Nancy Lieberman

Origins and early life

Nancy Lieberman was born in Brooklyn on 1 July 1958 and grew up Jewish in Far Rockaway, in Queens, raised by her mother, and learned the game on New York playground courts.

Work and career

At eighteen, at the Montreal games of 1976, she became the youngest basketball player in Olympic history to win a medal, taking silver with the United States. At Old Dominion she won two national championships, in 1979 and 1980, and became the first player to take the Wade Trophy twice; the playgrounds had already called her Lady Magic. In 1986 she signed with the Springfield Fame of the United States Basketball League and became the first woman to play in a men's professional league, and in 1988 the first woman to go out on tour against the Harlem Globetrotters.

She played the first WNBA season for the Phoenix Mercury at thirty-nine, and came back in 2008, at fifty, for seven days with the Detroit Shock, which makes her the oldest player the league has had. She coached the Shock, then in 2009 became the first woman to head a men's professional team with the Texas Legends, and in 2015 joined the Sacramento Kings as an assistant, among the first women to coach in the NBA.

Recognition

The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame took her in 1996 and the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999, and she is a member of the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame as well.