The 14,284 fans at the Great Western Forum on June 21, 1997, held their breath as Lisa Leslie got in front of the defense and charged toward the basket. The crowd was already witnessing history as the Los Angeles Sparks hosted the New York Liberty for the first game in WNBA history. But now, midway through the first half, with nothing but runway between Leslie and the basket, they were on the brink of witnessing immortality.
Leslie, who barely slept a wink the night before due to nerves, wasn’t planning on dunking that day, but had dunked before. As she dribbled toward the open basket, she pondered: Do I do it? Do I not do it? At the last second, she leaped in the air, knowing how big it would be for the nascent league if she could debunk one of the most common criticisms of the sport on such a monumental stage.
And then she ran right into the front of the rim.
“I thought it would be big for women’s basketball,” Leslie mentioned after the game, an all-around sloppy affair that the Liberty won 67-57.
On Sunday night, the Liberty will return to Los Angeles to face the Sparks exactly 29 years and 30 seasons later. Looking back at that inaugural game and the coverage around it, it’s overwhelming how much was on the shoulders of these pioneers, and how openly so many were rooting against them. And yet, despite all of that, the league hasn’t just survived, it has thrived. Players are signing multi-million-dollar deals, franchise valuations are averaging $427 million and ratings and attendance numbers are soaring.
In this instance, it turns out the adage is right: Pressure does make diamonds. Sometimes it just takes a while.
‘The burden of carrying the league’
The NBA formed the WNBA on the heels of the U.S. women’s national basketball team’s success and popularity at the 1996 Olympics. When the WNBA launched, there were only eight teams and a 28-game schedule. The first game — which featured two of the league’s three marquee stars, Leslie for the Sparks and Rebecca Lobo for the Liberty — was broadcast live on NBC after a months-long advertising campaign by the NBA and Nike.
There had been multiple attempts to launch a professional women’s basketball league in the years since Title IX, and all had swiftly gone kaput. Those failures hung in the air that day in Los Angeles, alongside well-vocalized doubts that women’s basketball was worth watching, let alone investing in.
It’s more than understandable that the game itself was, as even Lobo admitted, an “ugly” affair. Lobo led the Liberty with 16 points, six boards, three assists and three blocks while Leslie had 16 points, 14 rebounds and two blocks for the Sparks. But Leslie only shot 35.3% on the day — a notch above her team’s 30.9% — and had seven turnovers, while Lobo shot 40%.
“I did feel the burden of carrying the league,” Leslie admitted after the game.
“It was a relief to get the first game behind us,” Lobo mentioned. “We can calm down now and go out and play the way we know how to play. I think everyone had the jitters … It wasn’t the prettiest thing out there and a lot of the players were nervous, but the important thing for us is that we stuck it out and we came away with the victory.”
(Prematurely) penning the league’s downfall
While the game might not have been the best showcase of the teams’ talent — season openers rarely are, let alone league openers — there were signs everywhere that people cared. The attendance nearly doubled the Sparks’ expectations just days prior, and 3.7 million people tuned in to watch the game. The players fought hard and were dialed in. Fans were enthralled.
But that hardly mattered to many in the media — especially male sports columnists — who were already penning the WNBA’s downfall.
“Let’s face it, describing someone as a WNBA superstar does not make her the kind of star that many people will ever bother to locate,” Vic Ziegel wrote in the New York Daily News. “The league is already two days old and there’s still no sign of a Lisa Leslie T-shirt. Two years from now, who knows where Lisa Leslie, the WNBA’s best chance for a breakout star, will be? Two more years, who can be sure what the initials WNBA will stand for?”
Hanging over it all was this question posed by Bernie Lincicome of the Chicago Tribune: “This [league] is programmed to succeed, and if it does not, how far back will women’s sports be set?”
Thanks to the foundation set by Leslie, Lobo and so many others, that question never needed to be answered.
Thirty and thriving
Everything about the WNBA has grown substantially since that opening tipoff between Leslie and Kym Hampton of the Liberty. In the first season, the maximum salary was $50,000. This year, they’re $1.4 million. There were 28 games back in 1997; this year, there are 44, and the league revealed just this week that it will expand to 50 games in 2027 and likely 52 in 2029. The playoffs that first year were a single-elimination, Final Four format. Today, the championship series alone is best-of-seven. An eight-team league has grown to 15, and will be 18 by 2030.
Success is rarely a straight line, and that’s certainly been the case for the WNBA. In fact, the WNBA is lucky that the Sparks and Liberty played in that inaugural game. Four of the original franchises have folded and one (Utah Starzz) moved to a new city and changed its name (Las Vegas Aces).
There are still doubters at every turn — though now that the newspaper sports columnist is a dying breed, they’ve been reincarnated as social media commenters and hot-take artists on YouTube — and players still carry the weight of women’s sports with them in every game. But thanks to a $3.1 billion television deal, a historic new CBA that includes revenue sharing and a $7 million salary cap, and an influx of billionaires bidding for WNBA expansion teams, the weight these days is more motivating than it is crushing.
Leslie went on to play 12 WNBA seasons, all with the Sparks. She led her team to back-to-back championships in 2001 and 2002, was a three-time MVP and is still a household name.
Five years after that opening game, Leslie became the first player to successfully dunk in a WNBA game on July 30, 2002. That time, as she drove to the rim against the Miami Sol, she wasn’t thinking about the history at all — she was angry that her team was losing and threw it down. She didn’t even realize what she’d done until the crowd reacted.
Similarly, on Sunday night, Breanna Stewart and the Liberty will be focused on righting the ship after a stunning loss to the Washington Mystics on Friday, while the Sparks will hope that their leading scorer, Kelsey Plum, is healthy enough to play.
The players and coaches will, I’m sure, be aware of the historical nature of their meeting and appreciate its significance. But their primary concern will be basketball, just as it should be.
That is a victory 30 seasons in the making.
