WOMEN’S BASKETBALL / EARL GUSTKEY : After Leslie’s Future Flashes, Her Present Flickers

It seemed at the time that maybe the short-term future of West Coast women’s basketball was on display Jan. 18 at USC’s Lyon Center.

And to every Pacific 10 coach, except USC’s Marianne Stanley, it was a fearful sight.

On that night, USC’s 6-foot-5 junior center, Lisa Leslie, played the game of her career, one that propelled her Trojans to a 67-55 victory over defending NCAA champion Stanford.

For the first time in her college career, Leslie seized a game by the throat. She scored 27 points, had 14 rebounds and blocked three shots. Against one of the best teams in the nation, she dominated the game under both backboards.

But her game that night didn’t engender respect or admiration from Pac-10 coaches.

They felt fear.

“That’s what we’ve been afraid of all this time,” said Stanford Coach Tara VanDerveer, “that Lisa would start stringing together monster games like that, one after the other. If she starts doing that. . . .”

There was no need to finish the sentence, and she didn’t. She simply shrugged.

But there is no need to cancel the rest of the Pac-10 schedule, either. Leslie has played well since Jan. 18, but she hasn’t played another monster game.

Pete Newell, the former California coach and present-day basketball guru who runs off-season technique camps for NBA and college players, worked with Leslie at a woman’s camp last summer at the U.S. Olympic Committee training center in Colorado Springs, Colo.

Fifteen women post players, all 6-4 or taller, attended.

“She’s a remarkable talent,” Newell said recently.

“In fact, my only criticism of her is that she doesn’t really understand how talented she is. When she figures that out, she’ll reach heights far above where her game is now.

“And I think at center she’ll always be almost out of position. If she’s ever on an Olympic team, I’m sure it’ll be at forward. She’d have even more rebounds at forward, with smaller players guarding her.”

To Newell, basketball is a game in which the most important body parts are those closest to the floor.

So, he likes Leslie’s size-12 feet as much as her 6-5 stature.

“At the women’s camp last summer, and at all my camps, we do a lot of work with the feet,” he said. “We do it at our NBA camps, too. Basketball is a game played 90% of the time with the feet, 10% with the hands.

“And a lot of coaches never understand that players are left- and right-footed, just as they’re left- and right-handed. That should be taken into account in whatever you ask a player to do.

“We worked with Lisa and the other big women (the tallest camper was Vanderbilt’s Heidi Gillingham at 6-9) on holding the ball high in the air, not bringing it down where smaller players can knock it away, and on using their feet correctly to set screens, block out, rebound and shoot.

“We helped them learn how not to get in situations where they have to jump off the wrong foot. That causes them to ‘float’ in the air and be more likely to get their shot blocked.”

Leslie is in her third NCAA season since she was the nation’s most-sought high school prospect at Morningside High in Inglewood.

She hears observers such as Newell saying her greatest games are ahead of her and she wonders . . . when? Will she be the Wilt Chamberlain of women’s basketball?

And when will she dunk a ball in a game, as she does often in practice?

“I feel pressure. I know a lot is expected of me,” she said recently.

“I felt it in high school, too. It didn’t start when I got to SC. It hasn’t gotten to the point where I dread playing. I really do love basketball. But I do get into some situations where I feel, no matter what I do, I can’t help my team. And that’s very frustrating.”

She’s talking about officiating. Leslie has fouled out 21 times during her USC career, four times this season. After her big game against Stanford on Jan. 18, Leslie was in immediate foul trouble a weekend later at Palo Alto, where she wound up playing 13 minutes and USC lost, 76-67.

She plays an aggressive defensive game, but Stanley and other Pac-10 coaches--VanDerveer, for instance--believe she’s often whistled for calls for which other players would not be cited.

Leslie is one of her game’s best-known performers--and also one of its biggest fans. Nationally, attendance is up almost everywhere for women’s college basketball. In the Pac-10, women’s teams at Stanford and Washington are out-drawing the men.

“I’m always asking people I meet to come to our games,” Leslie said. “Then they come to me afterward and they always say the same thing--’Hey, I didn’t know you could play that good.’ ”

And the dunk?

“I really want to do it, but I also feel time is starting to run out,” she said.

“I practice it every week. It’s becoming more and more important to me.”

She is happy at SC--except when discussing referees--and seems happiest that her mother and sisters attend her home games.

Her mother, Christine, is a truck driver who hauls three or four tanker loads of coconut oil from Vernon to the City of Industry every day. Leslie’s sisters, Dionne, 25, and Tiffany, 12, also attend the home games. Her father died when she was 12.

Christine Leslie calls her daughter “a beautiful person with a beautiful personality.”

And among Leslie’s teammates, too, there is a special feeling for the woman who plays the game with a special blend of grace and power.

After the loss at Stanford, USC starter Joni Easterly, probably the Pac-10’s best all-around player, was nearly moved to tears when defending her teammate.

“None of you can possibly understand the kind of pressure Lisa plays under every night,” she told a group of Bay Area sportswriters.

“You just don’t know how hard it is to be Lisa. Everything she does is so closely scrutinized, every little move.”