sacramento regular-season game in July 2004
I was in Sacramento almost two weeks for the Olympic track and field trials. Near the end of that, the Monarchs had a matinee game before that night's track action.
A couple of days before that, we media folks had the chance to meet and interview many of the surviving members of the legendary Tennessee State Tigerbelles, the track program that was synonymous with Olympic success for so long. The most famous being the late Wilma Rudolph, whom the U.S. post office honored that week with a stamp.
The Tigerbelles' heyday was in the 1950s and '60s, before Title IX and before the South was in any way significantly integrated. The facilities and equipment they typically used would be insultingly unacceptable to today's female athletes.
Yet to the Tigerbelles, the only thing that mattered was getting a chance. There's an elegance and dignity to these women that is such a triumphant contrast to the duel discrimination they faced as African-Americans and as women. They won.
And because they and others like them in every sport competed against the odds, we got to the point where on a sunny California weekday afternoon, I could go watch a pro women's basketball game.
6. Tamika Catchings' hustle in the 2002 WNBA All-Star Game
Catchings never got her "big moment" at Tennessee. Not really. She was a freshman on the 1998 NCAA title team, when Chamique Holdsclaw was the star. The next year, Tennessee was upset by Duke. In 2000, there was the title-game loss to UConn. Then when she was a senior, Catchings' career ended in January because of a knee injury.
Catchings always went full-bore. She didn't need a feeling of "unfinished business" fueling her. And yet to see Catchings as a rookie All-Star, playing this exhibition with the same fire as if it had been for something really substantial, was seeing a great player who will always be hungry.
5. USA Basketball team practice the day after the 2002 WNBA Finals
This was at UC Irvine, as a Van Chancellor-led group was working out in preparation for the World Championships. It was about 24 hours after the Sparks' Nikki Teasley hit the winning shot against New York in the decisive Game 2 of the Finals in Los Angeles.
And there was Houston's Sheryl Swoopes, with nothing to prove to anyone, racing up and down the floor, finishing shots, making sharp passes, playing aggressive defense. This was the year after she'd had to sit out the 2001 season with a knee injury.
This was "just" a practice, yet what was on display is why Swoopes and her fellow veterans have made the WNBA what it is and why they've been so successful when competing for the U.S. national team.
The "you play like you practice" axiom is so well illustrated by Swoopes.
4. Liberty guard Teresa Weatherspoon's half-courter to send the 1999 Finals to a third game
The Houston Comets and their fans were soooooooooo close to starting the celebration. Some people on press row already had their game stories ready to file: "Houston threepeats!"
But "The Shot, WNBA version" (as opposed to "The Shot, NCAA version" by North Carolina's Charlotte Smith in 1994) brought everybody back for one more game.
Until joining the Liberty, most of T-Spoon's athletic glory in the United States had been in Louisiana; she helped lead Louisiana Tech to the 1988 NCAA title. Yet her popularity translated right away in New York.
She gave the Liberty another chance in the Finals. Even though for Houston, it really was just delayed gratification.
3. Deanna Nolan's 3-pointer for Detroit in Game 3 of the 2003 WNBA playoffs
Ruth Riley was the star of the game for the victorious Shock, as she repeated a clutch performance that was reminiscent of what she'd done for Notre Dame in the 2001 NCAA championship game.
But Nolan had the monster shot in the last minute against the Los Angeles Sparks.
Nolan is from the University of Georgia, which has never won an NCAA women's hoops title. That seems quite cosmically unfair to me. But, of course, nobody in the SEC has won it all except … you know …
However, Tennessee wasn't there at the Palace of Auburn Hills to get in Tweety's way.
2. The hours before and during Game 3 of 2004 WNBA Finals between Seattle and Connecticut
There are a lot worse places to spend the day waiting for a ballgame than Seattle. In fact, there aren't too many better. I went to Bainbridge Island, sat in a park a long time and watched birds flying over the water.
On the ferry ride back from Bainbridge, the family next to me got out of their car. It was a man and his two little girls, all of them wearing Seattle Storm T-shirts. The kids kept asking Dad if he was absolutely, positively sure he had the tickets. He was sure.
Then I went to the top of the Space Needle … again. I love that thing. An elderly woman who sometimes looked after me while my parents worked had a plate hanging in her kitchen with a picture of the Space Needle on it. I once asked her if it was taller than the St. Louis Arch. She wasn't sure. Was it anything like a needle in a shot or a sewing machine? No, she laughed. Had she gone to the top of it? No, it turns out she'd never even been to Seattle; she'd rarely left Missouri. Her son got the plate for her. She passed away when I was in high school, but of course I thought of her several years later when I first saw the view from so high above Seattle.
That October day of Game 3 was my third trip up to the top. Then walking to KeyArena was so festive; inside, it was wonderfully, thunderously loud -- as good a crowd atmosphere as the WNBA has ever had. The noise didn't abate as the Storm won the title. Betty Lennox, a fellow Midwesterner, had an amazing WNBA Finals. And the dynamic duo of Lauren Jackson and Sue Bird were also WNBA champions.
1. Cynthia Cooper's celebration as Houston Comets won their first title in 1997.
In a preview for this season, I wrote a lot about that whole day: Cooper's super performance, the Comets' victory, the fans and confetti, the feeling of real history being made … and then the completely unrelated but forever-linked-in-my-mind news that Princess Diana had been killed in a car accident that night.
It has all remained mixed in my memory, the happiness and tragedy. To sum up the good part: How nice it was to see Cooper have the chance to star on a stage in her home country. I thought then, "Time ran out on so many great players who didn't get this. But it didn't run out on Cooper."
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