Before going to the US for the 2004 WNBA season, I’d been asked by the magazine Black + White Photography to pose for a special edition book, The Athens Dream, leading up to the Athens Olympics. They’d asked me to pose for an earlier edition but I’d said no, because I wasn’t ready or comfortable enough with my body to be photographed naked. I’d always been the sort of kid who would have communal showers in a bathing suit. When they asked again a couple of years later, I thought long and hard about it. I agreed, and as with everything, I told Mum and asked her opinion. Both of my parents were really supportive, they may have had some doubts, which I totally understood, but as always left the decision ultimately up to me. I had this moment where I thought ‘I’m going to do it’, and pushed myself to commit. But then almost immediately after, I hugged Mum and thought, ‘Why did I say yes?’. I’d agreed, I just had to talk myself into it, I could do it!
It’s funny to think about it now, but when I was young I got this tattoo on the bottom of my foot, and I had to hide it from my parents, Dad was really against them. One day, when I was lying down in the living room with bare feet, he saw the tattoo and just about had a conniption. He said to me, ‘Someone’s going to take a photo of that one day’, and I told him, ‘I don’t care’. But he was really upset about this stupid little tattoo. It felt like my mum and dad were worried about everything, and looking back, I know I was a rather eccentric young woman, I still am—I definitely have my own flow, but you only live once, right? Over the years, it just reached the point where both my parents would tell me that they loved me, supported me, and if I asked them for their opinion they’d tell me, they still do. But ultimately, it’s my life.
When I arrived the morning of the photo shoot I immediately asked whether anyone had a bottle of champagne, or anything alcoholic, something I could drink to relax. It was a male photographer, I’d never met him before, there were another couple of people in the room and I felt really awkward, but I got through it, like I do everything, and the photos are truly beautiful.
I was able to choose the photos they used, and I was lucky enough to be on the front cover of one of the editions. The photos are truly stunning. There were a few shots in the book where I was really exposed, and I was worried what my parents would think, but they were really supportive. Mum and Dad loved the finished product. After Dad saw it for the first time he called me and told me he was proud of me—needless to say I still felt a little bit uneasy knowing my dad had seen the pictures.
Thirty-five Australian Olympic athletes posed for The Athens Dream, with its beautiful tasteful photographs of incredible athletic bodies, beautifully captured. I’d never do it again, because my body doesn’t look like that anymore, but not only for that reason, I just don’t feel the need to expose myself like that again. I felt totally liberated the day after that photo shoot, I felt beautiful and strong, particularly after I saw the pictures.
My nan was getting older, both my grandmothers were, but Mum’s mum, Nanna Bennie, became seriously ill and Mum retired from work to take care of her. Mum and I are close as anything, and I missed her when I went back to the US, but she was busy looking after Nan.
With the Athens Olympics coming up, the WNBA season was going to be long, starting in May, breaking for a month for the Olympics, and then finishing up in October. I arrived for pre-season training in April and articles started appearing in the Seattle papers about The Athens Dream in June. It was relatively uncontroversial in Australia, but it created a stir in the US. The week the book was released over there, my player profile page on the WNBA website had 70 000 hits, a 3300 per cent increase from the week before. Not a lot of female athletes had posed nude over there at that time, and it was right on the back of my MVP win. Some people in the US, women in particular, saw it as attention-seeking. There were comments that if you’re a woman in sport you have to get naked to gain attention. It wasn’t that at all. It was both Australian men and women, Olympics athletes, posing for those pictures. I thought it was beautiful, very artsy, displaying amazing bodies. We put so much effort and time into creating these bodies so they can perform, why not show them off?
There was a bit of negativity in the US, but there was also a lot of positivity. Even last time I visited, someone asked me to sign a copy of the book, people still bring them out and get me to sign them. I never did any book signings in Australia, but in the US I think we had two, and there were a lot of people there. The publishers in Australia had to ship books to Seattle, with the money going to charity, there was simply nothing like that in the US at the time. Some people thought it brave, I thought it was worth it. I was definitely out of my comfort zone posing for those photos, but oddly enough that’s often when I do the most rewarding things in my life—when I’m a little bit uncomfortable.
I really did the photo shoot thinking of an Australian audience, here it’s quite prestigious to be asked. But in the US they saw it differently. Tully summed it up beautifully when she spoke with the American media in Seattle, ‘The human body is nothing to be ashamed of’. But perhaps that’s an Australian cultural thing, not an American one.
By the Olympic break at the beginning of August the Storm had won 17 of their 25 games played in the Western Conference, and I headed back to Australia to train with the Opals.
The Opals’ first big tournament leading up to the Olympics was the FIBA Diamond Ball, which from 2000 to 2008 was held each Olympic year just prior to the Olympics. The first tournament had been for men’s teams only, but 2004 and 2008 were for both men and women. Despite the US women’s team being the then-reigning world champions, they didn’t compete. We played in Greece and won, beating China in the finals 74–70, with Brazil coming in third. It was a great start to our 2004 Olympic campaign, we felt ready.