Making Sparks Fly

The offices of the Los Angeles Sparks staff are small, crowded and plain. Privacy and quiet are premiums only for the president and the general manager, and only in small doses. But no one is complaining. Not as Saturday nears, the launch date of the Women’s National Basketball Assn.

It won’t be the first American women’s league. That distinction belongs to the U.S. Women’s Basketball League, which formed in 1978, then folded three years later. And this year, the American Basketball League started, finishing its first season in March and reportedly breaking even financially.

But in these offices, across the street from the Great Western Forum, the WNBA feels like a surer thing. There are the money and the marketing of the prosperous NBA behind it; the eight teams in the league are all attached to the established franchises in cities like New York, Houston and Sacramento, so they’ll get to play in the large NBA arenas. With a 28-game summer season, starting just as the men’s championship ends, the hope is that they’ll catch some lingering basketball fever. The risk, though, is competition from the distractions of summer, the beaches and the blockbuster movies.

Still, there is plenty of reason for optimism. The Sparks’ first game against the New York Liberty is nearly sold out, and the team says season ticket sales have surpassed projections. The league will have nationally televised games on NBC, plus ESPN and Lifetime (the ABL has an all-cable package). The prime market is women and families, and ticket prices are reasonable, $7.50 and $20 for individual loge level seats ($100 on the floor). Better yet, they’ve got the marquee Olympian names: Lisa Leslie of the Sparks, Rebecca Lobo of the N.Y. Liberty and Sheryl Swoopes of the Houston Comets.

And here at the Sparks office, there is something more: the women. On this staff of 17, a dozen of the positions are held by women. Yes, Johnny Buss, scion of Lakers owner Dr. Jerry Buss, is president of the team, but the energy in the room is drawn from sisterhood. “I interviewed just about half male, half female,” Buss says. “Anybody that had women’s basketball knowledge and experience, they were that cut above. I wanted people to know who Lisa Leslie was. It just turned out that females that I interviewed knew more about women’s basketball.”

The women who work in this office know women’s basketball--the history and the heroines. From equipment manager to general manager, they dreamed of this day, willed it into being. Listening to the stories of four of them, the women behind the women, you quickly sense that they are passionate about womanhood and passionate about the changes a league of women can forge. On the eve of its realization, they are determined to create an organization that thrives, and has value for things both on and off the court.

General Manager Rhonda Windham started playing as a child in the Bronx. She liked gymnastics too, but she gave it up easily after a challenge from her mother. “When I was in the fourth grade, my mother told me, ‘Baby, I want you to go to college. I can’t afford to send you. You have to get a scholarship. You’re the oldest; you have to do it.’ ”

OK, Mom, she thought, no problem, even though she didn’t know what a scholarship was.

By the seventh grade, when a park director told her he thought she could win a scholarship more easily through basketball than gymnastics, things were clear. “That was my last flip.”

Basketball became her center. Although only 5 feet, 5 inches, Windham was an all-city, all-American star in high school. As a freshman point guard at USC, she was an integral part of the 1983 Trojan national championship team that included Cheryl Miller and Pam and Paula McGee.

Later that summer at the National Sports Festival, while rising to the basket to tip in a teammate’s shot, she dislocated her knee and kneecap and tore the ligaments. The pain was complete, the comeback, slow and tough, but Windham did return to play for the Trojans.

After graduation, she made a career wish list that included the Lakers. They called after she’d accepted a job in women’s basketball--in Italy, which has had women’s pro league basketball longer than the U.S. But when she returned in 1989, Windham became an assistant public relations director at the Forum. Now, there is the Sparks.

Windham handles the position with a cool head. It’s clear she doesn’t lord over the staff; she deflects their ribs about her status easily. But even her jokes aren’t frivolous. As general manager, she handles all of the basketball operations including evaluating players, agents and any player-related issues, hiring the coaching staff, scouting potential players, coordinating travel for the team and setting up practice sites and schedules. On the business end she works with the marketing and promotion people and the WNBA brass. She’s doing a lot of learning on the job.

Then again, she brings plenty of know-how. Since 1991, she’s been running the Say No Classic basketball program in Los Angeles, building it from an idea to an institution for college and high school amateurs with 40 teams.

And then there was her own experiences playing around New York. “I grew up in an area where we had rivalries: Riverside versus the Afro Sisters. . . . Brooklyn USA, State Park. I mean it was very competitive, so dreaming and thinking about the possibility of being involved [in a women’s league] was not far-fetched at all.”

She has no regrets about being management instead of talent with the WNBA. Long after the memories of the expert ball-handling, no-look passing, between-the-leg dribbling player that she was fade, the work she now does will endure.

“I think I’m happier for the players than they are for themselves because I know everything that’s gone into getting to this point. As a player and when I started working for the Lakers, I had no idea all the things that went into a ball actually being thrown up for that first tip. I had no idea of the hours, weeks, months of preparation for that very moment.”

As the public relations director, Susan Wilson has to do a lot of talking. She’s got to cajole a spot for the Sparks in the papers and in the community. She’s got to champion girls and women’s basketball.

But that’s OK, because Wilson is a talker. You don’t even have to see her riffle through her auburn hair to know she’s exasperated. She uses gestures to get her point across, but she doesn’t need those either. In one fast sentence, she uses enough words and conveys enough tone to make things plain. You get the picture.

A Santa Monica park and recreation commissioner and columnist for the Outlook newspaper, Wilson discovered women’s basketball serendipitously, a decade ago when her daughter came home from school and asked to be taught how to play.

Wilson was dumbfounded. “I could spell the word and that was the extent of my involvement in the sport.”

A native of Boston, she had been to a few Celtics games as a girl, but academics really had been her focus. Still, “being a good Jewish mother,” she wanted to give her child everything. Following her instincts, she called the local YMCA.

She was led to a neighborhood father who was trying to start a girls league and she took on the quintessential mom’s role: She bought the snacks and made sure the kids got to practice.

Then she met Lynette Woodard. In 1985, Woodard became the first woman to join the fabled Harlem Globetrotters. When she held a clinic for kids under 12, Wilson was drawn to it, the only adult in attendance.

“It was almost a spiritual experience,” Wilson says. “It just shattered every stereotype I had of women athletes. I thought they were tomboys, not elegant, not beautiful.”

At the end, Woodard, who had brought her own ball to the event, gave a short inspirational speech. She told the kids how hard work would bring them far, good grades and hard work, further, and those two qualities combined with team work and punctuality even further.

“And then she said, ‘And those who do all of that and are lucky enough to have at least one parent who always has money to put gas in the car to get you to practice, who always can find money to get you that new pair of shoes when you need it, those of you who have that, you’re the ones who are going to go straight to the top.’ ” As she finished speaking, Woodard looked at Wilson, signed the ball and

handed it to her.

Wilson ran with it. She believes that because she came to sports as an adult and mother of Tirtzah, now 17, her perspective is different. Working with children let her see the possibilities beyond the game. Sure, winning is important, she says, but the WNBA is not really about getting the ball in the basket.

“At our [final] tryouts, 160 women showed up and a full 100 had no business being there,” she says. “They came with their kids and traveled from all over, and they all had the same reason: They had promised themselves when they were little and played basketball that if ever the NBA let women in they were going to try out.

“There’s this dream part of it that even people who never played the game understand. Every woman knows what it’s like to have thought about doing something they really wanted to do and they didn’t get a chance to do it because something stopped them that had nothing to do with themselves. So there’s that part of it that I don’t ever want any of us to lose sight of.”

*

At first Linda Sharp did not want to be involved. “I thought, ‘I’ve played my part.’ I was happy for the younger women.”

After all, she coached the women of USC to two championships. She was challenging herself at the helm of Southwest Texas State University, taking the team to seven winning seasons, building to conference title. She’s a true pioneer.

But Cheryl Miller, the former USC star Sharp coached, convinced her that she’d earned a place in the league, that she deserved one. Now Sharp’s working for Windham, another player she had coached. It seems like an intriguing role reversal, but the women don’t seem fazed.

Sharp relates all this with a voice that matches her easy smile. Her short hair is layered neatly; she’s one of those people who seems polished even in sweats. She seems authoritative without being maternal, like she’d put you in your place gently but firmly.

As the coach for the Sparks, she brings 20 years of experience but what she wants to focus on now is the joy of the game and the new enterprise. Sharp has weathered the valleys--this is a mountaintop. This time she wants to savor the experience.

“I want to be positive. I want to make sure the players feel good about themselves so they can play well. As the coach, that’s part of my job. We have an exciting team with tremendous personality.”

And they are very skilled young women. Sharp will be guiding a 10-player squad featuring local favorites center Leslie and guard Penny Toler, a former Long Beach State star, both of whom can entertain and score. Recent Stanford graduate Jamila Wideman, another guard, is heralded for her poise and teamwork (read: assists), and at 6 feet, 10 inches, Chinese player Zheng Haixia will be defensively imposing. Olympian Daedra Charles should provide rebounding fire.

The game they play will not be precisely like the men’s. They’ll use an NCAA women’s size ball (one inch smaller than the men’s), play 20-minute halves and have a 30-second shot clock.

“We have our own game and it’s a good game. It’s a team-oriented, spirited, emotional game. I’ve talked to guys who’ve said they’d rather watch the women than the men because of our style of play. And I know women who don’t play sports who have gotten into our game.

“I just hope the city of Los Angeles embraces us.”

*

Mary Lou Youngblood was born in Illinois 37 years ago, the middle child, a girl surrounded by brothers. She wasn’t uncomfortable there, in the thick of things. In fact, she’s learned to relish it. “I think I was made strong to be in the middle,” she says. “I was put there for a reason.”

Her strength and sense of destiny made her unafraid to leave Texas, her mom in tow, where she had spent 14 years coaching basketball and teaching, to join the Sparks, handling promotions and public relations duties. She knew she belonged here, not with the closer Houston WNBA team.

So since April, for the Sparks, Youngblood spends her days going to schools, talking to kids and giving out free tickets for the coming games. “In Texas, I felt like every year I reached 100, 200, 300 kids. Here, I’ve been to 50 or 60 schools and I must have talked to over 10,000 kids so far.”

It’s a fulfilling, but not easy, job. Most weeks she visits 10 or 15 schools. This rare day in the office, she speaks softly in the deep accent she picked up from her years in Plano, Texas, her coltish frame slumping a little from only two hours rest. Still, she gets wide-eyed when she talks about her work.

What does she say to the students? She points to a poster of Leslie, looking sweaty and focusing as she makes a shot. “That’s it right there. It’s about being a good person.

“I’ve been to really wealthy schools and I’ve been to really poor schools, and it’s the same with the kids. As long as they can feel good about themselves and know they can feel someday they can be successful, they are OK. And that’s what I want them to feel.”

Things might slow down once the season ends in August, but she hopes not. “After we win the championship, we’ll be hot. We need to get people then.”

Youngblood doesn’t say this with an air of brash prediction or overconfidence, but with quiet certainty. It’s just another feeling. She pulls forth a small piece of paper she’s had for four years or so, a list of goals that includes “work with a professional basketball team to become familiar with women’s basketball and business.”

It’s as though she knew about the fated existence of the WNBA before the NBA did.

Her next goal is to own a WNBA team. “I’d be a terrible owner,” she says, laughing, giddy from work and anticipation. “I’d be poor because I’d give all my money and all the tickets away.”