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The spectacle of Tennessee’s Candace Parker dunking not once but twice against Army, in a women’s NCAA basketball tournament game, no less, rewound my inner SportsCenter back to my high-school days.
My high-school basketball team was ranked No. 1 in the nation and started a front line that went 7 feet, 6 feet 9 and 6-3, which still would be pretty impressive today and was really impressive 30 years ago. Back then, dunking was not legal in high-school games in the state of Washington and considered unsportsmanlike. Still, near the end of the many blowouts in which that team was involved, the ritual was to set up a dunk for the sophomore 7-footer and absorb the technical foul that went along with it.
Believe it or not, it took quite a few games before the ritual produced the desired result. And though the 7-footer went on to have a pretty decent NBA career, and now is coaching internationally, I won't embarrass his family by naming him here.
Maya Moore of Collins Hill
goes up against Tina Charles
of Chris the King |
Nor am I trying to embarrass anyone by equating those circus, garbage-time exploits of yesteryear to Candace Parker's count-em two dunks on Sunday. But the first thing I thought about after seeing Parker's pair of deuces was that long sequence of games it required for a 7-foot teenaged boy to do the same way back when. Which is to say, by deduction, the women's game is about where boy's high-school basketball was circa 1976.
I mean, shouldn't we even call what Parker executed a "stuff," the way we called those barely-dunked dunks back in the day?
It's good stuff, by the way, for the women's game, but only if it draws attention to the game, attracting viewership and following, and not become a distraction or lead to a witch hunt for the next aerial exploit. When will the tallying ever end? It's bad enough that we now know the identity of the first woman to dunk in an NCAA tournament game and the first to dunk twice in an NCAA game. Will we also take note of the first to dunk in an Olympic bronze-medal game, the first during a game telecast by Lifetime on a Friday in primetime, the first to dunk without makeup and fingernail polish? How about the first woman to actually slam dunk? Or the first to actually posterize an opponent? (Not to be sexist, but will that provoke any post-posterizing hair pulling?).
Even so, we've all been there. We've seen human beings dunk a basketball. Now we're distinguishing the feat by sex? Lisa Leslie dunked during a WNBA game. Prepsters Tina Charles and Maya Moore have dunked in all-star games. Maria Stepanova dunked twice in a European all-star game. The barrier has been broken, OK? Let's be awed by something truly impressive. Like the first guy who gives birth. Or picks up after himself in a locker room.
This year is the 20th anniversary of Spud Webb's NBA Slam-Dunk championship. I was in Dallas when the 5-6 Webb bounced the ball off the floor and backboard, caught it and, yes, slammed it home. That was impressive. I came up covering the NBA during an era when dunking was not as commonplace as, say, being disrespected. David Thompson's skywalking, Michael Jordan's balletic, splay-legged, tongue-flicking jams and, shoot, even Dr. J's wrap-around-the-backcourt against two Lakers in the 1980 NBA Finals - which was a scoop shot, for David Stern's sake - were jaw-dropping exploits because no man, woman or child had done them before.
Maya Moore taps the glass after
making a layup at the TOC |
Today's women and girls do plenty of things not actually being seen for the first time, but not seen anymore, at least not consistently, in the men's game. Things like fundamental soundness, strategic and unselfish play. Which is more entertaining, to be certain, than any go-through-the-motions, dog-days-of-the-schedule NBA game in February, and can be as entertaining as anything the NBA playoffs and March Madness have to offer.
The title game of the 2005 Nike Tournament of Champions, the elite high-school girl's basketball event in the country, was a drama-filled, up-and-down overtime contest featuring two of the game's brightest stars, the aforementioned Charles and Moore, both of whom, at 6-3 and 6-1, spent a lot of time air-bound, just not above the rim. Afterward, a few of the old-school male (of course) sportswriters described Moore, especially, as "playing like a guy." That must mean something altogether different to them because, to me, it too often means overly ego-driven and unnecessarily ostentatious.
A couple of my coaching mentors and longtime friends, either longtime NBA or college coaches, are converts to the women's game. "It's the last level of basketball where you can still teach," says one. They like that the women's game actually runs offensive sets and makes defensive adjustments.
It would be a shame if, to play up the next "first woman who dunked in a (insert milestone here)" headline, that women's basketball degenerated from a basketball purist's vision of near-perfection to the equivalent of the end of my high-school basketball games. Those were not misty, water-colored memories, but freak shows that elicited laughter or ill will. Lest we forget the day in 1997 that Nykesha Sales was allowed to limp out with a torn Achilles tendon for an uncontested layup against Villanova to become Connecticut's all-time leading scorer, women's basketball already has been to the dark side before.
Glenn Nelson is the publisher of HoopGurlz.com and the editor-in-chief of Scout Media (www.Scout.com), an online sports network and magazine-publishing company and subsidiary of Fox Interactive Media. Glenn also founded and coached
the Dragons and Northwest HoopGurlz select girls basketball teams. He previously was a longtime, national-award-winning basketball columnist and writer for The Seattle
Times. His work also has appeared in several national magazines and books. He is co-author of "Rising Stars: The Ten Best Players in the NBA" (Rosen Publishing, 2002).
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