Reign Woman -- Seattle's Top Pick Storms To U.S., Full Of Fire, Fury For New League

The little girl in the picture is destined for a difficult childhood. Her legs, already misshapen, will throb and torture her. Her size, arriving via some biological installment plan gone haywire, will invite ridicule.

The little girl in the picture is about 5 years old. She knows little of what is to come. So she smiles broadly, exposing buckteeth and a hopeful innocence.

The little girl in the picture is Venus Lacy, conqueror - of most that has been laid in her path. The picture tells her this, more clearly than anything else.

"I get teary eyed, looking at that picture," Lacy says. "It brings back great memories. People ask me how they can be great memories. I tell them that the memories are from now, and that I'm looking at myself and all that I went through since that picture was taken."

All of those battles have prepared her for this one. After six years overseas and a lifetime under siege, Venus Lacy is bunkered down on U.S. soil, in a fledgling circuit called the American Basketball League, with the Seattle Reign. At stake is the viability of women's professional basketball in this country.

For this quest, Lacy engages all the fire and fury she usually conjures on a basketball court, and all the grace and charm she usually musters off. It is passing out printed home schedules at Thompson's Point of View in the heart of Seattle's Central District on a recent evening. It is then spreading the word at Philly's Best sandwich shop on the corner, and at the liquor store across the street.

She wonders if they hear her. Then again, she also doubts if they know her. Invariably, they do. "Miss Lacy," they say, often a child in tow, "we must have your autograph."

A part of Venus Lacy tells her she was put on this planet to do something great, that all the suffering she has endured has been a series of tests that have prepared her for this one shot. And something about Lacy tells you she will succeed, because success has followed her as doggedly as has the suffering.

Lacy has won basketball championships at the city, state, national and world levels. She has a very specific checklist for her life. She wanted to be married by 28 - check. She wants a college degree by 30 - close to a check. She wants kids by 34 - well, take that up with her husband, Harry. She also wanted an Olympic gold medal and, while she didn't get one in 1992 as she expected, she got one in 1996.

Now Lacy wants a professional women's league to succeed in her country.

Check?

"I'm glad she's playing," says Stanford's Tara VanDerveer, who coached Lacy on the 1996 U.S. Olympic team. "She adds a lot of legitimacy to the league. She's a big-time player."

A Reign teammate, Christy Hedgpeth, who was a former rival at Stanford, says, "There's really no one who's her equal, in terms of size. She has the most physical presence of anyone I've ever played against."

The Reign and the ABL should be glad to have her on their side. She's their Venus. She's their fire, their desire.

Lacy is quick to smile so broadly that it often appears the grin will pop right off her face. Sometimes the smile pops away, her head stops bobbing and her fingers start darting at invisible targets.

That's when you know you're in trouble. While at Auburn, the Reign's Linda Godby played Lacy and Louisiana Tech three straight years in the NCAA Final Four. When Lacy gets her dander up, Godby says, "It's a little frightening. Playing against her, I felt like I was a pinball, flying all over the place."

Lacy says she will allow her opponent to set the tenor of an encounter. She also says she knows two wrongs don't make a right. She likes to add, "But they sho' do make things even."

A lot of scores have been settled over the course of Lacy's 29 years, including several with her maker. Lacy was born with legs so cruelly deformed that she wore corrective braces until she was in the fourth grade. Her brother, Scott, often carried her piggyback the four or five blocks to and from school, where the kids taunted her for being different.

Once, Lacy tried getting a doll off the top of a dresser. The dresser fell on top of her and she laid trapped underneath for hours. She remained silent the whole time, afraid of calling attention to the consequences of disobeying her mother, Dorothy.

The silence lingered. Lacy overcame a speech impediment. Then the growth began. Already painfully self-conscious, she asked her mother when it would stop. It didn't. By the time she was in the ninth grade, Lacy was 6 feet tall, and so awkward she was cut from the volleyball team. She began fearing she would hurt someone.

Basketball then seemed out of the question. Lacy is the eighth of 10 children, enough for a decent five-on-five run. However, "even my sisters and brother didn't want to play with me in the backyard games," Lacy recalls. "They'd pick my mother and father before they'd pick me."

Unlike her limp and her slowed speech, size would stay with Lacy. In P.E., the boys refused to square dance with her and she had to partner up with a coach. Many a time, she'd run to Beth Donahue's home economics class at Brainerd High in Chattanooga, Tenn., and break down.

"She was so big and clumsy, she stood out," Donahue says. "But she was a special child and sometimes people didn't see that."

Marianne Stanley may or may not have been one of those people. She recruited Lacy to Old Dominion the year after the 6-foot-4 center led Brainerd to the state championship. For reasons the two dispute, Lacy transferred to Louisiana Tech after just one year.

By then, Lacy had accumulated a reputation for trouble. She was deemed moody, uncoachable and an unreliable student. Leon Barmore at Tech was one of the few who would take her.

"When I left Old Dominion, my confidence was really low," Lacy says. "There was nothing I could do to please Coach Stanley. She took away from my confidence so bad. . . . But I'm not saying it's her fault. I can't blame her. I wasn't willing to bend for her and she wasn't going to bend for me."

Stanley says she underestimated the adjustment Lacy had to make, being away from home for the first time. She also believes Lacy's high-school experience didn't prepare her for the rigors and expectations of a top-10 program. Finally, there was the issue of size.

"As with every tall player I've ever coached, she is an extremely sensitive person," says Stanley, now at California. "Venus can't walk into a room and blend into the scenery. That's a huge burden for anyone to handle.

"Everyone has probably looked at Venus as just a basketball player. She's much more than that. And she's very attuned to that."

So was Barmore.

"One thing I know about big people is that you have to be patient," he says. "You have to teach every day. You have to be patient every day."

Barmore had to rebuild Lacy's confidence in both basketball and life. "I was afraid to be the Venus I knew I could be," Lacy says. But that changed. She sat out a season because of the transfer, then returned to basketball with a vengeance, helping Tech to a national championship in 1988.

Louisiana Tech returned to the Final Four in each of Lacy's final two seasons there. During her senior year, she was undeniably the most feared player in the game. She averaged 24.2 points and 12.7 rebounds that season and was the consensus national player of the year.

Lacy's stay at the pinnacle of women's basketball was short-lived, however. Just two years later, she was an unsuspecting victim the first time the axe fell during tryouts for the 1992 U.S. Olympic team. She was devastated, resigned to kissing her gold-medal aspirations goodbye.

That same year, Lacy was shorted $69,000 in salary from an Italian professional-league team. A couple of years earlier, she'd slept through an earthquake in Osaka, realizing it only after frantic knocks from teammates jerked her into consciousness. That was when she noticed her bed had moved from a corner to the middle of her room. Otherwise, the money dispute in Italy had been the first glitch in Lacy's overseas career.

Still, Lacy was souring on the international experience and during a Christmas break in 1995, she seriously considered not returning to her team in Greece. Meanwhile, VanDerveer's 1996 Olympic team was criss-crossing the country, leaving a string of vanquished college squads in its wake. All the while, she couldn't help lamenting the absence of an inside enforcer.

"I thought about Venus every day," VanDerveer says.

A few months later, Lacy received a shocking phone call in Greece. USA Basketball was inviting her and five other post players to an extended tryout for the Olympic team. Excited but apprehensive, Lacy accepted.

During the pressure-packed weeks that followed, Lacy says, "I felt like I was on trial." Representing herself well, Lacy earned a positive verdict. And all the mishaps and misgivings of the past melted away in that one glorious decision.

VanDerveer didn't engineer the choice, but she applauded it. Even more so after Lacy put the clamps on Brazil's Marta de Souza Sobral, who had exploded on Lisa Leslie during the early minutes of the gold-medal game in Atlanta. Afterward, Lacy's joyous celebrating was captured on the covers of sports sections across the country, and the street in front of Brainerd High in Chattanooga was renamed Venus Lacy Parkway.

The once-circuitous road on which Venus Lacy is traveling, now seems headed straight for history. To play in the ABL, Lacy makes $120,000, having turned down $250,000 from a team in Madrid. She conceivably could have made another $50,000 to $100,000 playing in the women's NBA, which launches next summer.

But what Lacy's life has taught her is that taking a charge now sets up something better down the road. It happened to her, time and time again. She hates the fact that her best friend, Penny Toler, the former Long Beach State star, feels like she has to play in Israel, or that her children, yet unborn, or other female players yet unborn, might have to travel halfway around the world to hoop.

Now, Lacy is pumping iron at a gym in Fremont. "I must have my strength," she says. Lacy is 29 and says, "My clock is ticking." She hears the pattering feet of Ramika McGee, Bridgette Mikes and Tamisha Burts approaching. They are her oldest nieces, all basketball players.

"I'm doing this now," Lacy says of helping to establish women's professional basketball in the U.S., "so they don't have to do this later. I'm doing this for them."

She's doing it for all the little girls in the pictures who know little of what is to come.