A short documentary film about basketball won the Oscar for Best Short Film, The Queen of Basketball. Who is the heroine of this film? Born in 1995 in a small town in southern Mississippi, she was once considered the greatest female player in the history of American basketball and was known as the "Queen of Basketball."
The New Orleans Jazz had chosen her, the first female player to be selected by the men's basketball team. She led the team to three national championships, was the first woman to score at the Olympics, and was the first and only female player officially recruited by the National Basketball Association. She's Lucia.
Lucia doesn't play for money, power or fame, and like most female athletes, no matter how good she is, she won't be valued like Chamberlain or Jabbar, and Lucia plays basketball just because she likes it.
"I want to shoot like they do, it's a natural phenomenon."
In 1973, Lucia began playing basketball at college, the year President Nixon signed The Education Act Amendment Section IX. The bill requires schools to provide girls with the opportunity to participate in sports, as they do for boys.
The following year, Lucia became a groundbreaking phenomenon, playing with her teammates in arenas across the United States, including Madison Square Garden in New York.
What's more exaggerated is that at that time, Lucia's team sold better tickets than the men's team, and they also enjoyed the treatment of being able to fly to the United States, while the members of the men's team could only choose buses to go to the stadium.
As an epoch-making figure, Lucia became one of the first female superstars in the history of women's basketball universities, and she was also the only black player on Delta State's women's basketball team, leading the team to 51 consecutive wins. In 1975, Lucia was also elected by the predominantly white student body as Delta State's first black Homecoming Queen, and as a member of the first Olympic women's basketball tournament, Harris scored the first goal in Olympic history.
In 1977, Lucia again reached the peak of her career, receiving a special invitation to join the NBA team and receiving an olive branch from the New Orleans Jazz.
"I just think it's a publicity stunt. I feel that I am not good enough." Lucia said, "I don't regret giving up the opportunity the NBA gave me, but as a black female athlete, my options were limited and I later put my energy into starting a family." After retiring from the military, I got a job as a basketball assistant at Delta State University and directed the school's women's basketball team. However, Lucia had applied for the position of principal, but was turned away by a white high school basketball coach.
Today, 50 years after the passage of Title IX of the Education Act, the United States has come a long way from the days when Lucia ruled the women's basketball court. In some ways, the situation has improved, women's professional sports leagues have begun to develop, and basketball has become the most active university women's sport in the world, which has also promoted the development of the modern Olympic Games.
Through Lucia's experience, many people have begun to have a higher consciousness, O'Neill once spoke for WNBA players, he said: "Some unworthy men make $40 million and women earn much less." It shouldn't be like that. ”
In addition, according to statistics, male basketball teams spend twice as much on non-travel meals as female basketball teams. Last year, the NCAA acknowledged that the budget for the 2019 men's tournament was almost double that of the women's tournament.
What's more, the NCAA's system is still designed for men's basketball, so its priority remains maximizing the value of men's basketball. This inequality exists throughout the industry, and from coaches to management, white men still dominate the leadership of sports teams across the United States.
In such an environment, all this makes Harris's achievements even more important. Her son Christopher Stewart once said: "I think that at the end of her career, my mother's only wish other than raising children is for people to remember what she did." ”
Lucia died a month after the completion of the documentary film About Lucia, The Basketball Queen, and her funeral was held at the gymnasium, which unfortunately is still named after the white athlete Walter Cyrus.
Admittedly, as the producer of this documentary film, O'Neill was ambitious, saying, "It finally tells this story and fills a huge void in the history of basketball, a story that all of us need to think about and consider, all the talent like Lucia, who is denied the opportunity because they are women, but they also need a person who can work in line with their talents." ”
"For Lucia's story, you have to ask the question, who are we going to pull aside in sports today? How can we be sure that what happened in Lucia's time doesn't happen again? ”
In fact, Lucia, like O'Neal, is a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame. However, O'Neill didn't know her story until she became the film's producer, and O'Neill said: "At first I didn't know who she was".
In addition, Curry, as one of the producers of this film, also revealed that he did not know her story at first, but Curry spared no effort to publicize Lucia's deeds, he wore sneakers printed with the words "Queen Lucy", hoping that more people would know her story.
Today, Lucia's story has been made into a short documentary film, "The Queen of Basketball", and with the film winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film, the story about Lucia will continue to pass on.