In the US, basketball games are a show, they really know how to put it on for the fans—there’s music, lights and entertainment. The Seattle Storm was named after the city’s propensity for winter storms and rain, though when I was there and playing in their summer I never saw that sort of weather. Their theme song for home games was AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’, which was perfect for an Aussie like me. They really played up that fact. Every time I landed a shot in a home game there’d be the sound of a didgeridoo playing, and when I was warming up they’d always put on an Australian song for me.
The Storm also had something called a Jumbotron, a great big electronic four-sided screen on top of the scoreboard—it was located in the middle of the court, up high, and they would show videos that players would make for the fans, interviews where they would get to know a bit about us and our personalities. There were also mini-games, and an all-kid dance squad who’d lead the young fans in a conga line on court to a pop song, it was all a lot of fun. It was glamorous, playing in these big arenas with huge numbers of fans, the atmosphere could be overwhelming at times, but it was awesome.
The 16 WNBA teams are broken up into two ‘conferences’—Western and Eastern—and the finals are played between the best teams from each conference. The previous year, Seattle had come last in the WNBA Western Conference. The WNBA was still new to Seattle, and as well as the fact that I was the number one pick of that year’s draft I was what they term a ‘franchise player’, something that was really pushed by the media. A franchise player is seen not only as the best player on the team, but also as someone who the team can build their franchise around for the foreseeable future. Being so young, and not having experienced anything like it before, I didn’t understand what this truly meant, but I quickly found out.
It was made abundantly clear that my one role was to help the team win, to score points. I didn’t initially understand this from the business perspective. I’d always been a good basketball player in my teams, but I didn’t understand the concept of one player having all of the spotlight. My first professional game was against Phoenix Mercury in front of a home crowd. The group of media at the game were pretty much the people who came to training, you’d usually have the same reporters covering every game. Their questions were always very blunt and pointed, I felt an enormous weight of expectation. I needed to make a very big adjustment to operate in a highly professional world of basketball that I’d never encountered before. Even though I had a degree of media exposure in Australia, I’d been protected a bit, especially at the Olympics, probably because of my age, the enormity of the situation and to keep me focused. Media appearances had been shared amongst the entire team. My media involvement had been pretty low key, and I just assumed that was how it was done. Suddenly in Seattle everyone wanted to know about me, talk to me. I think I blundered my way through it, but the pressure was intense. The team had put all their faith in me as a basketballer who would take the team somewhere other than last place.
We played 32 games over 11 weeks—it’s a very compact season over there, you’d play three, sometimes four, games a week over a four-month season. You don’t get a night off in the US. There are no easy games, so you can’t take it easy, and I was training all the time. Basketball is a more physical game than a lot of other female sports, apart from perhaps women’s AFL, but it really is a different type of physicality, you can’t compare sports. I had a real chip on my shoulder when I first went over to the US, I knew people were saying I was an upstart, the young Australian coming into their league, and my only response to that was to arc up. I felt like my back was against the wall, and I fought. That year I had a record number of technical fouls given to me, but I had to play that hard to show people not to mess with me, because otherwise I would never have survived. People went after me physically, but I could handle it.
The Los Angeles (LA) Sparks, Lisa Leslie’s team, were also in the Western Conference, so we’d come up against each other four times a season. With the hairpiece mishap still in everyone’s mind, I knew it was going to be tough. It was unfortunate what happened in the Sydney Olympics final, unfortunate that it happened at all, and for the rest of my life people are going to associate me with that incident. Our battles, yes, they were absolutely battles on the court, she was without doubt one of the best players in history. But she wasn’t the toughest opponent I ever had to face.
The LA Sparks were tough back in their day, they were probably the benchmark for all the other teams. Lisa and DeLisha Milton, who also played for the Sparks, could be quite rough, overtly physical, elbows flying, it was over the top, especially with me. I didn’t deal well with it when I was younger, because I wasn’t as physically strong as them, and I know I was a bit of a loose cannon. Sport is entertainment, but for the athletes it’s everything, that’s why we’re there. It’s serious for us, we don’t know anything else, that’s all we’ve done our whole lives.
I was very lean at that point, and I still played more of an outside game, so that I could shoot the ball from outside the key. Post moves—which involve putting your back to the basket, getting inside and pushing people around—still weren’t my forte, I wasn’t strong enough for that yet. We had a big Czech Republic girl at Seattle, Kamila Vodichkova, who’d represented Czechoslovakia in the 1992 Olympic Games, she was really strong and had a body on her, and she played 5 (centre) while I played the 4 (power forward) spot. Generally, the taller, larger players play in the 4 or 5 positions as we’re better at post moves. To ‘post up’ you establish a position near the basket, especially if you have a smaller defender, and you face away from the basket to receive the ball so that your body can protect the ball from the defending player. This is where most of the overtly physical contact takes place. Lisa could push me around a bit, absolutely, because she was stronger and she was a better inside player than I was at the time.
The stadiums were always packed when Seattle played LA, there was always a lot of hype around it, the TV viewing audience was larger, people loved it. That incident at the Sydney Olympics had drawn so much media attention—a bit of controversy will always get you viewers, as I found out. Those LA Sparks and Seattle Storm games were often sell-outs.
We didn’t win a single one of the three games we played against LA that season, but I played my hardest, and it showed in my stats, with some of my highest point scores achieved in those games. DeLisha Milton was the 4 player for LA, so we’d also match up against each other, and DeLisha was known for being physical. I ended up becoming a physical player as well, because there’s no other way to combat a dominant power forward, it’s hard when you can’t score. Unless you put on weight, get strong and work that aspect of your game, you’re just going to get pushed out. DeLisha is a lovely girl. It’s so funny, the contrast between her personality when she is and isn’t playing—off the court she’s a beautiful human being, but on the court in opposition, you have to watch out. I would finish games covered in bruises, but I loved it, it made me feel alive.
My status as the number one pick, the fact I wasn’t American, the hairpiece incident, none of those things helped my on-court battles. All of this made me feel low at times, and I was dreadfully homesick. Mum and Dad were still working and couldn’t come over, and I was calling them every night. My phone bill was astronomical.
I missed home, but I was one of 11 Aussies playing in the WNBA that year. Two of my AIS team had also been drafted in 2001 alongside me—Kristen (13th in the draft) and Penny Taylor (11th)—and Tom was coaching in Washington. Halfway through the season we played Timmsy’s team, the Phoenix Mercury, in Phoenix. Even though she’d retired from the Opals, Timmsy was still playing in the WNBA. Another Opals player, Trish Fallon, was also playing for Phoenix, and Graffy was the assistant coach. We won that game against Phoenix with the highest winning margin in the Storm’s two-year history, and that night after the game we all went out, Timmsy, Trish, Graffy and myself. We talked, staying up until four in the morning, it was the best night. I hadn’t had much time for socialising before then, it had been training, training and more training.
We only won 10 of the 32 games that year, and Seattle again came in at the bottom of the Western Conference ladder. Despite that, the people of Seattle were great, the fans, the team, the city, they were behind me and I felt, I knew, I could do better. I was chosen as an All Star that season, one of the top ten players from the Western Conference. An All-Star game, which takes place once each season, features the best ten players in each conference, and we would play against the Eastern Conference in an All-Star weekend match.
I was nervous before that first All-Star match. Playing alongside some of the best in the league in a showcase match was frightening to say the least, but what an honour. Lisa Leslie was in the team, along with Sheryl Swoopes, Tina Thompson, Ticha Penicheiro and Yolanda Griffith, it really was an eye-opener, and my confidence grew by being there. Given what had happened at the Sydney Olympics just the year before, I wasn’t looking forward to the reception I’d receive, but my fears were mostly unfounded. I walked into the locker room and the 2000 US Olympic player Katie Smith walked up to me with a flower and said, ‘A rose for my Aussie friend’. I felt relieved, most of the team were really nice and friendly when we played.
I’d been afraid of going to the US, and still by the end of the season I was in two minds about returning, because I’d been so homesick. For a while, I thought that maybe I wouldn’t go back—but I did, it was just what I had to do. Even though I didn’t want to, in my head I felt like I had to, I had a responsibility to Seattle, and to myself.
After 28 games of basketball in the US, which were very physically demanding—much more so than any consistent runs of games I’d played before—my shoulder had broken down. It had started playing up when I was at the AIS and playing in NSW Country, and like a lot of my injuries, initially it wasn’t diagnosed. I’d had numerous scans and they hadn’t revealed anything serious enough to warrant surgery, so I played through the pain. I had full medicals before I started playing with most teams I joined, each having their own set of medical investigations, their own medical treatments.
It got to the stage in the US where I’d try and lift a can of Coke off the bench and it would hurt so much, the pain in my right shoulder was just so sharp, that it would physically stop me moving my arm. I knew the importance of getting up a certain amount of shots a day, I needed to do that for my own confidence, but that was still more time on court, pounding, jumping, and my body would react. The more I did that, the more my shoulder, my body, hurt. Before playing and practice I’d be taking five Ibuprofen tablets, an over the counter medication, because I found they helped with my pain. Every day for years this was my routine, even for shoot and run games, and for practice. I don’t know how my liver still functions.
Arriving back in Australia, I had to have surgery on my shoulder. It ended up being diagnosed as a rotator cuff injury. I’ve still got the pins in my shoulder, they were meant to come out one or two years later but I’ve never had a problem, so I just left them, I haven’t touched them. My shoulder had been a critical injury, if I hadn’t had that fixed properly I wouldn’t have played again. It’s one of those injuries you can’t really play through, so I took time off, and didn’t take part in the start of the Capitals’ WNBL season, returning mid-season instead.
We won the WNBL series for a third time, and this was the start of me playing on either side of the world each year. The Australian WNBL training camps would take place in September, then I’d play in the WNBL from October to February, finishing closer to March, so almost six months. Then I would normally train in a camp or two with the national team, before I went back to the WNBA in early May and played all the way through to August, and into September if we made the playoffs and finals.
I also still played for the Opals in between my WNBA and WNBL commitments. In May 2002 we travelled to Japan, where we won a tournament, before I returned to Seattle for the 2002 season. I was playing year-round, basketball was my full-time job.