Article

Hoops, dreams

06:56 PM CDT on Friday, August 6, 2004

By MICHAEL GRANBERRY / The Dallas Morning News
From the time she was 11, a Jewish girl growing up in Far Rockaway, Queens, she would ride the subway alone at night, all the way to Harlem, just to play with "the guys." Some of the guys would graduate to the National Basketball Association, but from the moment she introduced herself, Nancy Lieberman could hold her own.

Full name: Nancy Lieberman Date and place of birth: July 1, 1958, Brooklyn, N.Y. Occupation: Analyst, ESPN Favorite movie: Remember the Titans Favorite all-time athlete: Muhammad Ali My ideal vacation: Cruise to the islands I drive a: Mercedes Benz CL 55 smoke gray My hero is: Billie Jean King The best advice I could give a 20-year-old is: "Never stop working, wanting or dreaming." My last meal would be: Maine lobster My trademark cliché or expression: "You don't know what you don't know!" My worst habit is: Patience – or lack of it. My best asset is: Loyalty Guests at my fantasy dinner party: Bill Cosby, Muhammad Ali, Martina Navratilova, Katharine Hepburn I wish I could sing like: Beyoncé If I had a different job, I'd be an: Owner, pro sports team Favorite city outside Dallas: NYC, I love the energy I'm happiest when: I'm with my son, T.J. If I could change one thing about myself, it would be: Finding more personal time for me. I regret: The WNBA wasn't around in my prime. Nobody knows I: Love to cook, and want to take a culinary course.

Her mother was terrified at the thought of her only daughter riding the A train alone at night, but for Nancy, it was part of a mission. A way to get better. A way to move beyond Queens. A way to do something few, if any, girls had ever done.

And before she was finished, she would be among the first women admitted to the Basketball Hall of Fame.

"My parents were getting a divorce when I was 8 or 9," she says, sitting in her living room in Carrollton, where she lives with her 10-year-old son, T.J.

"Everyone responds differently to conflict and the resolution of conflict. For me, I couldn't handle it. So I would just leave the house."

And the world she turned to welcomed her with open arms.

"There were all these guys, all these black guys, and it was awesome. Such a wonderful feeling of confidence and self-esteem," she says. "Instead of being told, 'What is wrong with you? Why are you playing sports? Where did we go wrong?' – the guys would say, 'We want Nance!' And that was instant gratification."

Today, Nancy Lieberman, 46, has a different life but one deeply rooted in basketball, which remains her passion, her fire, her all-consuming world. Her parents are easily her biggest fans, despite the fact that basketball became so much more than a casual pastime.

Her world has long included Dallas. She moved here in 1980 as the No. 1 draft choice of the Dallas Diamonds in the Women's Professional Basketball League, the first women's pro league, which died after one season. She's back again, as general manager and coach of the Dallas Fury in the 4-year-old National Women's Basketball League, whose most recent champion is – who else? – the Dallas Fury.

She's also a popular public speaker, hired frequently by Fortune 500 companies. And she remains a tireless on-air voice, covering men's and women's basketball for ESPN. Given "the right situation," she would love to be a head coach once again (she formerly coached the Detroit Shock) in the Women's National Basketball Association.

But close friend and colleague Deion Sanders says such a position would sell her short.

"She should be coaching in the NBA – not the WNBA," says Mr. Sanders, the former Dallas Cowboy who served as her assistant coach with the Fury.

"I don't understand why men can coach in the WNBA but women can't coach in the NBA. I don't know anyone who has better credentials."

Ms. Lieberman, he says, "was Michael Jordan before there was a Michael Jordan. She's done everything at every level and is still the same true person. She's a woman, a mother, a friend, and I wish everyone could know her as I've known her. She's so caring, so loving, so sensitive, but is also tough and daring and dependable."

The greatest
From the time she was that little girl, growing up in a broken home, her heroes were different from other girls.

New York to the core, she loved Walt Frazier and Willis Reed of the Knicks, Joe Willie Namath of the Jets, and all but worshiped at the altar of her role model, Muhammad Ali.

"I wanted to be the greatest – like him," she says. "I trained to be the best and made sacrifices to be the best. I don't say that with arrogance, I say it with humility. Because I didn't go to proms, and I didn't go to movies, and I didn't go to parties. I was the girl at 10 o'clock in the schoolyard playing what we called radar ball. Where there'd be a dimly lit streetlight and all you could see was the reflection of the rim. And I'd be out there dribbling and shooting and shooting and shooting.

"In New York, there were never any nets, just the metal rim and a metal backboard. And you'd have to listen for the bouncing of the ball because you couldn't see it. Some days, it would hit the back of the fence and roll somewhere and you couldn't hear it. And you'd have to get up in the morning and come back at 5 or 6 or 7 just to get your basketball. I was so focused on that, because I believed it was my only way out."

At home, hers was a world brimming with conflict. She turned to sports; her brother, Cliff, 48, became a doctor. But the more success she had, the more she was forced to deal with an atmosphere that was inhospitable to female athletes.

In those days, home also wasn't much of a refuge. Her father's leaving had ended the acrimony but made life even tougher economically.

"At times, they were turning off the heat and the electricity in our house," she says. "The bills weren't paid. Mom just didn't have the money. I look back, and I'm thinking, 'My gosh, it's weird,' but I knew all along that basketball would change my life."

Her mom, however, was slow to understand her daughter's special gifts.

"She would say, 'Nancy, girls don't play sports.' And I would say, 'Why not?' 'Because they don't.' And I would say, 'Well, that's really intelligent. Why don't they?' And she couldn't explain it because it wasn't something her generation did. Her generation got married, had children and became homemakers. And there's nothing wrong with that.

"So she would say, 'I'm sorry, you're not going to do it.' And with my hands on my hips, I would say, 'Well, I'm going to be the best player ever, and you're going to have to live with it.' "

Had she listened and caved in to her mom's wishes, she shudders at what her life might have been.

"I could have been a casualty of my environment. I could have gotten involved in drugs. But sports kept me on a certain track. It gave me," she says, "a sense of accountability and responsibility as a very young person."

The Olympian
In 1974, as a sophomore at Far Rockaway High School, Nancy was invited to participate in trials for the United States' first women's national team. At 15, she established herself as one of the top female players in the country by earning one of a dozen spots on the team. At 16, she was named to the U.S. team designated to play in the 1975 World Championships and in the Pan American Games, from which she brought home a gold medal that same year.

At 17, Ms. Lieberman was named to the U.S. Olympic team and competed in the 1976 games in Montreal. And so it was, just after her 18th birthday, that she became the youngest player on the women's team to win a medal as she and her teammates captured the silver under legendary coach Billie Moore.

She contends she would have won the gold had the U.S. not boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.

It was a time of enormous change in the life of a girl becoming a woman, whose growth as a human being was often as startling as her own leaps and bounds as an athlete.

"I remember Billie saying, 'What you do tonight will have an effect in your life 25 years from now.' But when you're 17, 18 years old, you can't see three days in front of you.

"Now," Ms. Lieberman says, "I can see the impact that the '76 team made in my life."

She pauses, leaning forward in her chair.

"They put the medal around my neck and played the anthem. It's everything you've ever dreamed of ... I went back to the Olympic Village and had tears in my eyes. Because I was so unfulfilled. And that's when the spiritual part of me really took effect."

Recruited by more than 100 colleges, she enrolled at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., where she was influenced by a teammate named Nancy Dunkle.

"I'm really silly by nature," Ms. Lieberman says. "I'm not that serious or introspective. My personality is more joking and sarcastic and fun-loving. I like to make people laugh.

"Nancy was always reading the Bible, so I would ask, 'Nancy, what are you reading?' And she would say, 'I'm reading about Jesus.' I said, 'Oh, yeah. Who's he play for? This Jesus, is he good?' And she would always say, 'He doesn't play for anybody. He's our Lord and savior.' She was very kind and sincere in helping me learn what I didn't know."

So Ms. Lieberman accepted Jesus as her savior and converted to Christianity, which left her Jewish family nothing short of stunned.

For the other Liebermans, her decision was "terrible, terrible. They kept saying, 'You're a sellout! How could you do this?' " But as she often tells audiences at her motivational lectures, young and old alike, her new belief helped sustain "the building blocks to success." And to an inner peace she had craved for years.

At Old Dominion, "they never thought we'd win a championship," she says.

"But we won two national championships. I was a three-time player of the year and made the Olympic team. I achieved individual goals but did it through team goals, and it was terrific. We were on the cutting edge of women's basketball and were selling out everywhere we played."

Drafted No. 1 by the Dallas Diamonds, she was paid $100,000 a year. She bought a home in Kessler Park and fell in love with Dallas. But the league folded a year later.

During the early 1980s, she remained in Texas, serving as personal trainer and mentor to tennis great Martina Navratilova.

Among female athletes, Ms. Lieberman holds one of the most noteworthy distinctions: She is only woman to have ever played in a men's pro league. That occurred in 1986, when she played for the Springfield Fame of the United States Basketball League. In 1987, she switched to the Long Island Knights of the USBL.

On the lighter side, she also was a member of the Washington Generals, the team that always lost to the Harlem Globetrotters. In 1988, while playing for the Generals, she fell in love with teammate Tim Cline. They were married for 13 years and remain close as the parents of T.J.

Basketball as metaphor
Her basketball camps have operated in Dallas since 1983, serving more than 5,000 kids a year. She also provides private lessons, using basketball as a metaphor for life.

And she doesn't mind answering the phone late at night, offering help to frustrated moms and dads. "They'll say, 'Can you talk to my daughter?' 'Billy's beating up his brother.' 'He's got a test, and he's not focusing.' "

But help in this case goes even further. Just as she helped Ms. Navratilova with her game – some credit Ms. Lieberman's influence with making Martina one of the tennis world's premier players – she has a charisma, coupled with a natural coaching gift, that professional athletes find not just appealing but irresistible.

When the phone rings, it isn't just parents frustrated with the challenges of pesky kids, it's often Karl Malone or Mr. Sanders or Buck Showalter.

Ms. Lieberman says, "It's kind of wonderful that people trust you and believe in you, as a friend, as an athlete ... I love it. Maybe I have a need to feel needed."

And whether it's a Dallas Cowboy or a parent worried sick about a kid who struggles, helping, she says, "is the least I can do." Because, in her words, so much has been given to her.

She sees herself as a sports pioneer, one who benefited from an era of enormous change for women, who after so many years were able to discover some small measure of equality. Like black athletes of an earlier era, who know the value of a Jackie Robinson, she harbors an appreciation bordering on reverence for those who made it easier for her.

"I didn't know what my friend Billie Jean King meant to me when I was watching her play Bobby Riggs," Ms. Lieberman says.

"I never realized what it would mean to my career, my future – the sacrifices she made. Every time I see her, I give her a big hug and say thank you. She really put it on the line for us, and I'm living proof of how well it paid off."

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