Unsinkable Milton Learns Not to Take Back Seat With Sparks
The 11-year-old couldn’t cry out because she was inhaling water and choking.
But as her head slipped beneath the water, the last person she saw was the lifeguard, seated on his tower.
“Please look at me, please see I need help,” she pleaded, in her mind.
But the lifeguard’s eyes were on two youngsters who had just jumped in at the pool’s other end.
Young DeLisha Milton sank, thrashing, to the bottom of the pool’s deep end, still choking and praying that someone other than the lifeguard noticed.
“Where’s DeLisha?” someone wondered.
Then someone cried out: “She’s on the bottom!”
She lay on the bottom, seemingly lifeless.
“I don’t remember landing on the bottom, but that’s where they found me,” recalled the 6-foot-1 forward for the Sparks.
“The next thing I remembered was lying on the pool deck, throwing up water all over everybody.”
Resuscitated . . . and reborn. A second chance at life.
“Everyone I knew told me it had a meaning, that it meant I had a purpose in this life,” Milton said. “And I believe that--I work hard every day to excel because I know from personal experience you might not be around tomorrow.”
Presently, Milton is excelling for the Sparks. The long-armed University of Florida product was the third of 35 players from the defunct ABL drafted in May by the WNBA.
Said Spark Coach Orlando Woolridge: “We needed to get much better defensively, and that’s why we took DeLisha. She’s a truly great defender.”
Milton was a chief contributor when the Sparks upset league-leading Houston at the Great Western Forum on Sunday. Her defense inside against Polina Tzekova, Sheryl Swoopes and Tina Thompson was a key, often forcing bad passes and altered shots.
Milton played in the ABL with the Portland Power. On the day of the WNBA draft, her Portland coach, Lin Dunn, was asked why, if Milton is such a great defender, she had ordinary ABL numbers in blocked shots.
“Because when DeLisha guards you, there are no shots,” Dunn said. “She plays you that tight.”
Her coach at Florida, Carol Ross, says no one will find Milton atop any stats sheet.
“DeLisha’s not about stats,” she said. “Her game is hustle, success, leadership, winning, defense . . . She made me a great coach, for sure.
“She gives you her career effort every day, and it doesn’t matter if it’s practice or at a game with 12,000 people watching.”
On draft day, Milton talked about how she viewed her Los Angeles role.
“I will enhance Lisa Leslie’s game, I will make her an even better player,” she said.
That’s not what Woolridge had in mind, and it became clear in the Sparks’ first games that on offense Milton was deferring to Leslie.
“We talked,” Woolridge said.
Milton explained: “I thought he wanted me to go to our marquee player, to look for Lisa every time down, like we did with Natalie Williams in Portland.”
Woolridge responded: “I told her no, that I wanted her to be DeLisha Milton, to look for shots. I told her Lisa can take care of herself. Since then, she’s done everything we’ve wanted.”
Milton and Leslie have become friends, rooming together on trips and often participating in barbecued feasts at Leslie’s mother’s house in Culver City.
Woolridge calls her “Sunshine.” Milton is a stat-leader in one category--bubbly personality. She even smiles when she gets tagged for a bad call, or even, she says, when visiting the dentist.
“I’ve always been this way,” she said.
“My mom is the worrier. She worries about everything, but tries to hide it. I love it when people have a good time, especially if I’m participating.”
Mom is Beverly Milton, who raised her daughter in Riceboro, Ga., a town of 745, 32 miles from Savannah.
The memory of her near-drowning in 1985 is never far from DeLisha Milton.
“It was an outing for my Bible study group,” she said.
“Sure, I think about it all the time. I couldn’t swim--I can now--and I was holding on to the edge of the pool where it was four feet deep. I took one step and it was over my head and it startled me and I let go of the edge. I tried to yell but I swallowed too much water.
“Sometimes I’ll be sitting in my apartment, alone, and I think about that day and I’ll start to cry because I’m so grateful the way it turned out.”
NOTES
Jenni Ruff, a guard on the ABL’s 1998 Long Beach StingRays, is now a radio commentator for Phoenix Mercury games. She also recently gave birth to 8-pound, 7-ounce Kearney Adams III. . . . Arizona Coach Joan Bonvicini recently turned down an offer to become coach of the WNBA’s Indiana franchise. . . . WNBA players, even Utah’s 7-2 Margo Dydek, will be flying coach through the 2002 season. Players lobbied for first-class rights in labor negotiations but lost.