Holdsclaw Rejoins Sparks After Leave
The Sparks saw a welcome sight when they returned to practice Monday after a 3-3 trip to open the season.
It was Chamique Holdsclaw, their all-star forward.
Holdsclaw had missed the first two weeks of the season with the team’s permission. She returned to her parents’ home in North Carolina to tend to her father and stepfather after both were recently diagnosed with cancer.
“My mother needed some support,” Holdsclaw said Monday. “It was kind of a double-whammy. Each of them are serious in their own way. When things like that happen, everyone gets a little stressed; people don’t know what to expect and there are a lot of emotions behind it.
“I felt good when I got there because I was worrying a lot about my mom, making sure she was OK. And both my dads ... once I went home I saw it was going to be tough but everyone’s going to be OK. And they really wanted me to come back to L.A.”
She has done “all that I could possibly do,” and both men were receiving chemotherapy treatments.
“If they need me, if it’s something more life-threatening, of course I’ll go back,” she said.
Holdsclaw said she was prepared to join the Sparks on Saturday for their game in New York, where she starred at Christ the King high school. But the team told her to return to Los Angeles and report for practice Monday.
“I’m glad to be back,” she said. “It’s my teammates, my friends
Coach Joe Bryant, whose team struggled offensively in losses to Minnesota and New York, was pleased to see the league’s third-leading scorer last year (17.0) on the court.
“She’s a special player,” Bryant said. “And we were missing somebody special as far as the numbers. But more importantly, because they’ve been triple-teaming Lisa [Leslie], now they can only double-team her and have to double-team Chamique. That should make our other players more dangerous.”
The players also welcomed her back.
“It was really nice to see her ... “ said Jessica Moore, one of the reserves starting in Holdsclaw’s place. “We all gave her a lot of hugs and so forth to get her back into things.”
Bryant said he would ease Holdsclaw back into the rotation, beginning with Wednesday’s home opener against Detroit.
Bryant added that most of the team’s playbook was in place before Holdsclaw returned.
“We just added a couple of new plays, and that’s all she needs to get into, as well as the philosophies of some plays we had before she left,” he said. “But she’s a ballplayer, naturally gifted, so I don’t think it’s going to be a hard thing.”