ALL AMERICAN MOM

Attention, Lisa Leslie:

Listen to Satchel Paige.

He speaks to you, from decades past.

“Don’t look back,” he said. “Someone might be gaining on you.”

Yolanda Evette Griffith of the Long Beach StingRays just might be the best women’s basketball player in Southern California, a title bestowed on Leslie since she played for USC, then in the Olympics and then joined the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks.

Until this month, Griffith has been better known in Germany--where she played professionally for four years--than in Long Beach.

She was the American Basketball League’s No. 1 draft pick, taken by the StingRays. As this week began, Griffith led the nine-team ABL in scoring (23.8 points), rebounding (14.8), blocked shots (2.0) and field-goal percentage (67.9%).

She’s also a mother.

Candace Griffith, 8 and already 4 feet 6, is the only girl in Southern California whose mom is a professional basketball player and who speaks German.

“She’s my weed,” says Griffith, who is 6-4.

“She’s going to be really tall. And smart too. When we went to Germany in 1993, she was speaking German in six weeks, just from playing with kids.”

Mom, meanwhile, is putting up smart numbers.

Griffith has drawn a bead on one of the ABL’s premier players, Portland’s Natalie Williams, last season’s runaway rebound leader at 12.5 a game.

After four games, Griffith had 13 more rebounds than anyone. Williams was third, averaging 11.0 and also trailing Colorado’s Tari Phillips (11.5).

On Nov. 18 at the Pyramid, Portland and Long Beach will play the first of their five regular-season games and Griffith and Williams will go head to head.

For comparison: Leslie led the WNBA in rebounds at 9.5 a game.

In quickly establishing herself as an ABL star, Griffith has displayed amazing quickness in the low post.

“She’s just so quick, no one can box her out . . . at least not yet,” StingRay Coach Maura McHugh said.

Said San Jose Laser Coach Angela Beck: “I never saw anyone get up and down under the boards as quickly as she does, on second and third jumps for a rebound.”

No one should be surprised Griffith is a rapid-fire jumper. She has “Yo-Yo” tattooed on her ankle.

Griffith dropped out of the sky onto the American women’s pro game in April at the University of San Francisco, where the ABL held tryouts.

She had slipped through the grasp of the WNBA during its start last year, and the ABL signed her to a two-year contract.

Before one of the sessions during the three-day tryout, Griffith was warming up in a three-on-three game. A visitor, noting that Griffith was dominating everyone, said to ABL co-founder Ann Cribbs:

“I have no idea who that is, but whoever she is, she’s the best player I never heard of.”

“That’s Yolanda Griffith,” Cribbs said. “We think she’s going to be a pretty good player.”

Pretty good? How about: Best in America?

After the tryouts, Griffith was the ABL’s No. 1 draft pick--chosen ahead of Kate Starbird (Stanford), Clarisse Machanguana (Old Dominion), DeLisha Milton (Florida) and Kara Wolters (Connecticut).

A typical Griffith play occurred recently against Colorado. Coming out quickly from the low post, she blocked a jump shot at the free-throw line softly enough to secure the ball in both hands and then started a fastbreak.

Among the big players in the women’s game, no one can match her combination of hand and foot speed. At either end, she can get to a spot in a heartbeat. Defensively, in the low post, interior passing by opponents simply isn’t permitted.

At Denver in the StingRays’ second game, on three consecutive Colorado possessions, Griffith got at least a touch on passes.

Griffith, 27, grew up on Chicago’s South Side and basketball came into her life at a nearby playground.

“I played with my two older brothers a lot,” she said.

“They tell people they taught me how to play. Well, maybe I taught them some stuff too.”

She became a Chicago prep star at George Washington Carver High and was recruited initially by almost every NCAA women’s basketball power.

“Yolanda is one of the five best players I ever saw in Chicago high school basketball,” says Steve Tucker, who has covered girls’ basketball since the 1970s for the Chicago Sun-Times.

But most college recruiters backed off Griffith because of her poor academic record.

Not long after enrolling at Iowa as a Proposition 48 student, she discovered she was pregnant.

“I left Iowa and came home, not knowing what to do,” she said.

“It was the toughest part of my life. Having to tell my father [her mother had died when Yolanda was in high school] I was pregnant. He was angry. What parent wouldn’t be?

“But we had a family meeting, with my two sisters and my father, and we just decided to get through it. No, the subject of an abortion never even came up.

“When I get asked that . . . I can’t imagine going that route. I love my daughter. Without her, I myself wouldn’t have a life.”

She went to see her high school coach, Gloria Smith.

“She came in to see me, after she left Iowa,” Smith said.

“I had a good relationship with her; we could talk about anything. But she had the hardest time telling me she was pregnant. I told her: ‘OK, every young person gets to make one big mistake. You’ve had yours now. So you have this baby, and get on with your life.

“She is a wonderful athlete. And not just basketball. She still holds the Chicago girls’ softball record for most home runs. In basketball, she was so good on defense, some of my players were afraid to go near her with the ball.”

Not long after giving birth to Candace, Griffith set out for Palm Beach, Fla., to enroll at Palm Beach Junior College. She and Candace’s father never married and she has had minimal contact with him.

She supported herself and her daughter by working for a car repossession firm after being taught how to hot-wire cars.

“I was good at it,” she recalled with a grin. “I never got caught and never even had an incident with an angry owner.”

She again became a hot recruit by four-year schools and was on her way to Western Kentucky when she decided to enroll at an NAIA school, Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.

“It just made more sense,” Griffith said.

“It was only 30 minutes away and I was settled in Palm Beach with Candace. And one of my teammates there, Charlene Littles, was helping me out a lot with Candace.”

Littles, in fact, still lives with the Griffiths, at an apartment about a mile from the Pyramid, and helps Yolanda get Candace packed up and off to school each morning.

“I never would have made it through those tough years without Charlene and my family,” Yolanda said.

“I owe a lot to a lot of people, to have gotten to this point.”

In her junior year at Florida Atlantic, Griffith received a phone call from an agent. She was offered $18,000 to play the remaining nine games of the German pro season, and she accepted.

She earned $55,000 in her second season, plus an additional $25,000 for making the German all-star team. Last season in Germany, she made $90,000.

Her ABL salary is about $100,000, a source said.

“She’s phenomenally quick,” San Jose’s Beck said. “She’s better, I think, than any of us realized.”

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* STINGRAYS STUNG: Griffith held to 10 points by defending champion Columbus in 98-72 rout at Pyramid. C8