The Boom YearS

It could be a morning flight to Houston or the red-eye to New York. Doesn’t matter. The other passengers are bound to stare.

Maybe they are struck by the sight of this woman, all 6-foot-5 of her, curled into an airplane seat. The curve of her neck, those broad shoulders that narrow to sleek hips, the impossible length of her legs.

Or maybe they catch her attention and she smiles. She has a particular way of doing this, ducking her head ever so slightly and making her eyes a little bigger. “Puppy dog eyes,” she says.

Her smile is a clue, like the earrings she wears and her carefully applied lipstick. This face has been everywhere the last few years, on the cover of Sports Illustrated and in Vogue, on sitcoms and game shows and 10 feet tall on a billboard along La Cienega Boulevard.

So the other passengers might recognize her, or at least suspect that she is someone famous. But that is not why they stare. They stare because the extraordinary woman in the first-class cabin is hunched over a child’s coloring book. “With my 96-box of crayons,” she says. Her favorite colors are orange, blue and gray.

“Gray is pretty,” she says. “You’d be surprised.”

*

Lisa Leslie is full of surprises.

Watch her run the floor as the center for the Los Angeles Sparks, so graceful for her size. While critics have questioned her toughness, her willingness to bang under the boards, no one doubts the talent that has made her a superstar in the fledgling Women’s National Basketball Assn. It shows in the way she catches the ball along the baseline, spins and sinks another jump shot.

“Pick any superlative you want,” says Frank Layden, who now consults for the WNBA after eight years of coaching the Utah Jazz and watching the big men of the NBA. “Lisa is a streamliner,” he says. “She was absolutely built to play this game.”

But basketball is only part of the deal. A new era has dawned on women’s sports, a move beyond the traditional confines of golf and figure skating, beyond tennis players in little skirts and gymnasts in leotards. Now Mia Hamm gets wall-to-wall television exposure at the women’s World Cup and amateur hockey player Cammi Granato gets endorsement deals. Now the towering Leslie can use that body, those eyes, to grab her own piece of pop stardom.

The billboards and the guest shots on “Moesha” have done more than boost her income above $1 million a year. They have transformed her into an icon for all those little girls who come to the Great Western Forum wearing yellow Sparks jerseys with her name across their backs. Leslie is a symbol for a generation of females discovering they can sweat and grapple and throw elbows while still being glamorous. Says game-show host Whoopi Goldberg, who recently had her as a guest on “Hollywood Squares”: “I wish she’d been around when I was a kid.”

No wonder fans expect Leslie to behave like a star. They expect her to be cocky and ambitious and, as her longtime boyfriend says, “flashy.” Instead, they get the coloring book. She likes big pictures because it’s easier to stay inside the lines. Even the people closest to her--players, coaches, agents--are continually amazed by the childlike innocence of this 27-year-old woman.

The smile. The soft voice. The schoolgirl etiquette. “Very proper with everything,” says Nikki McCray, a star for the Washington Mystics and a teammate on the U.S. national squad. “Saying thank you, opening doors for you, the way she eats.”

Don’t expect Leslie to explain. Cautious by nature, given to long pauses, she speaks of the rules her mother taught her and the Christian principles she learned in church. Finally, she says, “I’m not so good at talking off the top of my head.”

The truth emerges in small, unspoken ways.

*

Start with a seventh-grader who was 6 feet tall. The other kids called her Stick and Beanstalk and Olive Oyl, names that could drive a girl to tears.

Especially a girl like Leslie. She grew up in houses in Compton and Carson and Inglewood that at various times included two sisters, four half-brothers, one half-sister and a couple of cousins. This family both protected and bedeviled a child who was the admitted “scaredy cat” of the bunch, who hated to wrestle or get dirty, hated arguments, always went running to mother. Leslie says: “My mother provided the comfort.”

Christine Leslie-Espinoza stands 6-foot-3 and can make people smile by the sheer force of her giggle, a mirth that cannot be contained by the hand she holds demurely over her mouth. Her words are kind and her eyes have a way of changing from brown to green with the shifting light, but this sunny facade masks a toughness, the grit required to raise a family on her own.

A postal worker for many years, Christine switched careers more than a decade ago after meeting a trucker. “He seemed to have a lot of money,” she said. “I thought, ‘I want some of that.’ ” Learning to drive an 18-wheeler, she made short and long hauls. She wanted her children to see that she could provide.

“I wanted all my kids to walk with their chin up,” she says. “It was tougher with Lisa because she was so tall.”

When schoolmates taunted Lisa, Christine told her: “Your feet are big, but they are beautiful feet.” Or, “You’re so tall because you are going to be a model.” When Lisa dressed in the morning, Christine grabbed a spoon or a hairbrush--whatever was handy--to announce her entrance into the living room as if it were a fashion show. It seemed like a game at the time, but Lisa now realizes “my mom was preparing me to be different.”

Sitting before the mirror, she practiced her smile, her lips parting to show just enough teeth, not too much, and her chin staying cautiously down. She practiced her signature too, starting with manuscript letters and graduating to a big, looping cursive.

Someday you will be famous, Lisa told herself. She dreamed of becoming a model or a television weather announcer.

*

“Why don’t you play basketball?”

Every tall kid hears that question, and Leslie heard it often enough to grow resentful. Even when junior high classmates persuaded her to join the team, she warned them: “The first time I fall down, I’m quitting.” She never fell down.

Nor did she fall in love with the game, not at first. But she was tall enough and coordinated enough to make layups over the other kids, and that kept her playing. The following summer, a cousin named Craig Simpson took her to the gym and taught her the basics. “On defense, you bend your knees,” Leslie says. “When you shoot the ball, aim for the square on the backboard. Simple things like that. I remember having this conscious thought: If I listen and just follow instructions, I will be successful.”

The game drew her in, comforting her with its straight lines, its rules and strategy. A place for everything and everything in its place. For the first time, Leslie felt sure of herself outside of home.

At Morningside High School, she practiced with the girls team in the early afternoon, stuck around to scrimmage against the boys until dusk, then jumped rope and did push-ups. “I don’t even remember having time to go to church that year,” she says. Her sophomore season, Morningside went to the state championship game.

“There were four seconds left on the clock and we were losing,” Leslie says. “I was standing right under the basket. We would run this play where they would lob me the ball and I would catch it and score. We’d done it all year long.”

Even when rattling off a memory, Leslie chooses her words. “Well,” she says, “they lobbed me the ball and I missed the shot.”

A year earlier, she might have cried. This time she went home and made a list of goals: grab more rebounds, get a B plus average in school, win a state title. Morningside did just that the following season, in a game not nearly close enough to require a last-second shot. Leslie earned good grades and made All-American.

There were no role models then, no professional league, no women players with their faces on billboards, but Leslie got a taste of notoriety when local television crews came to interview her. She videotaped her spots on the evening news, going back to count every “uh” and every instance when her eyes wandered. She made rules that she observes to this day: pause before answering, formulate a response that can be delivered in 10 to 15 seconds, stick to the point.

The tall girl no longer got teased. She ran for student body president and won. “I didn’t slouch,” she says. “Basketball taught me that.”

*

Each season, Morningside coach Frank Scott chose one game to, as he put it, “let a senior shine.” In 1990, the senior was Leslie and the game was against South Torrance High.

At tip-off, South Torrance had six players on the floor. By late in the second quarter, two of them had fouled out. Meanwhile, Morningside passed the ball again and again to Leslie, who was trying for the national high school record of 105 points in a game. The mark is held by Cheryl Miller, who, after high school, won two national championships at USC and was considered the best female player ever.

By the end of the first quarter, Leslie had 49 points.

It was no parade of layups. Two and three defenders jumped at her every time she touched the ball. Her lip was cut and bleeding. But the opposition was hopelessly outmatched.

By the end of the first half, Morningside led 102-24 and Leslie had 101 of those points.

She still defends going for the record, even if it meant embarrassing a weak opponent. Her beloved rules supply the justification: “It’s not like we cheated. We just played the game.” And when South Torrance quit at halftime, Leslie asked the opposing coach to continue just a few more minutes, just enough for her to score five more points. South Torrance refused. Leslie told reporters she was heartbroken.

There is an old saying that any publicity is good publicity. That game put Leslie on the map, but it also put her at the focus of school hearings and newspaper commentaries about sportsmanship. The stigma lingered, in another form, when she left to play at USC in 1991. “She would have 16 points and 10 rebounds and four blocked shots and people would say, ‘What do you mean? Isn’t this the girl who scored 101 points?’ ” says Marianne Stanley, the USC coach at the time. “It became an albatross. People expected her to score 50 points a night.”

They expected her to be another Cheryl Miller. Leslie made All-American three times in four seasons and was national player of the year in 1994 but could not lead the Trojans to a title. “What was frustrating about college was that not everybody bought into the philosophy of working hard,” she says. “The last game of the season, I’d look around the locker room and everybody’s crying. I wouldn’t cry because I already knew . . . we lost because of what we didn’t do in the preseason, in practices, the weights we were supposed to lift but didn’t.”

The timid girl had grown quietly fierce. Another side of her emerged when teammates failed to embrace the rules and principles she held so dear. Be early to practice. Run hard. Follow the coach’s game plan (which, by the way, almost always put Leslie at the focus of the team’s offense). “She wants to know exactly how things work,” says Nell Fortner, coach of the U.S. national team. “She needs that sense of order.”

This trait has been tested, especially in the previous two seasons, as the Sparks--much like their counterparts, the Lakers--have often looked disjointed while struggling to win. Leslie has questioned herself: “Is it me? What can I do better?” She has barked at teammates in practice. “I’m not trying to be Miss Goody Two-Shoes or anything,” she says. “But I really believe that about sports. These are the rules and you demand them from everyone.”

Such is her stature that teammates have never barked back, at least not openly. The only time Leslie has suffered negative publicity--apart from that high school game--was in her senior season at USC, when Stanley left the university over a money dispute. Leslie voiced support for her coach and butted heads with Stanley’s replacement, none other than Miller.

It was an unfortunate piece of business and, after college, Leslie eased out of the spotlight for a while. She spent a season in Italy, playing professionally, learning the language from a neighbor. The experience made her tougher under the basket. Off the court, it made her homesick.

“You know what they say . . . joy and sorrow are never far apart,” she says. “But I had some really good food.”

*

Then came the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. The u.s. women were suddenly a hot commodity with sellout crowds and a Nike commercial of their own. They got so much attention that NBC switched their semifinal game from a late-night slot to prime time.

In those glorious two weeks, Leslie established herself as one of the best players on earth, scoring 35 points against Japan--a U.S. Olympic record--and 29 against Brazil in the championship game. The gold medal still ranks as her greatest achievement, though she cannot recall whether it is in a safe-deposit box or her sock drawer. More victories waited off the court.

That summer, the NBA laid plans for a women’s league and wanted Leslie badly enough to offer a personal services contract estimated at $300,000--a pittance in the men’s league, big money for a woman. At the same time, she was on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s pre-Olympic issue and appeared in Vogue, one of several athletes photographed by Herb Ritts. While not a prototypical model--her features not quite striking enough, her body not quite lithe--she had that smile and those eyes and, as she explains, “people are shocked that I’m so tall and I wear a size 6.” Wilhelmina Models signed her to a contract and she auditioned for magazine spreads and fashion shows.

“They’re called ‘go-sees,’ ” she says. “They see you do a walk, you may try on an outfit, they look through your book. Then it’s ‘Next.’ ”

Some auditions went well, Leslie doing the walk she did as a child in the living room, but as time wore on there were outright rejections. She ended up in tears one day, in a telephone booth, calling mom for a few comforting words. “The modeling business is not about being attractive, it’s about being photogenic,” says Natasha Esch-Coffin, a vice president at Wilhelmina. “Your face just has that sense. When you take a picture, something just comes out.”

Wilhelmina and Leslie eventually parted ways. Esch-Coffin says: “Lisa is not somebody who would make it in a modeling career if she weren’t an athlete.”

That did not bother Leonard Armato, the Southern California sports agent who positioned Laker center Shaquille O’Neal as a rap singer and erstwhile movie superhero. He quickly signed Leslie because he saw similar crossover potential. “There are plenty of beautiful women out there,” he says. But how many of them can hit the open jumper from 15 feet? How many can dunk? Armato smelled endorsement dollars.

“Companies are becoming more and more aware that the female consumer is important,” Armato says. “And maybe a way to attract that consumer is through the female athlete.”

Leslie is a promising candidate. Even as the Sparks struggled through two subpar seasons, she ranked near the top of the league in scoring, rebounds and blocked shots. This summer she led the team to a winning record and was named the most valuable player in the league’s first all-star game. Equally important, she is an athlete who makes a point of saying, “I wear lipstick and fingernail polish 90% of the day.” Above all, she is well-behaved.

“She gets what she wants but she does it in such a way that she makes everybody feel good at the end of the day,” says Bruce Binkow, who helps direct her career from Armato’s office. “So many athletes can have that ‘I, me, mine’ mentality. Lisa cares about how other people feel.”

Ten sponsors ranging from Nike to Sears to Lawry’s Seasoned Salt have signed her up. She has done “Moesha” and “The Tonight Show” and “Sister, Sister” twice. She has done an American Express billboard and one of those magazine ads in which famous people have milk mustaches. It is uncanny the way Leslie has learned to work the camera, muscles loosening across her back and arms, shoulders tilting a little closer to the lens. When Nike asked her to pose nude for a television commercial, her body barely obscured, she agreed. It is not something she cares to mention, but she did it.

“She’s very poised,” Binkow says. “I mean, here is a 6-foot-5 woman who wears high heels.”

So why does she still get nervous walking through the mall?

Like many big-time athletes, Leslie craves big crowds. Like many players in the new breed of women’s sport, she appreciates the attention from fans and media, taking time for autographs and interviews. But all that changes when she steps off the court.

If people recognize her on the street, if they point or stare as they sometimes do, Leslie walks a little faster and tugs her boyfriend, Todd Bradley, by the arm, whispering; “Go, go, go.” There is a tangible relief when she steps inside the door of her house in Los Angeles. She does a little dance, something between a hop, skip and a jump. Everything is safe at home and everyone follows the rules. No shoes on the white carpet. No messing up the mirrors and glass brick. No arguing.

“If you start arguing,” she says, “it’s time to leave.”

Home is for relaxing. For watching television with Bradley, a counselor at UCLA, or eating Frosted Flakes or hanging out with her mom. They remain nearly inseparable, seemingly incapable of sitting side by side without draping their arms around each other. This is where the contradictions melt away. “I am totally my mother’s daughter,” Leslie says.

This is where it begins to make sense, her acting like a kid. Simplicity and innocence may, in fact, be the secrets to her success. She works hard at the game she loves. She keeps hold of her sweetness. “She’s still a little girl at heart,” says Stanley, the college coach who still thinks of her as a daughter. And this vein runs so deep through Leslie that success has not changed her, not yet.

If only the other passengers on the plane knew. Listen to Bradley, the tall and soft-spoken boyfriend, explain: “Everything with Lisa is simple.”

The smile. The coloring book and her favorite crayons. Orange, blue and gray.

You’d be surprised.