The first game was a classic—it went to three overtimes, a marathon back-and-forth game, exciting in every respect. The Sun ultimately bested us by about five points. But the Fever took the second game handily, winning by nearly twenty points.
It was game three that would prove what inner soul the Fever really had. At one point in the second quarter we were down by twenty-two points. No team had ever come back from that size of a deficit before. By statistical standards, we were doomed. Katie Douglas and some of the other Sun players sensed that, too, and started talking trash.
We didn’t like that.
We stayed focused, playing hard, chipping away at the Sun’s lead. Slowly we crept back into it, cutting our deficit by a few points here, a few points there. With seconds left in the game we tied the score, sending the game into overtime.
This time, we took charge, ultimately winning by five, and taking the first round of the playoffs. Afterward the Sun’s Katie Douglas acknowledged our effort. “Give credit to Indiana,” she said. “They didn’t hang their heads.”
In winning, we had set the record for the greatest comeback in WNBA playoff history, erasing a deficit of twenty-two points.
In the eastern conference finals we won the first game against the Detroit Shock, putting us within one game of reaching the WNBA Finals for the first time. We had two games to win it, and we squandered our next chance, losing big in Detroit.
And suddenly everything changed. In game three, in the final minute of the second quarter, I jabbed with my right foot, went to take off left, and felt a pain as though someone were kicking me. But as I lay on the floor and looked back, I could see no one was there. They had to wheel me off the court in a wheelchair. At first it was thought to be a sprain, but, no, it was an Achilles tear. I would be off the court for another six months.
Detroit went on to win the final game by sixteen points.
We never know what God has for us. What life we will have and how we will be able to live it. We assume so much day to day about what will happen in the next twenty-four hours, and we so often have this illusion of control. Truth is, we don’t control anything; only God does. We just need to live the life he wants for us. And deal with what comes our way.
We were so close to the finals that year. My injury happened at the worst possible time. Losing was a bitter pill.
Another dose of frustration times two. Losing the game and getting injured.
The year 2008 brought us two new faces.
Lin Dunn became our new head coach, replacing Brian Winters, who had led the team into the playoffs successfully but was never able to get us to the finals. Lin had been an assistant coach with the Fever under Brian since 2004.
One USA Today sportswriter wrote of Lin Dunn as a cross between Aunt Bee from The Andy Griffith Show and Indiana Hoosiers coach Bobby Knight.1 Lin was the kind of coach who might bake you an apple pie and then throw it across the room at you. She had a folksy charm about her, along with a strong southern drawl, but she could be tough and hard as well.
I confess that back then I wondered if Lin was the right choice for the team. I heard our GM state that our team “needed to go in a different direction,” and I felt hiring someone who had been on the staff was too close to the same direction. After three seasons of identical regular season records and almost-but-not-quite getting to the finals, I thought it might be time for the team to bring in someone to shake things up. But time would prove me wrong.
Lin had quite a long legacy in women’s basketball, with roots in Tennessee. She graduated from UT Martin and had recruited Pat Summitt to go to school there. And Lin coached a number of college teams before entering the pro ranks. She had experience and success.
The other new face was Katie Douglas.
In the off-season the Fever traded Tamika Whitmore to the Sun for Douglas in one of the biggest trades in WNBA history. Perhaps Katie’s performance in the previous semifinals was the tipping point for the Fever front office. Certainly Katie was a premier player at the top of her game and was highly coveted. Additionally, Katie was an Indianapolis native, one of the reasons she came to the Fever, and she’d be good for local interest, perhaps bolstering attendance at the games. The financial status of some WNBA teams was shaky, and the Fever was one of them. Katie Douglas might help. No doubt it was a strategic acquisition for the team.
But the front office was concerned about the chemistry. Could two all-star players share the same court? Would we constantly be vying for control of the team?
And so it was determined that Katie and I should go to counseling together.
Yes, counseling.
We were sent to a sports psychologist hired by the team. When we first sat down, he looked at us and asked, “Why are you here?” We looked at each other, part smiling, part smirking, and said, “We thought you knew.”
Katie and I didn’t get along very well at first. But the point is that you can’t force relationships. You can’t manufacture a friendship. A relationship needs to grow naturally, and develop by choice of the two people involved.
How often do we see that in life? We want a relationship to happen, and we want it so badly that we force it. We try to control the other person and strive to manufacture a bond. And that never works. In fact, it messes everything up. A relationship has to develop on its own. Two people need to choose each other in their own way, uncoerced.
The year 2008 was a step back for the Indiana Fever. We finished the regular season just 17–17, although we made it to the playoffs. We faced our archnemesis Detroit Shock in the first round, and we lost in three games.
Frustrating.
In the off-season, Katie went to play for an international team—Galatasaray, a Turkish team in Istanbul. And one day, I got a call. From Katie. She said, “The team here needs a good player. I was thinking of you. Why don’t you come here and play on the team with me?”
I did. And in Istanbul, Turkey, that off-season, we developed a friendship.
It felt good to be chosen. From one phone call, a more positive relationship started to form, one that all the team psychology on the planet couldn’t manufacture.
When my mom and I moved to Duncanville, the first job she took was at a local ninth-grade school. She had a similar job before we left Illinois and wanted to continue focusing her energy on kids. But after a year, looking ahead, she realized she wanted a job that would give her the flexibility to visit each of her kids. As a result, she pursued a job with American Airlines and could fly most anywhere, anytime. It got to a point where my teammates were just as excited to see my mom as I was, whether we were at a home game or an away game. Mama Catchings was always welcome.
Mom was there in 2008 at the Beijing Olympics. In fact, Mom and Tauja attended each of the three Olympics (Athens, Beijing, and London) I’ve had the thrill of participating in. Dad and Kenyon came to the one in London.
I was playing for the USA team alongside Sue Bird, Lisa Leslie, Diana Taurasi, Candace Parker, and Kara Lawson, among others. And as a team we were never challenged. We played Australia in the final and won by nearly thirty points. America’s dominance in women’s basketball would continue, perhaps as a result of the successful college and WNBA programs back home.
I did well in the games, playing good minutes among a wealth of talented players. To Mom, though, I was there, and that was all that mattered. But not even that. She was proud of me for the basketball I played, sure. But I was her little baby girl, and that was all that mattered. She was my cheerleader.
Not just in basketball but in life.
We came back from the Olympics break, and although we made the playoffs, it was a disappointing ending. Yet another off-season to figure out what was going wrong with the Fever. Perhaps the real estate bust and resulting recession of 2007 and 2008 were causing people to pull back on spending. Companies were more conservative in their spending, and sponsorship and partnership opportunities were harder to come by. Nothing was announced, but I could sense that
even in our own organization, we needed to have a good—no, great—year to keep our team alive.
Winning a championship was on everyone’s mind, but getting further than we had, into the conference finals, was a must.
No pressure.
In 2009, Katie and I finally clicked. The Fever had added Briann January in the draft, re-signed Tully Bevilaqua, our energetic point guard and defensive phenom, and got a boost from Tammy Sutton-Brown, who had the year before been named the WNBA’s most improved player.
After losing our first two games, we got it together and won our next eleven. We finished with our best regular-season record of 22–12. We earned the first seed in the playoffs, and this time handled our first-round series with Washington rather easily, winning in two games.
Facing the Detroit Shock in the conference finals, we lost the first game. At least subconsciously, we, along with our Indiana fans, were probably thinking, Here we go again. But we came back two days later and won by four, setting up a third-game finale.
In the end, we beat Detroit by five points, making our way to the WNBA finals for the first time in franchise history. We would face the Phoenix Mercury in Phoenix for the first two games.
We lost the first game, a close one in overtime that was considered one of the greatest WNBA games of all time. It shattered all kinds of scoring records. We were playing against a team that had won everything just two years before, a team featuring a three-headed scoring monster composed of Diana Taurasi, Cappie Pondexter, and Penny Taylor.
Game two came, and despite the foul troubles and struggle offensively, we were able to come out of it with a win. That meant the series was tied 1–1 and we could return to Indianapolis for the next two games on our home court. We took game three, another close one, winning by just one point. We were just one game away from winning it all.
Indianapolis was buzzing. Game four fell on a Sunday an hour and a half after a Colts home game. The Colts handled business early in the game, so we had fans stripping off their Colts’ jerseys to reveal Fever jerseys underneath as they walked the few blocks from the Colts’ stadium to Bankers Life Fieldhouse to support us. Suddenly, the building became even more electrified.
Playing game four in front of a home crowd that included Indianapolis Colts Peyton Manning and Reggie Wayne, we struggled. We were down most of the game, and although we fought to stay in the game, we shot miserably in the fourth quarter.
The series tied 2–2, and we would return to Phoenix for a final game.
Again we struggled with our shooting. Our defense was suspect. Fighting from ten points behind a lot of the game, we stayed in it, and with a minute to go, I made a layup that cut Phoenix’s lead to just two points. As we played out the last sixty seconds, we fouled to force Phoenix to make free throws.
And they made them all—six shots in the final minute—and we went down 94–86.
It was hugely disappointing to get so close and yet not win it all. Katie was devastated because she’d had a bad night shooting.
And yet, a lot of people considered the five-game series some of the best WNBA basketball ever. Our two teams showcased the best offensive team against the best defensive team and we took it down to the last minute of the last game. The Indiana Fever had played great basketball and competed well at the highest level.
And the fans had come out, supporting the team and saving the franchise. Sometime later, our team owners came out with a comment that “the Indiana Fever would remain in Indianapolis.”
One of the responsibilities that came with my increasing leadership role with the Fever was off the court. I was asked more and more to do public speaking. Of course, at first I was uncomfortable doing it, given my childhood experiences with hearing loss and a mild speech problem. Not to mention my natural shyness. Getting up in front of people and talking is a far cry from that quiet solitude by the side of a nameless Tennessee lake.
But my sister, Tauja, ever my motivator, convinced me I could do it, encouraging me and coaching me in public speaking.
Years before, during my first off-season while I was still rehabbing, the Fever’s community relations director, Lori Satterfield, had asked me to start doing some public speaking. Initially I told her no, because I knew I’d be terrible at it. She and Tauja both encouraged me. Lori said, “You can do it. We can create a script that you can say verbatim. Each time you do the speech, you’ll get more and more comfortable, and eventually it’ll come naturally. You’ll be great.”
So we talked about what I’d say. Lori had already come up with an acronym for FEVER—“For Every Victory Earns Respect.” And we developed a speaking script around that using what I knew—basketball—to create my message.
It worked. We started the school tour with my FEVER speech, and while I was a bit rough at first, the more I did it, the easier it became. Lori would be at each of the schools to listen to my delivery. Afterward she would coach me on what I could do better. I became more comfortable and a lot more fluid.
In time, I would experience the ultimate compliment: kids coming up to me on the street, saying, “You came to my school and spoke to us. That was so great!” And they’d remember my speech, reciting back to me the acronym—“For Every Victory Earns Respect.”
In those moments, it’s all worth it.
And no one really knew the fear I had inside in those moments, the butterflies in my stomach and the disastrous thoughts that floated through my head. But before every speech, then and now, I say a prayer to help me get through.
One thing that became more and more important to me when I moved to Indy was church. I found a church called New Life Worship Center, and I quickly got myself immersed in the Word. I was attracted to the church’s powerful music and its teaching. It was a church firmly built on the Word of God.
I attended New Life as often as I could. Sometimes the Fever’s games, practices, or travel made it impossible for me to be there on Sundays, but if I missed, I would catch the service online later.
Sundays when I was there, I’d enjoy the music—contemporary, powerful, a wall of sound that praised God and allowed me to sing to him. And I’d eagerly listen to the sermon by up-and-coming Pastor John Ramsey, opening up a notebook I kept for sermon notes and jotting down his main points and Scriptures.
Many of my friends and even family members talk about my faith as if it’s like one more tough self-discipline thing I do. But, to me, it’s not about discipline. It’s about being in the presence of God himself. It’s about hearing God speak to me. Being in church is what I want to do and what is important to me. It feeds my soul.
After I’d attended New Life a while, the pastor’s wife, Alicia, came up to me and said if ever I needed to talk, she would be happy to be available to me. She had a sense of the potential challenges I faced being something of a celebrity. “Sometimes you might need a friend to confide in,” she said. “I gotcha.”
That began a friendship that continues to this day. Alicia is a friend, yes, but she is much more too. She’s a mentor. Someone apart from my family and my basketball world who can reflect the light of God’s Word into my life.
Most of all, Alicia has given me wise guidance about relationships. At one point, I found myself interested in a guy I met while traveling to a game. He and I struck up a conversation, and I liked him. When I came home, I continued to stay in touch with him, and I also confided this to Alicia.
She listened as a friend does, but later did something she had never done before—she googled the guy. What popped up was a picture of him with some other people he probably shouldn’t have been with, or rather that I shouldn’t be with. When Alicia and I got together again, she said, “Tamika, do what you want to, but I’m just saying this guy’s not it.”
I didn’t end that relationship right there and then, but eventually I did, and I told Alicia later, “You know, that guy’s just not it.”
From 2009 through 2011, the Fever’s regular season record would be consistent—winning twent
y-one or twenty-two games each year. Good records, all knocking on the door of a championship. But in 2010, though we made it to the playoffs, we lost in the first round to New York in three games.
Following the 2009 season, and in the beginning of 2010, the Fever acquired Shavonte Zellous from Tulsa. Shavonte, a do-it-all guard, would prove to be a significant contributor to the team in coming years, another piece of a puzzle that was being assembled. But we lost someone too—our starting power forward, Ebony Hoffman, to the Los Angeles Sparks. And that was sad for me because Ebony and her husband, Ron, had become my best friends on the team.
In 2011 we reached the playoffs once again. The Fever had become one of the stronger and more consistent teams in the league, and while we might be considered an elite team, we weren’t yet thought of as being one of the teams at the very top. Not yet. We hadn’t consistently advanced further in the playoffs. But it was becoming clear that we had the talent to do better.
And we thought we could do better. We’d finished tied for first in our division, and we had had good records against the better teams. We thought this year we could advance to the finals.
We faced New York in the eastern conference semis, and we won both our home games, advancing to the conference finals. We’d done it.
In the finals, though, we faced the Atlanta Dream. While in the regular season we’d bested a lot of strong teams, the Dream had had our number. Though they finished third in our division that year, we faced them four times in the regular season—and lost all four games.
When we won the first game of the series, 83–74, it really looked good. But game two was a blowout, with one of Atlanta’s guards shooting lights out from the outside.
My dad was present for game three back in Indianapolis, and while I never allow myself to be distracted by family and friends who are at courtside, I was aware of his presence. After years of pro basketball success, he and I were still butting heads. I’d come to understand that Dad meant well. He was there, watching, rooting for me, and that counted for a lot. But at the same time, he wanted to coach me, just as he had coached me when I was a girl and when I was in college. And even when I reached the WNBA, he was still trying to coach me. He would still talk to me after a game, tell me what I could have done differently, what I could do better. “You should be taking the shot here. Don’t pass it off like that, Mika.”
Catch a Star Page 16
