Shelby's Life and Whatnot

We Made the LA Times!

We being my alma mater, that is. High school alma mater--South Torrance High School.

Picture this: it's February, 1990. I'm a junior in high school. Our girl's basketball team consisted of 7 players, most of whom were Asian. The tallest was around 5'6" or 5'7". On the opposite side of our conference was a high school in Inglewood called Morningside. On the Morningside basketball team was a player named Lisa Leslie. You may have heard of her. She's the star member of the Los Angeles Sparks--our local WNBA team. She's also got an Olympic gold medal. And some other accolades and whatnot.

But here we are in 1990. Lisa Leslie's coach (and Leslie herself, actually) decided they wanted her to break the all-time record of points scored in a high school basketball game. The record was 103. They picked sad, pitiful little South High's basketball team. I'm not saying that to be derogatory--we really were rather pitiful. The carefully orchestrated game played out like a nightmare for South. Leslie was given the ball at every opportunity to score points while our players fouled out and played through injuries. At halftime, Leslie had scored 101 points--yes, 2 away from the record! And our players packed up, forfeited the game, and went home. Leslie even had the audacity to ask our coach if we would stick around for one more basket or so so she could make the record. As if.

Sports Illustrated did an article about the incident later, and there were many other articles, pretty much all of them making Leslie out like the victim of a team who were big meanies and didn't want her to get the record. However, 17 years later, our story has been told.

Witness the article in today's LA Times: "They made their stand, simply by walking away."

I have never been so proud to be a Spartan!