No Role Models Needed

The way Nancy Lieberman-Cline tells it, as a stylish executive now, the way to the Basketball Hall of Fame was on the A Train to Harlem, red-headed and looking as mean on the outside as she felt on the inside. She was white, short for the game, and female, which made for some difficulties.

Her mother, Rene, would tell her it was dangerous to ride there from home in Far Rockaway. And Nancy would tell her, “If you let me go, I won’t hurt anyone.”

So she stuffed T-shirts into the shoulders of her sweatshirts and the A Train took her where she wanted to go. If somebody looked hard at her, she glared back: “You got a problem?” What she was afraid of was losing. “If you could win, you could play,” she said. “I never felt somebody didn’t like me because I was white.”

By the time she was 12 or 13, she was riding with Danny or Scott or Larry to Queens, Canarsie or Fort Hamilton to hustle. “I’d go into the park and act spastic,” she said, “shoot the ball over the backboard and all, and one of the locals would say, ‘Let’s play 2-on-2,’ and ‘I got the girl.”’

All of a sudden the girl was dribbling behind her back and whipping the ball around before the ice cream truck came by. “Then we’d say, ‘We want two dollars, and we don’t want it in change.’ “

She was Nancy Lieberman of PS 104 and Far Rockaway High then. Her parents were divorced, her father largely absent, and she didn’t want the influence of her mother. Monday, Lieberman-Cline, wife and mother of an 18-month-old, the 37-year-old broadcaster and sports-marketing executive was announced as the eighth female player selected to the Hall of Fame. She was announced with George Gervin, Gail Goodrich, David Thompson, George Yardley and the late Kresimir Cosic. Of the 101 males, each had someone to emulate, someone whose presence told him it was possible.

Lieberman didn’t, which makes her induction and that of the previous seven women significant. “Some little girl will read your column,” she said. “You have no idea of the impact. They’ll say it’s OK to play basketball. It’s ladylike. It’s what they should do.”

The father of a daughter grows up with that need all the time. Somebody has to be first - as Yardley was among the first to fly. Lieberman walked around tennis with short shorts and long legs and, as “Agent Orange,” pushed Martina Navratilova to put a basketball player’s work ethic into tennis, and together they showed what was possible.

“Maybe I can be there some day for young girls,” she said. “We have to have that in basketball.”

Lieberman at 18 was the youngest player in Olympic history to win a medal. She went to camp at 17 out of Old Dominion University and saw nothing to lose in challenging Ann Meyers, even if other girls thought Meyers was trying to hurt them because she played the way guys played against her.

She was the first woman to play in a men’s professional league with Springfield of the United States Basketball League. She was paid $100,000 as first pick in the Women’s Basketball League for the Dallas Diamonds in 1980. “I bought my mother a Cadillac and sent it to New York because that’s what the guys did,” she said.

She tried to be one of the guys and they treated her like a little sister, which was all right for a pioneer. She learned what it was to take a charge from Hot Rod Williams, who was trying to remake a career for himself, and to get into a fight with Andre Turner.

In the USBL, they would try to push her around. “They did it when I weighed 150 my first year,” she said. “The second year I weighed 155, and they (still) pushed me around.” She and Turner scrambled and he pushed and elbowed her and she threw the ball at his head. And when Turner came at her, Micheal Ray Richardson stepped in and said, “You don’t touch my baby.”

That was in 1987. That’s her story. There wasn’t any money in women’s basketball. Forget the flair of the Diamonds. She was Lady Magic and there was no place to play except Europe, which was out of the question for her. She played for the purest of reasons: She loved to play basketball. She had delivered the Long Island Press so she could buy her own basketball.

There was the time she reported to play in the Lakers’ 1980 summer program. Jack Curran, the trainer, says, “Are you Lieberman?” She says, yes, as she recalled it. He throws her the Lakers’ purple equipment bag, points and says, “You change in there.”

She says, “Jack, that’s the men’s locker room.”

He says, “You change in there.”

“So I find this corner of the room,” she recalled, “and everybody is staring at me. I open the bag and pull out Laker socks and Laker shorts and a Laker shirt. And a jock strap. And I yell, ‘Yo, Jack, this is too small for me.’ All the guys laugh and it broke the tension.”It’s the argument that more men could learn from women golfers than from men.

Now, she’ll argue that there’s more premium on ballhandling and movement and situation basketball in the women’s game and little one-on-one and no dunk.

She met Tim Cline while they were together on the bench of the Washington Generals losing 200 times in a row to the Globetrotters. They live in Dallas. She usually has her nails polished and her hair is well done. And she laughed and raised the hem of her skirt just high enough to make a point. That was not at all in conflict with being named to the Basketball Hall of Fame.