Lisa Leslie Walks on Court for Final Time

Basketball in Los Angeles is not going to be the same tonight.

Tonight Lisa Leslie, a hoops icon in this city and this country, will walk away from basketball after her final regular season game with the LA Sparks at age 37 (there will be some playoff games to come).

Her career helped define women’s basketball and she leaves the WNBA the league’s all time leading scorer and rebounder. More importantly, she leaves as the face of the game, the person who helped lift women’s basketball higher than it had ever been.

She came to our attention in 1990 when at Morningside High she deliberately tried to go after Cheryl Miller’s record of 105 points scored by a girl in a high school game. Leslie “Cherry picked,” standing under the opponents basket, and scored all but one of her team’s 102 first-half points. The opponent (South Torrance) wanted no part of this, they refused to come out for the second half.

It was immature and filled with ego, but that game also showed the competitive fire that would fuel Leslie through her career. She wanted to be the best, nothing would get in her way.

She went to USC and was dominant there as well — one season she blocked 95 shots. She was a three-time All American, National Player of the Year, and USC’s all time leader in just about every category. She was a force of nature.

But there was nowhere to get paid to play women’s basketball in America then, so Leslie played a season in Italy before coming back to be part of the 1996 USA gold-medal winning team at the Olympics (the first of four Olympic golds she has). She was the star — and it was the momentum of that team that sparked the WNBA.

Leslie dominated the WNBA like she did everything else — she is a three time league MVP, two time champion, and the leading scorer and rebounder in league history. More than stats, she was the star, the face of the league. She was the one people ran up to in airports, she was the one Kanye West wanted to be photographed with, she was the one that inspired little girls to play basketball, she was the one who sold tickets.

Now she knows it is time to walk away, and the look on her face when she talks about her two-year-old daughter tells you all you need to know about where her heart is.

But for basketball fans in this city, there will be a little hole in our hearts with her gone.