Recognition Is at End of Road

It was only yesterday, but will you look at those dress-for-success suits?

Navy skirts, navy blazers, matching navy pumps.

“The flip-do,” Teresa Edwards said, spotting herself--top row, far left, 1980s hairstyle--in the photo of the U.S. women’s basketball team that won the gold medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Games.

“Looking like my mom,” Edwards said. “That was innocence for me.”

That was Edwards at 20.

At 36, she is back for her fifth Olympics--one of only 17 athletes ever to make five U.S. Olympic teams, an accomplishment that puts her in the company of Carl Lewis.

Even fewer have actually competed in five Olympics, taking into account alternates and the 1980 boycott. Edwards will be the 10th.

“This is it. Absolutely,” she said with a laugh, eight years after what she once thought would be her final Games. “My body says so. It’s not me talking, it’s my body.”

She began her career playing with Anne Donovan, Cheryl Miller, Lynette Woodard, Denise Curry and Pam McGee.

She will end it playing with Lisa Leslie, Sheryl Swoopes and Chamique Holdsclaw.

She will leave a sport she has helped transform--somehow without ever having been fully recognized for what she has done, not only in the Olympics but in the development of women’s professional basketball.

“I don’t think our country has embraced her as other countries have embraced, say, Hortencia or some of the other women’s legends,” said Dawn Staley, an Olympic teammate in Atlanta and now Sydney. “I don’t think our country has done that for Teresa. I don’t know why.”

The Brazilian star Hortencia had one-name status.

Edwards isn’t that well known by two.

“To play five Olympics is something special,” Staley said. “If there isn’t something written about her every time we pick up the paper, that’s a shame. Because she has contributed so much to the game, and it’s kind of fallen by the wayside. I think we should give her flowers while she can smell them, so to speak.”

Edwards received no bouquets from the WNBA this season.

She was one of the founders of the ABL, the rival league that was born with the WNBA in the afterglow of the 1996 Olympics but died in 1998, a victim of the marketing power of the NBA.

Edwards was ready to join the WNBA this summer but couldn’t agree on a contract.

Donovan, coach of the Indiana Fever, said before the season she considered Edwards “the greatest player in this game” even at 35.

Others pointed to similarities with Cynthia Cooper--a guard of the same size, style and career statistics as Edwards--and wondered if Edwards might have been nearly as prominent in the WNBA as Cooper, the four-time most valuable player of the WNBA championship series for the Houston Comets.

But Edwards, who made $125,000 in the ABL and was the league’s leading scorer when it folded, reportedly sought $100,000 to $150,000 from the WNBA. The WNBA pays even its biggest stars--such as Cooper, now retired, and Leslie--base salaries only in the $70,000s.

(There also was friction because the WNBA limited ABL players to rookie salaries two seasons ago, after the ABL folded, even though the ABL was widely acknowledged to have more of the talent.)

In any case, two seasons passed, and Edwards and the WNBA never struck a deal--making her the only player on the Olympic team not to have played in the WNBA.

Staley bristles at that.

“I think the WNBA takes the perspective that it’s a business, and definitely, it is,” said Staley, who started in the ABL but moved to the WNBA’s Charlotte Sting after the ABL folded. “But in running a business, especially women’s basketball, you’ve got to take care of your own.

“I don’t care, you’ve got to take care of someone who’s contributed so much to our game. I don’t know where they were, as far as numbers, but something should have been done to have her play in our league. Because she’s been such a big part of women’s basketball, and although she’s 36 years old, she’s a very, very good basketball player. I’ll take her now over some of the players who aren’t as dedicated as T.”

Dedicated--and a little stubborn.

“In my heart, I never felt we were real close,” Edwards said. “On paper and the way we were talking on the phone, you would think we were close. But in my heart, it really never felt like it was going to happen. Maybe because it never felt like they really had my interests at heart. But it’s not a big deal. I mean, I’m an old woman now. . . .”

The ABL did not survive, but Edwards has.

“You have to look at the big picture,” she said. “It exists: Professional women’s basketball exists.”

The Olympic team toured together for seven months before breaking for the WNBA season.

Edwards went home to Atlanta to train in solitude.

She hired a personal trainer and met him at the track at 9:30 most mornings for 45 minutes of sprints and middle-distance work, followed by free weights until about 12.

“If I could get out of bed and put my feet on the floor, I was going to put the work in,” she said. “That was the hardest part, making myself sit up and put my feet on the floor.

“The best thing about it was, I felt wholeness, I felt innocence again, and I felt work. Like, ‘OK, you’re going to earn it.’ ”

She had company on the track--NFL players Shannon Sharpe and Peerless Price. The camaraderie--and the competition--helped.

“Shannon can talk,” Edwards said. “He really didn’t talk much, though. He worked--until somebody said something to him, or somebody challenged him. I could stay with him one day, but after that it was, ‘Forget this. I don’t know who you are, girl, but you aren’t staying with me any more. . . .’ ”

Three or four days a week, after recovering from the mornings, Edwards sought out pickup games against guys, disciplining herself to focus on a different aspect of her game each day.

“One thing was trying to make yourself run up and down the court, because in a pick-up game you have the tendency to stop, not run this time,” she said. “So some days I’d say, ‘OK, you have to run. You might see a guy has a layup, but you have to run down there and catch him.’

“Or ‘This day, work on defense. Stay in front of this guy.’ Just little things like that, I’d try to have a little goal every time I went in there.

“I’d get home at 7 or 8 at night, so exhausted I could barely feed myself. But I knew it was worth it,” she said.

“The best thing was that I was on my own schedule. I didn’t have to. I mean, I knew I had to, but if I was like, “Oh, I’m too tired to make it,’ I could give my body a break. I didn’t have a coach standing over me, making me do it. I guess the best thing at my age is knowing my body.”

Nell Fortner, the U.S. coach, is only five years older than Edwards, and she knows what she means. She also knew she didn’t have to worry about Edwards.

“That just speaks to her maturity and her knowledge of what this takes, that she would do that on her own and say, ‘Look, I know I’ve got to do this.’ ” Fortner said. “I don’t know if there’s another player who would have done that.”

What other player would have kept coming back to the Olympics, again and again?

In ‘84, Edwards was the last player off the bench, but brought home a gold medal.

“I think the first one is almost too much to handle because everything is coming at you so quick, at every moment,” she said.

In ‘88, she was a mainstay, the second-leading scorer behind Katrina McClain.

“That was a good team,” she said. “I just remember winning. Being in Korea. Smelling kimchi every morning.”

In ‘92, it was Barcelona. The Americans lost in the semifinals to the Unified Team--the former Soviets--then beat Cuba for the bronze.

“That one game cost us a gold medal,” Edwards said. “That changed history.”

In ‘96, intent on not losing on its home soil, the U.S. team undertook an unprecedented yearlong tour, and the women’s Dream Team compiled a 60-0 record on the way to the gold. Nobody came close to the Americans in the Olympics.

“That’s the greatest team ever right there,” said Edwards, who was a contender to carry the U.S. flag in the opening ceremony but instead was chosen to recite the Olympic oath on behalf of all the athletes in Atlanta, a couple of hundred miles from her hometown of Cairo, Ga.

And now, Sydney.

No longer called on to score--though everyone assures you she still can--Edwards will share the point guard duties with Staley.

She is older, more savvy, and that ‘80s “flip” hairdo is gone, replaced by stylish long braids.

Leslie, the sometime model and fashion maven, took another glance at the 1984 Olympic team photo.

“The hairstyles . . . I don’t know what T would do with that flip now,” Leslie said. “Look at this, Farrah Fawcett. And the feather, but the feather’s coming back.

“Actually, you look at these hairstyles and you think how old they are, but all of them are coming back now, especially the feather.”

One more time around.

Just like Edwards.