Leslie has news of her own
On the day the new owners of the Sparks were formally introduced at a Staples Center news conference, the team’s most valuable and recognizable player stunned reporters Thursday by revealing that she was two months pregnant and would sit out the 2007 season.
Lisa Leslie apparently kept her pregnancy a secret to all but her closest confidants before Wednesday, when the league’s Board of Governors unanimously approved the $10-million sale of the Sparks from Lakers owner Jerry Buss to an investor group led by Los Angeles lawyers Kathy Goodman and Carla Christofferson.
“I’m pretty much blown away a little bit,” said General Manager Penny Toler, who will attempt to reconfigure a team that during its first 10 seasons was built around the 6-foot-5 Leslie, a three-time WNBA most valuable player.
Christofferson, a longtime season ticket-holder before becoming an equal partner with Goodman in a 55% stake in the team, expressed her support.
“Obviously, it’s exciting news,” Christofferson said. “We’re excited that she’s going to still be here and cheering on the sideline because she really is the face of the Sparks and we’d love to have her in whatever capacity.”
Of course, they’d rather see her playing and drawing fans.
“It’s God’s timing, not mine,” said Leslie, who led the Sparks to WNBA championships in 2001 and 2002 and was the league MVP in 2001, 2004 and last season, when she averaged career highs of 20 points and 3.2 assists a game while also pulling down 9.5 rebounds and making a career-high 51.1% of her shots.
“It’s just weird because as a woman playing sports that’s the only downside that people probably see: the fact that we have children. For me, it’s just a blessing. I had never tried to have kids.”
Leslie, the WNBA’s all-time scoring leader and a three-time Olympic gold medalist, was married 13 months ago to Michael Lockwood, a UPS pilot and former Air Force basketball player. She will turn 35 in July, when her baby is due, and said she planned to play at least one more WNBA season before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
“Other girls have done it,” she said of returning to the court as a mother. “Why not me? I’m probably in better shape than all of them.”
But she is not under contract and made no promises to return to the Sparks. She said she had given little thought to her plans beyond the Olympics.
“As a G.M., it knocks you on your seat,” Toler said of Leslie’s surprising news. “If you want to know the difference between men’s basketball and women’s basketball, there’s a big indicator right there.
“You can never prepare for it, but you could kind of see it coming after the wedding -- and rightly so. She’s had some great years and I’m sure she wants to do some other things in life. As a G.M., you hate for this day to come, if she were to retire. Now we’ve just got to pretty much pull a rabbit out of our hat.”
Earlier, Goodman and Christofferson described themselves as longtime supporters of women’s basketball in general and the Sparks in particular.
“I think that I’ve missed fewer Sparks games than I have family birthdays,” said Goodman, a season ticket-holder from the day the Sparks were founded in 1997 as one of the WNBA’s original eight teams.
Goodman, 43, is an English and social studies at HighTechHigh-LA in Lake Balboa and a former film industry executive. More than 100 of her students attended Thursday’s news conference, with Goodman joking, “It was difficult for me to get them here because they wanted to stay back and discuss ‘The Scarlet Letter.’ ”
Christofferson, 39, is a partner at O’Melveny & Myers and has represented the Backstreet Boys and Christina Aguilera, among others. She is a former Miss North Dakota and was an all-state basketball player in high school.
They met when Christofferson defended Goodman’s company in a lawsuit and bonded after discovering their shared interest in the Sparks.
“We became avid fans as only avid fans can be,” Goodman said. “We had an opinion about everything and we knew everything....
“And every conversation between Carla and I started, ‘You know, if we owned this team.... ‘ Finally, Carla said to me, ‘Here’s what I don’t understand: Why don’t we own this team?’ ”
They first asked about the team’s availability a year ago, escalated the negotiations last spring and closed a deal this week -- just in time to find out they’d be kicking off a new era in Sparks history without their leading lady.
*
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
The interruption of an era
How does a basketball team replace the player upon whom its entire history has been built? A look at what Lisa Leslie, who will take the 2007 WNBA season off due to pregnancy, has meant to the Sparks, and what building blocks remain:
By the numbers
Leslie’s scoring and rebounding averages, and her rank in the league each season:
*--* Year PPG Rank RPG Rank 1997 15.9 3 9.5 1 1998 19.6 3 10.2 1 1999 15.6 8 7.8 4 2000 17.8 5 9.6 3 2001 19.5 2 9.6 3 2002 16.9 5 10.4 2 2003 18.4 4 10.0 3 2004 17.6 3 9.9 1 2005 15.2 7 7.3 4 2006 20.0 3 9.5 3
*--*
Note: Leslie led the Sparks in rebounding in each of their first 10 seasons, and was the scoring leader in nine; Chamique Holdsclaw led the team in scoring at 17.0 in 2005.
Making her mark
* Accolades -- Three-time MVP, seven-time all-league, member of WNBA’s all-decade team
* All-time leader -- In points, with 5,412, and rebounds, with 2,863.
* New highs -- First player to dunk in a regular-season game (2002) and in the All-Star game (2005).
How to light the Sparks
The resources remaining to muster a defense of last season’s Western Conference championship:
* The heir apparent -- When the Sparks acquired Chamique Holdsclaw in 2005, it was with an eye toward her marquee value as a team leader in a post-Leslie era. But despite her talent and her 16.1 scoring average the last two seasons, she has yet to display the mental toughness to carry a team.
* In the middle -- The Sparks will need Christi Thomas, a 6-foot-3 first-round draft pick two years ago, to reach her potential and overcome her penchant for injuries.
* The veteran -- Mwadi Mabika, the last of the original Sparks, is only 30 and still an outside threat. But year-round play in foreign leagues may have made her old before her time; she followed six seasons of scoring in double figures with averages of 5.8 and 8.5 the last two.
* The future -- Lisa Willis, the No. 5 pick in the 2006 draft out of UCLA, got off to a slow start. By midseason, however, she was playing more minutes and showed the potential to become a consistent three-point threat.
* No quick fix -- The price of the Sparks’ success in 2006 is that they pick second-to-last in the first round of next year’s WNBA draft.
-- VAN NIGHTINGALE