BEIJING – You could hear her coming from the clinking.
Lisa Leslie moved about the Olympic Basketball Gymnasium with four gold medals jangling gently around her neck. She sounded like a set of wind chimes in a soft breeze.
She looked like the portrait of serenity, singing and swaying through “The Star-Spangled Banner,” posing with her prizes from Atlanta, Sydney, Athens and Beijing, savoring her quadrennial bliss for all the world to see.
“This wasn't my wildest dream,” said the high priestess of women's hoops. “My wildest dream was just to play in one Olympics to represent my country. I thought I was retired after the '96 Olympics.”
Associated Press
Are four Olympic gold medals enough for Lisa Leslie?
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Twelve years later, Leslie says she's now had enough; that Team USA's 92-65 gold medal rout of Australia would be her last Olympic game.
We are just going to have to see about that.
Less than two months past her 36th birthday, the author of the WNBA's first dunk is still a formidable presence in the women's game. Though she fouled out of the gold-medal game with 6:33 remaining, Leslie was responsible for 14 points and seven rebounds, and completed her fourth Olympic tournament with the second-highest field-goal percentage and the second-most blocked shots in the field.
If she walks away for good, it will be voluntary. You just don't find that many 6-foot-5 women with Lisa Leslie's skills and her savvy.
“I keep telling her she could get five (gold medals),” teammate Candace Parker said. “I'm still going to nag her about playing in her fifth one. And I'm very persuasive.”
Leslie needed some convincing to compete in China. She has a 1-year-old daughter, and missed the 2007 WNBA season to maternity leave. Like a lot of working moms, she has developed different priorities and has compartmentalized her career.
She wasn't sure that she needed the aggravation, or how compatible she might be with younger teammates.
“That's what really scared me about coming back, honestly, to play with a younger group,” Leslie said. “I was like, 'Oh, man, I hope they're not about themselves, thinking about points, and all that.' And I could not have been more wrong about what these young ladies were about.
“It was all about team for every minute, every second.”
Like their male counterparts, America's women's basketball players are so skilled and so deep that they have been competing mainly against their own potential. Their margin of victory averaged 43 points in five pool-play games, and they mauled their medal-round opponents by 44, 15 and 27 points.
“We started off well,” Australian coach Jan Stirling said early yesterday (San Diego time). “But then the U.S. had a timeout and put the clapper on us.”
The U.S. women could have won without Lisa Leslie. They might have won playing four-on-five. Their Olympic winning streak stands at 33 games, dates to 1992, and has no foreseeable end.
On the team bus trip to the gold medal game, Leslie told her teammates that they would hear their anthem twice before the night was through – once in pregame ceremonies and again during the medals ceremony.
She was so confident in the outcome that she had asked her husband to deliver her other medals from Dallas during team processing in Palo Alto.
“I just had that in my head (that) I'm going to have four gold medals and I'm going to put them all on and wear them on the medals stand,” Leslie said. “They asked me to put the (others) up until I received the fourth one first.”
She had carried three gold medals to China in a satin bag, rolled up neatly with their colored sashes. She generally keeps them concealed in a safe deposit box, mindful that the more they are touched, the more they are tarnished.
“They are not real gold,” Leslie explained. “(So) don't come after me for these medals. They're just gold-plated.”
Their value, of course, is not intrinsic, but symbolic. Teresa Edwards, a five-time U.S. Olympian between 1984 and 2000, is the only other basketball player of either gender to earn four gold medals. It is a feat that takes some doing.
“If I'm alive and kicking, I'll go for four,” said U.S. guard Diana Taurasi, a two-time gold medalist. “Just to see Lisa with it, it's an inspiration for anyone in the Olympics.”
When she's wearing all of her medals, just hearing Lisa Leslie works the same way. Clink. Clink. Clink. Clink.
Tim Sullivan: (619) 293-1033; tim.sullivan@uniontrib.com
