Richmond Player Has Basketball and Perseverance in His Blood
His
parents met while playing for the Washington Generals, eternal foils of
the Harlem Globetrotters, but this is no losers’ narrative, not by a
long shot.
Although
the very existence of T. J. Cline might be attributed to his mother’s
being a basketball superstar born a generation too soon, Nancy Lieberman
would also admit that her bad timing and worse luck helped provide
life’s greatest gift.
That would be motherhood.
“I
was so single-minded — all I wanted to be was the best women’s
basketball player in the world,” Lieberman, Cline’s mother, said. “But I
didn’t get a Plan A in my life. I had to have a Plan B. And I did get
T. J.”
At
the height of Lieberman’s Hall of Fame career, long before anyone had
the commercial brainstorm of adding a W to N.B.A., women’s professional
leagues came and went seemingly in the blink of an eye. Having played as
a teenager in the 1976 Montreal Summer Games, she was primed to be an
Olympic star — nicknamed Lady Magic — but the United States boycotted
the 1980 Moscow Games.
