LOS ANGELES – Tully Bevilaqua is 5-foot-4 and stretching out in the training room to have her ankles taped before she strides to the court. The arena is all but empty. It’s 6 p.m. here but feels to her like 9 because her Indiana Fever play in Eastern time. She says she could use a little coffee.
Lisa Leslie is 6-foot-5 and perfectly polished. She’s made up for TV nfl jerseys with eye shadow and lip gloss and a sparkling Chanel bracelet. She’s arm-in-arm with her husband as she enters the arena. The crowd is nearly 10,000 strong, and they’re on their feet ushering her in with applause.
Amid the first year of her retirement, Leslie is the face of women’s basketball. The Sparks are retiring her No. 9 jersey to commemorate her 13 years of service to the team. It will hang along the same ceiling as hallowed Lakers like Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain. The city of Los Angeles declared Tuesday “Lisa Leslie Day.”
Bevilaqua is more obscure, but she’s a starter on a team pushing for the playoffs. She flirted with retirement this offseason – “pulling a Brett Favre,” she called it – before deciding to return for at least another season. She’s been on too many teams to have her jersey retired, but she’s known as one of the league’s scrappiest and best defenders.
Despite their differences, Bevilaqua and Leslie, both 38 years old, represent the best of the beginning of the WNBA. They joined the league in its infancy – Leslie was the seventh pick in the first WNBA draft and Bevilaqua joined in 1998, its second season – and helped it mature.
An old-school point guard
Bevilaqua learned to love sports from her older brothers Shane and Vance. They treated her more like another brother than a sister. She became something of a tomboy, riding on rams in the sheep pen of Falcons jersey the family farm in Australia and changing gears without the clutch on their utility vehicle.
She also played every sport possible – field hockey, badminton, even Aussie rules football, her favorite until she was forced to quit at 10 because of her gender. “I was totally devastated,” she said.
The game taught her toughness, though, and fed her growing love of team sports. She started to focus on basketball as a teenager but was passed over for the prestigious Australian Institute of Sport, which takes the best junior athletes in the nation.
“I did do it the tough way,” she said, “which makes it even more satisfying.”
She got her first chance in the WNBA with the now-defunct Cleveland Rockers. She was cut after just 12 games, but moved on to the Portland Fire and the Seattle Storm, with whom she won a WNBA championship in 2004. She traveled the world as a member of Australia’s international basketball team, winning a silver medal in the 2008 Beijing Games and a gold in the 2006 FIBA World Championship for Women in Brazil.
She was never a star on those championship teams, but she did help give the league an international appeal. On the court, she set the tone for the intensity of the team on defense.
“My game is based around being a blue-collar worker and scrapping and putting my body on the line,” she said. “I’ve been able just to find a role on every team I’ve played for.”
As she’s aged, she’s also found a niche as a leader. In 2007, she earned the league’s Kim Perrot Sportsmanship Award. She is considered one of the most valuable players on the team, even though, at 38, she’s the second-oldest player in the league.
“She sets the tone for us defensively,” Fever coach Lin Dunn said. “She’s always been that tough-nosed, fire-plugged kind of point guard, kind of a bulldog.”
As the league has evolved, Bevilaqua has adjusted her game. She’s had to become more versatile as the talent has improved – and she’s had to score more points as the league has become more offensive-minded. As with most sports, more points leads to more fan support.
“I’m still kind of like that old-school, typical point guard,” she said. “I think we’re still getting to the stage where the point guard becomes one of your more prolific scorers. I’ve kind of had to change to that a little bit – I’ve had to mentally be prepared to put up points.”
A dominant post player
For Lisa Leslie, scoring was never a problem.
She was raised in inner-city Los Angeles by a mother, Christine Lauren Leslie, who founded a truck-driving business to support her three kids after Leslie’s father, who was a semiprofessional basketball player, left the family.
Leslie grew to 6-foot-1 in junior high but preferred tether ball to basketball. She dreamed of being a TV meteorologist. Her friends convinced her to try out for the basketball team and she taught herself to be ambidextrous so that she wouldn’t have to stand in the “lefties” line alone. Word about Leslie spread quickly, and she received more than 100 scholarship offers from colleges before Cardinals jersey she started playing high school ball.
When she was a high school sophomore, she dunked for the first time. She decided to stay close to home and play for USC and was an All-American her final three years and National Player of the Year as a senior.
When she finished school, though, there was no WNBA. She signed a modeling contract in New York and dreamed of competing internationally for the United States. Then she got a call – a women’s basketball league was forming.
“At first I thought it would just be a summer league, and that we would be wearing reversible jerseys or something,” she said. “It took me a couple of seasons to really realize the kind of world-class league we were becoming a part of and wrap my brain around what it means to be a professional.”
Leslie led the Sparks to the playoffs in their first five seasons and eventually led them to consecutive WNBA titles in 2001 and 2002. She was a three-time MVP and finished with league records for points (a mark recently surpassed by former Trojans and Sparks teammate Tina Thompson), rebounds and assists.
For a long time, she was the league’s only star, and the only woman who could dunk a basketball. More recently, she shared the spotlight with Candace Parker and Michelle Snow, who can both dunk, and scoring machines like Diana Taurasi and a slew of young former Connecticut stars flooded the league.
There’s little doubt that Leslie would be one of the best players if she were still playing, but she’d also be old-school in a league full of young stars. Then again, there might not be this generation of WNBA stars without Leslie.
A common goal
At halftime, Bevilaqua has played 15 minutes and has two steals and three points. Lisa Leslie is commemorated by a highlight reel of her career and by thank-you messages from Sparks’ players. The black curtain high in the rafters drops to reveal her jersey in its final resting place.
Leslie fields questions from reporters. On the court, Bevilaqua’s sneakers are squeaking as she smothers her opponent. The Fever beat the Sparks, who are struggling this season. The league has several struggling teams, but even the worst teams are capable of beating the best teams on any night – the last-place Shock beat the first-place Storm earlier this month.
Bevilaqua’s goal is to push her team toward the playoffs – her coach calls her essential to the team’s run. Leslie can only watch as her Sparks fade, but she football jersey has her own goal: to be an analyst with Charles Barkley on TNT talking about the WNBA and the NBA.
Bevilaqua boards a plane, and Leslie crawls in her car to head home with her husband and four kids.
They’re traveling in opposite directions again, but always toward the same goal – not just to keep the league they love alive, but to help it thrive.
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