#FromtheArchives: All the game changers who've come before

As we celebrate new women's basketball stars, let's not get carried away with superlatives.

Hi, friends.

So, a few weeks ago I published a piece that looked back at the history of women’s basketball (and women’s sports in general):

It's not capitalism holding women's sports back. It's male fragility.

That piece took months of research and sent me down many, many rabbit holes in the newspaper archives. In the piece, I focus on all of the success women’s basketball has had in the past, in terms of ratings and attendance, and how most of that success was ignored by investors or treated as one-off occurrences. It was a consistent pattern over decades. But it wasn’t the only pattern I found.

Every couple of years, a new college women’s basketball player came along who was supposed to save women’s basketball, change the game forever, single-handedly launch the sport into the next stratosphere, on-court and off.

As we begin this new college basketball season, I can see a lot of the same rhetoric used with players like Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers, Angel Reese, and even freshman like JuJu Watkins and MiLaysia Fulwiley. And I’ll be honest, something about it rubs me the wrong way. Not because these woman are getting coverage and praise — it’s all deserved, bring on the hype — but rather because said coverage is often lacking context.

Clark isn’t the first women’s basketball player to inspire huge crowds to come out when she plays away games; Fulwiley isn’t the first women’s basketball player to display moves on the court that would put NBA players to shame. And nobody is the savior of women’s basketball, because the sport doesn’t need saving.

Anyways, I’m rambling (how unusual!). But the whole point of this newsletter is to look back at some of the fanfare bestowed on the legends of women’s basketball past during their college careers, because it’s fun, and also because it’s a great reminder that today’s greats are truly standing on the shoulders of the giants that came before them.

Into the archives we go!! (All of the emphasis below is mine.)

Cheryl Miller

Here’s what Curry Kirkpatrick of Sports Illustrated said about Cheryl Miller in the November 20, 1985 issue, in which she was one of three college players — and the lone woman, of course — on the cover:

With apologies to Wayne Gretzky, back on the hardwood Miller probably is the most dominating individual in a team sport of this era. Arguably she is the finest basketball player of her gender who ever lived. Miller's goal this final season is to play so spectacularly well that, as she says, "You can strike arguably" from that phrase. Fellow 1984 Olympian Kim Mulkey, now an assistant coach at Louisiana Tech, says simply, "Women's basketball is Cheryl Miller." And beyond this: What athletes transcend their sport? How many transcend while still playing? Ruth, perhaps. Ali, maybe. Jackie Robinson. And now a 21-year-old black-magic woman and dyna-kid princess from down the lane in Riverside, Calif.

…

Just as the Los Angeles Olympics surely aroused interest in the women's game, so have Miller's yeowoman individual efforts. Her captivating interpretive style has taken the sport to another level and added visibility and drawing power both locally and on the national scene. In Miller's freshman season the Women of Troy broke 11 attendance records on the road and sold out four home dates. Since then the team has had to abandon the small campus gym and schedule its home games in the Los Angeles Sports Arena and elsewhere.

(That whole article is worth a read.)

Also, read the start of this Gannett News Service article from August 3, 1984:

LOS ANGELES - Wilt. Magic. Kareem. And now Cheryl. players have often been known by a single name.

But until Cheryl Miller came along, those first names always belonged to men. Cheryl Miller represents a new force in women's basketball. She is perhaps the greatest player the women's game has ever known, and she supplements her skills with a radiant personality. Already, at the tender age of 20, she sits in the television lights and handles questions like a politician, or a movie star. She wears a diamond earring in her left ear and a gold chain around her neck.

She talks about "cutting a film" and becoming a millionaire. Yes, women's basketball in the U.S. has come a long way, and wherever it goes in the future, Miller looks like the one who will take it there.

Sigh.

We’ve begun with a bit of a bummer, because now I’m once again sad that Miller was born into an era where there was no women’s pro league in the United States and where an ACL was a career-ending injury. But then again, we’re pretty lucky she came along when she did.

Her story is proof that star-power and talent can’t overcome a lack of infrastructure or resources.

Sheryl Swoopes

This year’s women’s Final Four might have broken viewership records thanks to its spot on ABC, but it was far from the first women’s Final Four to have the nation buzzing, and it certainly wasn’t the first time that individual stars of women’s college basketball transcended the sport. Sheryl Swoopes’ 1993 Final Four run with Texas Tech was truly one for the ages, and turned her into a sensation.

From the Tampa Bay Times on April 11, 1993:

Two fellows who work for Delta Airlines in Atlanta wished Monday morning for Texas Tech All-American Sheryl Swoopes to stay far away from their playground basketball games.

"She's too quick; quicker than a lot of the guys," one said. "Yeah, and how many points did she score? 43?" "Forty-seven. And did you see how she just stops and shoots? Like that," the first said, snapping his fingers and shaking his head slowly while he reached for another piece of luggage. "Man."

Such is Swoopes' impact on women's basketball: Like never before, people are talking. Swoopes, a senior, scored a record 47 points in the NCAA women's championship game Sunday in Atlanta, leading Texas Tech to an 84-82 victory over Ohio State. But in just one weekend she did more than break 10 NCAA tournament records, including Bill Walton's title-game mark of 44 points. Swoopes, with her on-court grace and charismatic smile, jolted the nation's perception of women's basketball. And the long-term effect may be immeasurable.

"She is the first to make people say, 'What a great basketball player,' where they used to say, 'She's great for a girl,' "said Nancy Lieberman-Cline, an All-American at Old Dominion and an Olympian in 1976 who was one of the first women to gain national notice for her talent. "She's really a pioneer, and she doesn't even know it."

Lieberman would know a thing or two about pioneers, wouldn’t she? Three years later, Swoopes was the first player to sign with the WNBA.

Diana Taurasi

Okay, there are a lot of articles heralding Taurasi’s present-and-future impact on the game that I could choose to highlight, but I’m going to go with this piece from the Hartford Courant on April 8, 2004, where Jeff Jacobs gives perhaps the best description of Taurasi in history:

Taurasi's arrival in the WNBA is a seminal moment in women's basketball history. She not only will be the best player in the world within two or three years, she is female athletics' best salesman right now.

No team of Madison Avenue advertising geniuses or Hollywood makeover artists is needed. You don't sell sex appeal with Diana. You don't sell raw athleticism.

You just sit back, watch her play basketball and soak in her joy. She doesn't immerse you with discussion. She is a human sound bite. She throws her arm around the world and her smile is bigger than the equator.

She could throw no-look passes, hit the winning three at the buzzer, hug Jack Nicholson and shadow box the Big Aristotle all before dinner time. She has enormous star power.

One thing that really sticks out when looking back at these articles? It seems like the WNBA/women’s basketball is *always* at a seminal moment. I’m absolutely positive you could find someone this very week writing that about today’s game. It’s kind-of exhausting, right?

Candace Parker

Candace Parker has had the weight of the women’s basketball world on her shoulders since she was a teenager.

Just like Cheryl Miller before her, Parker inspired an uptake in attendance everywhere she played during her Tennessee days, per this New York Times article from March 9, 2008:

Call it the Candace Parker Effect.

Everywhere Parker, Tennessee’s all-American forward, goes, arena attendance swells with screaming girls and people who would not usually make the effort to watch a women’s basketball game.

…

The Lady Volunteers always draw large crowds, but attendance this season at Tennessee’s Thompson-Boling Arena was the highest in university history at 15,796 a game.

At Vanderbilt, the Lady Volunteers drew 14,316 — 7,000 more than the next-largest crowd and 9,000 more than the Commodores’ average.

Tennessee drew 7,841 at South Carolina —— 5,000 more than the Gamecocks’ next-largest crowd and 6,000 more than their average attendance.

Parker has also helped draw more television coverage for the third-ranked Lady Volunteers. Only four of Tennessee’s regular-season games were not televised.

Quick note: Goodness has South Carolina come a long way since Dawn Staley arrived, right?

But back to Parker: She was heralded because of the versatility and greatness of the game, but also because of her “marketability.”

Here’s Pete Thamel of the New York Times on August 17, 2008:

With her resplendent smile and transcendent game, Parker is close to becoming the first international icon in her sport. She has already lined up deals with Adidas and Gatorade, and she said she hoped to follow the path of the former American soccer star Mia Hamm, who used the Olympics and the World Cup to create a global identity.

***

At 6 feet 4 inches, Parker can play any position. Now she hopes to see how her versatility will translate off the court.

“She’s obviously a pretty face, a sweet feminine girl that young girls and boys will look up to,” said the four-time Olympian Lisa Leslie, a teammate of Parker’s on the Olympic team and with the W.N.B.A.’s Los Angeles Sparks. “I think she has the whole package. I really do.”

When Parker was drafted No. 1 overall in the 2008 WNBA draft, Michael Cooper, then the head coach of the Los Angeles Sparks, said, “We knew this player was equivalent to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson. It’s Showtime all over again.”

No pressure.

Brittney Griner

Speaking of Michael Cooper, just a couple of years after drafting Parker, he was ready to bestow the Kareem comparison to another up-and-coming star: Brittney Griner.

Griner took the basketball world by storm when she was in high school, with her height and dunks and presence in the paint. By the time she was a sophomore at Baylor, she was drowning in superlatives.

Here’s an excerpt from a New York Times article on March 19, 2010 written by Karen Crouse:

College basketball observers sound like naturalists who have spotted something startling in the evolutionary soup when they talk about Baylor’s Brittney Griner. After watching her for the first time, Michael Cooper telephoned his former Lakers teammate Magic Johnson to say he had seen the female version of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a Laker whose scoring prowess at U.C.L.A. contributed to the N.C.A.A.’s banning the dunk for nine seasons.

…

“Nobody can do what she can do,” Lieberman said in a phone interview. “Not Cheryl Miller. Not Lisa Leslie. Not Candace Parker. She plays like a guy. It’s a really beautiful thing to watch.”

Cooper and Nancy Lieberman weren’t her only two high-profile admirers. In 2010, Cheryl Miller said that Griner could be the “savior of women’s basketball.” (I don’t blame legends of the game for reinforcing such narratives, but it does get a tad frustrating.)

It’s easy to forget that she was absolutely a must-see attraction throughout her collegiate career. This is a wild statistic from the New York Times on April 13, 2013:

At Baylor, Griner probably had the greatest impact of any player in the women’s game, setting an N.C.A.A. record for blocked shots, finishing second on the career scoring list and making the highlight shows with her dunks. In the 2012-13 season, opponents averaged 3,642 more fans for their home games against Baylor.

Skylar Diggins-Smith

Today, so many players use social media to heighten their popularity and permeate pop culture. But I think we all need to remember who set the blueprint, which is why I’m including Skylar Diggins-Smith here.

This piece by Nancy Armour from December 24, 2011 does a good job capturing the buzz around Skylar Diggins-Smith last decade:

Diggins is the biggest thing going in women’s basketball these days, maybe in all of women’s sports. Her smooth shot and uncanny floor vision carried Notre Dame to the national title game last year, and she’s got the third-ranked Irish poised to make another deep run. Her engaging personality and cover-girl looks have made her a crossover hit, with 130,000-plus followers on Twitter and megastar rapper Lil Wayne, one of her biggest fans, rocking her jersey at a concert last spring.

Can you all even imagine how well Diggins-Smith would have done in the NIL age??? My goodness.

And the list goes on …

This is not in any way a comprehensive list of game changers in women’s basketball. There was, of course, Chamique Holdsclaw, who Michael Jordan told was going to take women’s basketball to the next level. John Smallwood of the Philadelphia Daily News wrote of Holdsclaw in 1997, “She’s going to change the game. Chamique Holdsclaw is that good. She’s that captivating, that exciting, that unbelievably talented. Holdsclaw plays the game with a flare that had previously only been glimpsed at in women’s basketball.”

There was Sue Bird, who was marketed as the “great, straight, feminine, white hope” of women’s basketball in 2002. (It was a weird time.) (I wrote a whole newsletter on marketing Sue Bird last year:)

#FromtheArchives: Marketing Sue Bird

There was Maya Moore, who was touted as a player “who will help redefine the game, take it to the next level” and “transcend the game” when she was just a freshman at UConn in 2007.

And I could go on and on. Like I said, it’s a pattern.

I keep coming back to this Brittney Griner quote from 2010, when the then-sophomore was asked about whether she wanted to transform women’s basketball.

“It’s not my goal to go out and change the game,” Griner said. “I just feel like I’m adding on to it.”

Stars are great, and women’s basketball needs them. Every sport, men’s a women’s, is always looking for the “next big thing.” I know that. But I think women’s basketball can get lost looking for the next “face of the game” to bring popularity up a level. And while the greats absolutely make the sport better and bring in new fans, the only things that is going to truly and permanently push women’s basketball to said “next level” is proper investment and consistent media coverage. A star needs a proper environment to truly shine.