BASKETBALL: DREAM GIRLS

This is how it starts. A girl grows up in Southern California. Really grows up. By the seventh grade she is 6 ft. tall. By the eighth grade she is 6 ft. 2 in. A friend asks her to play basketball for the school. She has no female role models for this, so James Worthy, the Los Angeles Laker star, becomes her role model. “I loved James,” she says, “because he was the player other players would go to when they needed a basket.” Senior year in high school she scores 101 points in one game. In a single half. She learns how to dunk. She is signed by Wilhelmina Models. She is named to the U.S. Olympic team. And now Lisa Leslie is a role model.

Or it starts like this. A little girl in Southwick, Massachusetts, watches her older brother play basketball on the hoop in the driveway. So she plays too. “I just wanted to do what he did,” she says now. Soon she is not so little. She grows to 6 ft. 4 in. and becomes the star forward/center of the Connecticut Huskies basketball team. Then she learns her mother has breast cancer. “I began to focus on what I did on the court, because I could control what I did on the court,” she says. “I couldn’t control what was happening with my mom.” Her mother recovered from the cancer, and the daughter went on to lead her team to a 35-0 season and the national championship in her senior year. Rebecca Lobo is now an Olympian.

It also starts with a baby born with her feet turned almost backwards. “They said I wouldn’t be able to run and walk with the other kids,” that baby, all grown up, now says. So she wore corrective leg braces, wore them to bed, wore them to school. There she is teased because of her name, even though Venus is the goddess of beauty. “Venus is a planet,” kids tell her. Even when her own family chooses sides for basketball games, she is left on the sidelines. But in the fourth grade the braces come off, and her body, in celebration, grows to 6 ft. 4 in. and 190 pounds. She becomes an athlete, a college star, a pro player in Europe. Now she’s something more. “I used to think that someday someone would want me on their team,” says Venus Lacy, a center for the U.S. Olympic basketball team. “Now that I’m playing for my country, everything I went through seems like a big joke.”

This is the real Dream Team. We know that the U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team, which trademarked the name, is going to win in Atlanta, barring a natural disaster or an alien invasion. We know that Shaquille O’Neal is going to be slamming on Angola, that Gary Payton will be stripping Croatia of the ball and that Charles Barkley will jab Lithuania with his elbows. Americans may love every moment of it, but they’ll know the outcome of every game. There will be no dream there, only the hard realism of superiority. The players on the women’s squad, though, are still dreaming. “We’re going to have to work hard,” says Tara VanDerveer, coach of the women’s team. “We don’t have a Shaq on our team, or Hakeem Olajuwon. For us, it’s going to be a competitive Olympics.”

Feeding the dream is the disappointing show by the U.S. women in Barcelona in ’92, when they won the bronze. This time the team has been designed differently. In the past, U.S. teams had little time to train together, little chance to become a team. A full year before Atlanta, a dozen of the best U.S. women were chosen for a pre-Olympic squad. Members were paid about $50,000 apiece–a bargain considering that forward Katrina McClain gave up a reported $300,000 offer to play in Europe. They played together, traveled together, stayed in bad hotels in foreign countries together, looked for the McDonalds in Moscow together, and most of all, won together. Playing exhibition games against the world’s top teams, the Dream Girls went 51-0. They missed their families and tried not to miss mortgage payments, but they stayed together and became a team.

“You realize you’re different when you have a lot of college coaches calling your house,” says Teresa Edwards, a 5 ft. 11 in. guard from Atlanta and the first American basketball player, man or woman, to compete in four Olympics. “But when you get to this level of international competition as a member of one of the best teams in the world, boom! Now you know ‘I’m good.’ You have to be good to be on this team.”

And you also have to pay a price. Ruthie Bolton, a 5 ft. 8 in. guard from McClain, Mississippi, had to take temporary leave of her husband Mark and her job as a First Lieutenant in the Army Reserves to be a member of the traveling squad. “Every game I think we’ve got to win, and I’ve got to do my best because the sacrifices have been too great for me to do anything else,” she says, emotion in her eyes. “I don’t want to feel like all this has been in vain.”

How will it end? We know how the men’s squad will finish–with their size 17 sneakers planted firmly on the top podium, gold medals around their necks, more endorsement dollars around the corner. The women, on the other hand, face some serious challenges. In exhibitions, they had to stage furious comebacks to beat Canada and Russia. Brazil will also pose a threat, and China has a 6 ft. 9 in. center.

“We’re not worried about other people’s expectations because no one’s could be higher than our own,” says Lobo. “Ours is to win a gold medal. We feel if we play the best we can, we can achieve that.” A gold medal would also help the cause of female hoops in the U.S. Women’s pro basketball is actually flourishing in Europe, but in America it is only so much paper, with plans for two new U.S. pro leagues: The American Basketball League will tip off in the fall under the aegis of Reebok, and the Women’s National Basketball Association, an offshoot of the N.B.A., hopes to begin play in 1997, with NBC televising 10 of its games annually.

Why hasn’t women’s professional basketball taken hold in the U.S. before? “Because this a male-dominated society that we live in,” says Edwards. “In Europe, at least, they respect their female counterparts and say, ‘Let them have their own.’ We don’t allow that here. We think if women have their own, they may do better. They may try to take over. That’s the fear. And that fear is in every aspect of America.”

Times may be changing. Sheryl Swoopes, a star at Texas Tech, and now a guard/forward on the U.S. Olympic team, has a Nike sneaker named after her: Air Swoopes. She’s the first woman with such a contract. “I’m still trying to find words to describe how I feel about that,” she says. “It’s an incredible feeling when you walk into a store and see your shoe. And you hear a little girl asking not for a pair of Air Jordans but a pair of Air Swoopes.”

Says Lobo: “What’s really exciting is not just the little girls asking for my autograph but the little boys. As I see it, if a little boy asks for my autograph, maybe he’ll treat a little girl differently. Maybe he will pick her to play on his basketball team, or pick her for soccer in gym class, and realize that girls can be pretty good athletes too.”

Some day soon a young girl will watch these Olympians on TV, women with college educations, shoe contracts and worlds of confidence, and she will dream that she, too, can play sports. That’s how it will start.