The Lisa Leslie statue is officially standing outside Crypto.com Arena, making the Sparks legend the first WNBA player, and the first female professional athlete, honored with a bronze statue in the arena’s Star Plaza.
The statue was unveiled Sunday afternoon before the Sparks’ 105 to 84 win over the Portland Fire. The 11-foot bronze shows Leslie dunking an orange and white WNBA basketball, the same move she made history with in 2002, when she became the first woman to dunk in a WNBA game. Five years earlier, she had missed a dunk attempt in the league’s very first game. Leslie named the statue “The First Lady.”
She joins some of the biggest names in Los Angeles sports history out front, including Kobe Bryant, Magic Johnson, Shaquille O’Neal, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Leslie is the 16th person honored in Star Plaza and the second female, after Gianna Bryant, who is part of the statue honoring her and her father Kobe.
When the cover came off, Leslie’s first reaction was pure Lisa. “First of all, she’s cute,” she said, joking that she had been worried about looking like a linebacker. She explained that she wanted the Lisa Leslie statue to show a fearless competitor while still being feminine, so the bronze has ribbons in her hair and polished nails. She also revealed that her family’s names are on it, a detail she said her relatives probably had not even spotted yet.
The ceremony pulled out Los Angeles basketball royalty. Magic Johnson, James Worthy, Byron Scott, and Michael Cooper of the Showtime Lakers were there, along with former Sparks teammate and fellow Hall of Famer Candace Parker and Leslie’s college coach at USC, Marianne Stanley.
Cooper, who later coached Leslie with the Sparks, told the crowd their paths first crossed in 1994 at a camp he was running in Pasadena. Leslie challenged him to a dunk contest in front of the kids, the winner decided by the applause. She dunked, the kids went crazy, and Cooper lost at his own camp. Magic said she used to come up to UCLA to play against the Lakers because she refused to play with the women and insisted on running with the guys.
Leslie grew up in Compton, and during the ceremony she talked about looking after her siblings while her mother worked as a truck driver. She said she learned early not to quit or make excuses when life got hard, and to take on every challenge in front of her.
That mindset built one of the greatest careers the sport has ever seen. Leslie first made national headlines in 1990 when she scored 101 points in the first half of a high school game. She played all 12 of her WNBA seasons with the Sparks, from the league’s first year in 1997 through 2009, missing only the 2007 season while she was pregnant. She won three league MVP awards, led the Sparks to back-to-back championships in 2001 and 2002, won four Olympic gold medals, and was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2015.
At halftime, Leslie thanked the fans who had been there from the beginning. “This game does not get to where we are today without all of you,” she said, reminding them she never left the arena without signing autographs and taking pictures.
The Lisa Leslie statue opens for public viewing starting Monday.