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She’s Not Mailman, but She Truly Delivers

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I have seen professional basketball players bounce back from knee surgery, nose surgery, tonsillectomy, appendectomy, jock itch, ulcer, headache, hemorrhoids, booze abuse, food abuse, bad cuts and bad haircuts.

I have seen NBA superstars who had to wear mouthpieces, goggles, splints, face shields, knee pads, Ace bandages and those Band-Aids across the schnozzle, so they could get oxygen up their nostrils.

But I think Thursday night was a first, because I can’t remember the last NBA player who came back from giving birth.

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Sheryl Swoopes--a player so good, Nike named a shoe after her--made her comeback in a WNBA game at Houston, six weeks after having a baby.

You’ve come a long way, Mom.

I adore this turnabout. Usually, it is some guy who is leaving his pro team for 24 or 48 hours, so that he can see his baby be born. Then he grabs a plane, so his poor teammates won’t have to do without him for another minute.

Mom does most of the work, and Dad drops by for a look.

But this pro basketball team didn’t need Sheryl Swoopes’ husband back . . . it needed Sheryl back.

The WNBA is in its first year, and Swoopes could be the league’s biggest star. Some will tell you that Sheryl is the greatest of any woman who ever played the game.

For the first few weeks, however, the Houston Comets were unable to use Swoopes’ name to sell tickets, or to put her name on a marquee.

She wasn’t on a disabled list. She was on an obstetrics list. Sheryl delivered a son, and I wish she could carry Baby Swoopes up and down the court, like a papoose.

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Houston players could give her baby five, after every basket.

This is a new day in the NBA. I doubt if any NBA player has ever diapered a baby during a timeout.

Or breast-fed (although Dennis Rodman probably would, if he could).

Maternity leave is not a new concept in athletics, but generally, a woman doesn’t hurry back to rejoin her team.

A runner, golfer, tennis player can make her own schedule, more easily than a team-sport athlete can. She can have her blessed event, then enter any event she likes.

I suppose my favorite part of Sheryl Swoopes’ situation is the twist it gives to athletes who look into the TV camera and say: “Hi, Mom.”

Swoopes is Mom.

There was a baby controversy a few years ago, when a Houston Oiler football player was fined by his employers for missing a game. He had gone home to assist with his wife’s delivery of their child, and to actually stick around after she delivered it. (What a concept.)

The Oilers felt he should get his priorities straight.

I remember thinking at the time, Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be Oilers. They got my vote as Macho Deadhead Organization of the Century.

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There was also a Cincinnati pitcher, Tom Browning, whose bosses didn’t like it when Tom left the team in the midst of an important series, for a little thing like his wife having a baby.

Men. Can’t play with ‘em, can’t play without ‘em.

My buddy Norman Chad wrote a book called, “Hold On, Honey, I’ll Take You to the Hospital at Halftime.” That could cover about half the men in pro sports.

Recently, we had the Mark Whiten Kodak Moment, wherein a professional baseball player, whose wife was somewhere else, having a baby, denied that he had sexually assaulted another woman because, he said, their sex was consensual. I wonder if those father-of-the-year ballots are still in the mail.

Sheryl Swoopes was--is--so good, some people think she could have been the first woman to play for a men’s NBA team.

“I’m pregnant,” she could have told her boss.

“What’s your point?” he probably would have said.

Then the coach would have drawn up a new 6-on-5 defense.

Welcome back, Sheryl.

I am glad the WNBA has you back. Don’t park your baby carriage where the referee will run into it.

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