Margaret Martinez tried her best, but she knew she had to work on her game. Her 8-year-old daughter, Mackenzie, had fallen in love with Liberty rookie Didi Richards’ defense and her haircut – two sassy Afro traits. When Martinez couldn’t quite get Mackenzie’s traits right, she reached out to Richards through social media.
“Do you have any tips on how I can improve?” Martinez asked on Twitter, adding a photo of Mackenzie, in a Richards sweater, with matching features.
Richards tweeted back some tips on the technique – water, gel and edge control – and added “give it twice and BOOM!”
Tree. Connection made. Martinez, who grew up loving the early Liberty teams, and her daughter will watch this week as the Liberty celebrate their 25th anniversary by honoring the team’s pioneers in three home games. Despite all those early teams’ achievements, including three trips to the WNBA finals in the league’s first four years, perhaps the team’s most enduring legacy from 1997 is the bond the players had with fans, even back in the dinosaur days. before social media.
“We had a magical moment in time and the people in the stands were part of it, especially women and young fans,” said Sue Wicks, who led the team at the burns and signed autographs.
Wicks will be back for that crowd, as will Kym Hampton, Rebecca Lobo and Teresa Weatherspoon, albeit at Barclays Center instead of Madison Square Garden. (The team was sold to Nets owner Joe Tsai in 2019.) The only core players who will be missing from the inaugural group: Vickie Johnson, the Dallas Wings head coach, and Sophia Witherspoon, a United States assistant. National girls team under 16 years.
“It was a sisterhood,” Johnson said.
For Wednesday’s game against Phoenix, Hampton, a veteran singer, will perform the national anthem. During her three years with the Liberty, she sang the national anthem for the final home game of the regular season.
“We held hands and she would give us cold bumps every time she was singing,” Weatherspoon said.
After a decade of playing abroad professionally, Hampton came home to launch the league and scored the Liberty’s first basket in the WNBA’s inaugural game on June 21, 1997, a Liberty win.
Over the past quarter of a century, the league has struggled to find its place in mainstream sport, growing in terms of talent and succeeding in the ‘if you can see her, you can be her’ department. “We knew the league had the potential to make little girls, like my daughter, aspire to be a professional basketball player,” Hampton said.
Hampton has spent the past few weeks on the AAU basketball circuit, crisscrossing the country with her daughter, A’riel Jackson, a highly recruited security guard from Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Brooklyn.
Jackson attended her first Liberty game when she was 2 days old. “Her little umbilical cord fell off at the end of the game, which is crazy stuff. So she’s got a lot of history there,” Hampton said with a laugh.
Hampton, Wicks, and Weatherspoon were all in their thirties when the WNBA began, a time when they had more basketball behind them than before them. What if their careers had ended in obscurity in a small gym in Russia or Hungary instead of in front of a raucous Madison Square Garden?
Wicks recalled how Weatherspoon, better known as Spoon, stood in a damp gym in Italy in 1988. Weatherspoon was all muscle and energy. “The uniform they gave her was like a high school uniform, tight in every spot and she hit the floor, played defense, slid across the field and overmatched players,” Wicks said. “She was just this strength, this exuberant personality.”
Wicks recalled thinking at the time, “She needs a bigger stage. It was like she was this A-list movie star in this little indie movie, but not just in the background. She stole every scene, making you think, ‘What’s she in? this movie?'”
New York City was a perfect fit for Weatherspoon, a point guard from Pineland, Texas. (Population: 850) She spoke like a preacher, preaching when the game was on the line, and jumping on the jury table to celebrate with the audience.
Weatherspoon’s passion hasn’t changed now that she’s 55 and an assistant coach for the NBA’s New Orleans Pelicans — and resident Zion Williams whisperer. Now a whole new generation of Spoon is discovering. A Pelicans video in which she told a story about her return home after winning a gold medal in the 1988 Olympics has been viewed more than 1.5 million times.
In the clip, Spoon reenacted banging on a former coach’s door after midnight as she returned home from the Seoul Games. “The coach who told me as an eighth-grader that I was never going to be great, I took that medal off my neck and he opened the door and I said BANG!” she said, pushing her right palm and imaginary medal toward the camera lens. She added: “You can’t let one person tell you who you are and what you can’t become.”
To those who know them best, it’s not surprising what the core members of the 1997 Liberty team have become. A collection of coaches. A jazz singer. A high-profile ESPN analyst. And… an oyster farmer.
On the East End of Long Island, Wicks is treading the same waters generations before her. “The Wicks family worked on the water,” she said. “My father was a bay man, my grandfather was a boat builder, my great-grandfather a captain, my great-great-grandfather a rum runner.”
Wicks, on the other hand, has always been a study – a dreamer and a pragmatist, gentle and assertive, light on her feet but heavy under the basket. Two decades ago, she wondered why teams flew commercially, as travel delays affected performance; it’s still an issue for this year’s team, which suffered multiple delays on a return flight from Indianapolis. She also wondered why WNBA marketing focused on the personal lives of only the straight players in the league.
Wicks managed to be ahead of her time and of her time. When asked in 2002 by a business magazine reporter if she was gay, she answered just as directly, becoming the first openly gay active professional basketball player.
“You’ll never hear a player come out like it’s a confession about this awful thing. Now it’s a celebration of love, they’re getting married. And I’m like, wow, they really turned the tables, said Wicks. “It’s like I’m not coming out, but I will announce that my child will be born with my partner. That’s fantastic. I wish that was the perspective back then.”
After retiring from the Liberty, Wicks coached college basketball, including a stint with Rutgers, her alma mater, and founded a fitness company before making her way back to the water. Her commute is now a walk across the street to her dock on the bay. On a recent day, she wore overalls and violet Crocs and steered her 24-foot boat through the salty air of Moriches Bay to the floating cages of her oyster farm, Violet Cove Oysters. Wicks and her two crew members hand-selected each oyster and left the bay with 2,500 to deliver to two restaurants and a wholesaler.
Wicks finds the poetry in wading through medium waters on a cold February morning or turning the cages on a scorching July afternoon. After months of chemotherapy for breast cancer, she’s not quite herself, but is happy to be back in the same seagrass she grew up in.
“At 54 years old, I probably shouldn’t break my back,” Wicks said. “But there is something about the value of labor, something very honest. Why are you doing this? I felt the same about basketball and liked it just as much. Like playing basketball when you’re in your flow space, there’s a meditative quality to doing this. You hear a bird, smell the salt, there’s a symphony going on around you and you pick up your head and look and then go back to it. It’s a constant reminder to breathe everything in.”
