"I'm pretty much blown away a little bit," said General Manager Penny Toler, who will attempt to reconfigure a team that during its first 10 seasons was built around the 6-foot-5 Leslie, a three-time WNBA most valuable player. Christofferson, a longtime season ticket-holder before becoming an equal partner with Goodman in a 55% stake in the team, expressed her support. "Obviously, it's exciting news," Christofferson said.
"We're excited that she's going to still be here and cheering on the sideline because she really is the face of the Sparks and we'd love to have her in whatever capacity." Of course, they'd rather see her playing and drawing fans. "It's God's timing, not mine," said Leslie, who led the Sparks to WNBA championships in 2001 and 2002 and was the league MVP in 2001, 2004 and last season, when she averaged career highs of 20 points and 3.
2 assists a game while also pulling down 9.5 rebounds and making a career-high 51.1% of her shots.
"It's just weird because as a woman playing sports that's the only downside that people probably see: the fact that we have children. For me, it's just a blessing. I had never tried to have kids.
" Leslie, the WNBA's all-time scoring leader and a three-time Olympic gold medalist, was married 13 months ago to Michael Lockwood, a UPS pilot and former Air Force basketball player. She will turn 35 in July, when her baby is due, and said she planned to play at least one more WNBA season before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. "Other girls have done it," she said of returning to the court as a mother.
"Why not me? I'm probably in better shape than all of them." But she is not under contract and made no promises to return to the Sparks.
She said she had given little thought to her plans beyond the Olympics. "As a G.M.
, it knocks you on your seat," Toler said of Leslie's surprising news. "If you want to know the difference between men's basketball and women's basketball, there's a big indicator right there. "You can never prepare for it, but you could kind of see it coming after the wedding and rightly so.
She's had some great years and I'm sure she wants to do some other things in life. As a G.M.
, you hate for this day to come, if she were to retire. Now we've just got to pretty much pull a rabbit out of our hat." Earlier, Goodman and Christofferson described themselves as longtime supporters of women's basketball in general and the Sparks in particular.
"I think that I've missed fewer Sparks games than I have family birthdays," said Goodman, a season ticket-holder from the day the Sparks were founded in 1997 as one of the WNBA's original eight teams. Goodman, 43, is an English and social studies at HighTechHigh-LA in Lake Balboa and a former film industry executive. More than 100 of her students attended Thursday's news conference, with Goodman joking, "It was difficult for me to get them here because they wanted to stay back and discuss 'The Scarlet Letter.
' " Christofferson, 39, is a partner at O'Melveny Myers and has represented the Backstreet Boys and Christina Aguilera, among others. She is a former Miss North Dakota and was an all-state basketball player in high school. "We became avid fans as only avid fans can be," Goodman said.
"We had an opinion about everything and we knew everything . "And every conversation between Carla and I started, 'You know, if we owned this team . ' Finally, Carla said to me, 'Here's what I don't understand: Why don't we own this team?
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