Center of Attention : Sparks’ Zheng Haixia Is Impressive, but Size Isn’t Everything

Take a short walk with Zheng Haixia, one of China’s most famous personalities, and see how she is making an immediate impression wherever she goes.

Walk the two blocks from Cleveland’s Ritz Carlton hotel to Gund Arena for a workout, as her Los Angeles Sparks team did one day earlier this month.

The team, dressed in shorts and T-shirts, walks through the shopping mall attached to the hotel. Zheng strides along, pony tail bouncing.

Passing a pizza counter, an employee, open-mouthed as the 6-foot-8, 250-pound Zheng walks past, rushes out and asks: “Whoa! Hey! How tall are you, anyway!”

Zheng, who speaks very little English, smiles and keeps on walking.

It goes on that way, shoppers awed by Zheng’s size.

Outside, on Huron Road, early-afternoon auto traffic comes to a stop. A man who can scarcely believe what he’s seeing slows to a near-stop, and the motorist behind him honks. Then he spots Zheng, and he, too, stops to gawk.

The team enters the arena’s players’ entrance and a sleepy-eyed security guard is brought to full alert.

“Now that is a big girl,” he says.

That’s what it has been like for Zheng, 31, for most of her life, certainly since she was a 6-foot 12-year-old. She already was 6-8 by the time she competed in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics as a teen.

Does she like it? Of course not. But no matter how many stare, the big smile is always there.

Said former Spark coach Linda Sharp, before being fired Wednesday: “She told me she doesn’t like being stared at, but she said it’s always been like that, so she accepts it.”

When the WNBA held its elite player draft in February, Spark General Manager Rhonda Windham made her the league’s 16th pick. And at the start of the season, it looked like a steal.

In the Sparks’ fourth game, Zheng single-handedly took apart the Sacramento Monarchs at the Forum with 28 points, 10 rebounds and three blocks in 29 minutes, in a 93-73 victory.

She did much of that against Pam McGee, one of the league’s premier post players. No one in the league, it seemed that night, matched up physically with her.

Then . . . thud.

The bloom came off the rose.

Suddenly, Zheng’s defensive shortcomings were revealed.

That was first shown most clearly at Cleveland in the sixth game of the season when the Rockers’ 6-5 French player, Isabelle Fijalkowski--possibly the slowest player in the WNBA next to Zheng--twice dribbled around her for easy layups.

After that, Zheng’s playing time has been in free fall. She lost her starting job after a loss at Charlotte and in the next three games played 13, two and six minutes.

But Wednesday, the curtain appeared to have reopened for the biggest player in the women’s game.

Hours after being named as Sharp’s successor, Julie Rousseau said Zheng’s playing time would increase. “Physically, no one in the league matches up with her,” she said.

Against Houston that night, Zheng played 20 minutes and had 15 points and five rebounds.

However, in Saturday’s loss to the New York Liberty, she played only 11 minutes, scoring two points on one-for-seven shooting.

Zheng maintained an upbeat attitude while on the bench. She once stopped practice one afternoon to say, through interpreter Wendy Chang, that guard Tamecka Dixon needed to smile more during games, to show that she enjoyed basketball.

The team won’t give up on Zheng, said President Johnny Buss.

“We know she can really help us,” he said. “I still feel something’s there.”

Her game is exclusively geared to her short-range shooting. If she receives the ball within 8 feet of the basket and gets herself turned around, it’s roughly an 80% chance her shot will go in.

But she doesn’t have any speed, can’t jump well and doesn’t have good hands.

Zheng, who dislikes interviews, was asked after last Sunday’s loss to Phoenix if she was disappointed in her playing time.

She began an answer through Chang, then waved it off with a “no comment.”

In late June, when things were going well, she talked freely about learning the American style of team basketball. In China, she had always been the go-to player.

“The way I played in China was very different from the way they want me to play here,” she said through Chang.

“I was the center of the action, but here I must not only play in the paint. I have to be more mobile.

“I need to be much better at understanding team concepts. I hope my coaches and teammates will continue to help me change my habits, to meet the requirements of my new team.”

In the season’s first week, Sharp became worried that even with interpreters Zheng wasn’t grasping much in practice. She decided to take her to lunch.

Sharp, Chang and Zheng went to the Empress Pavilion in Chinatown, one of America’s largest restaurants.

As soon as she walked in the door, cooks, waiters and busboys poured out of the kitchen to greet her, her sudden arrival having been a form of spontaneous combustion. They swarmed around her, in a 10-minute autograph session.

But once lunch began, Sharp said she told her to speak up.

“I made her promise me that if there was anything she didn’t understand at practice that she’d interrupt me, and have me go over it again.

“The very next day, on a pick-and-roll play, Tamecka went the wrong way. It was a technical thing, but Zheng stopped the play and pointed it out to me. It was a technical thing, but she was dead right.”

Zheng roomed with 5-6 point guard Jamila Wideman on the Houston-Cleveland-Charlotte trip, and Wideman took her shopping in Cleveland.

Said Wideman, of the Cleveland shopping excursion: “She wanted something between casual and dressy, like for the road trips,” Wideman said.

“She found a pair of men’s Levi’s on the first stop and bought them. Then we went to about a dozen shoe stores, looking for shoes. There weren’t any 17s in stock.”

Zheng, who lives in the same Marina del Rey apartment complex as several other Spark players, came to the WNBA after weeks-long negotiations between the Chinese Basketball Assn. and a Los Angeles attorney, Gino Kwok.

He spent three weeks last December in Beijing, talking with the general secretary of the Chinese Basketball Assn., Madame Liu Yu-Min.

“This was a big step for Chinese basketball, they’d never had a player play overseas,” Kwok said.

“They seemed to want her in Los Angeles because of the large Chinese population here, and also the fact that the China men’s team played in the Long Beach summer pro league last year and had a good experience.”

Spark players said Zheng seemed for a while to have been corrupted by part of American culture.

In supermarkets, they said, she was astonished at the variety of frozen dinners, which she at first bought in stacks. But then she bought a crock pot on the road, and has used it to cook chicken and vegetables.

She was asked about Southland traffic, and if she could ever imagine herself buying a car.

After thinking it over, she said: “Maybe in the future.”