WNBA Needs Stars Like Holdsclaw to Shine if League Wants Success

Chamique Holdsclaw didn’t have to be in New York this year.

“Too many distractions,” said the basketball queen from Queens, who adopts the Mark Jackson belief that it’s best to play anywhere but home. “Too many people would’ve been calling, bugging me for tickets and stuff like that. It would’ve been a big hassle.”

But Chamique Holdsclaw needed to be in New York Wednesday night. She had to get her spotlight introduction at Madison Square Garden and take her place among the world’s greatest female basketball players. She had to become very good very quickly in this, her first pro season. She had to score and rebound as good as the very best. She had to be as big as the hype that tagged along from Tennessee.

Holdsclaw had to be at the inaugural WNBA All-Star Game. Anything less would have qualified as a severe setback for her but especially the league.

The WNBA needs stars, because stars sell, and at this stage the WNBA is still knocking on doors and pitching its product. Nobody goes to any game in any sport played by males or females to see faceless teams, angry coaches or goofy mascots. They pay money for stars.

And the WNBA needs Holdsclaw, more than anyone else, to sparkle.

Her time Wednesday night was cut short by a chip fracture to her left index finger in the second quarter. But the league benefited from her brief appearance anyway. The WNBA anxiously awaited her arrival. There was heavy anticipation. The Washington Mystics answered hundreds of calls for tickets the day they drafted her. They held a welcome rally at Union Station and about 800 people showed. There’s a huge mural of Holdsclaw stretching from ceiling to floor in Georgetown. Given the sorry state of the men’s pro teams in town, she may be D.C.’s most famous athlete.

For four years at Tennessee, she was college basketball’s premier player with college basketball’s premier program. She had talent, and more important, she had visibility. People knew her. She became one of those first-name-only wonders: Sha-MEE-qua. By playing superbly for a team that always went deep into the heavily televised NCAA Tournament, Holdsclaw was already packaged for mass public consumption even before the WNBA opened for business.

And of course, after winning three national championships, the inevitable whispers followed. Folks started dropping the name “Jordan.”

The feeling was if Holdsclaw could become a presence the way you-know-who did, she would be the transcendent star the WNBA is still searching for. She would make the league more credible and watchable. She would even do the impossible: Make men buy tickets.

Right now, she remains a work in progress. The WNBA will take what it can get from Holdsclaw, which isn’t bad. She’s 6-foot-2 and dribbles like a guard. She is averaging nearly 19 points and nine rebounds, among the best numbers in the league. But you probably wouldn’t know it, because she plays for a crummy Washington team that doesn’t generate any buzz.

At least Holdsclaw was on the Garden floor Wednesday night. At least she came through. This comes as a relief to the WNBA, because other players haven’t met the persistent and often insufferable hype spewed by the league’s bankrolling big brothers, the NBA and NBC. When the league opened for business two years ago, it promoted Sheryl Swoopes, Lisa Leslie and Rebecca Lobo. Only one out of three was worth it.

Leslie hasn’t lifted her lousy team, and even her Bond-girl beauty barely gets noticed in Los Angeles, where the Sparks don’t draw. Lobo had a nice college career, but she’s a personality, not a player. Swoopes has two titles with Houston, even though she’s the second-best player on her team.

The WNBA’s predicament is this: Most of the women in Wednesday night’s game needed ID tags. Many made their name in Europe, then came home, trading the bucks for the TV exposure. The best example is Cynthia Cooper, the two-time league MVP who was barely a blip on the sports screen until she returned home and took off in Houston. Solid as she is, Cooper is 36.

That’s why it’s important for the league that Holdsclaw becomes a smash.

“She’s our future,” Cooper said. “Chamique is the future of women’s basketball.”

The most ideal situation for the WNBA is for college stars to make the transition. It’s much easier to sell someone from Stanford than Siberia. The catch, of course, is star college players must make an immediate impact. It’s not that simple.

“You can be a great college player,” said Swoopes, who should know, “but when you come to this stage, you’ve got to raise your game. It may be something that happened to Rebecca, because there was all this hype, and when she didn’t meet it, people were disappointed.

“But Chamique has what it takes.”

We’ll check back in a few years. Still, last night was a start. It was best for everyone involved that Holdsclaw became an All-Star.

“My friends said, ‘If you’re not at the All-Star Game, we’re going to talk bad about you,’ ” Holdsclaw said.

She laughed with relief.

“It’s nice to be home, but I definitely didn’t want to play here for the Liberty. You come here, and all of a sudden, you’re supposed to take the team to another level.”

She doesn’t have to lift a team.

Just a league.