An author’s newest book explores the story of the 1976 United States women’s Olympic basketball team, which featured Leflore County native Lusia “Lucy” Harris.
Andrew Maraniss, author of “Inaugural Ballers: The True Story of the First U.S. Women’s Olympic Basketball Team,” is scheduled to visit Harris’ alma mater, Delta State University in Cleveland, on Feb. 9 to do a reading and book signing.
The event is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. at Jobe Hall on DSU’s campus. Maraniss will also sign books that evening between the men’s and women’s scheduled basketball games against Shorter University.
Maraniss is a longtime writer and media professional. A graduate of Vanderbilt University, he wrote his first book on Vanderbilt’s Percy Wallace, the first Black basketball player to play under a scholarship in the Southeastern Conference.
His newest book on the women’s Olympic basketball team in 1976 was the culmination of working toward a goal.
“I’d been looking to write a book about women’s sports,” he said. “I’ve written three other books that were all dealing with men’s sports, so I had an idea in mind to sort of keep an eye out for an idea on women’s sports.”
He said the timing of the release last September was also in line with the anniversary of Title IX. Signed as part of the Education Amendments of 1972, it prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex in schools or educational programs that receive federal funding.
During promotion for his book on the first men’s Olympic basketball team, fielded in 1936, Maraniss said he received the inspiration for the story of women’s sports he would write about.
“One of my trips was to a middle school in De Soto, Kansas, outside of Kansas City,” he said. “In the auditorium at that school, a girl stood up at the end during the Q-and-A, and she said, ‘Well, it’s great that you told us about the first men’s team, but what’s the story of the first U.S. women’s Olympic basketball team?’”
The book examines not just the team but the context of the time it was assembled, which was the height of the renewed women’s rights movement in the 1970s.
Maraniss said he interviewed players who made the team and players who didn’t. He interviewed the coach, Billie Moore, and international basketball historians.
“When you’re writing nonfiction, every single sentence has to be drawn from some element of research,” he said. “I think that’s more important even than the writing — the effort you put into the research.”
One of the most famous players of that team was Lucy Harris, also known as Lucy Harris-Stewart.
Harris, a native of Minter City, attended Amanda Elzy High School and led Delta State’s women’s basketball team to three consecutive na-tional championships. She was also the only woman ever drafted by an NBA team and was eventually inducted into several halls of fame.
Her story was told in the short documentary film “The Queen of Basketball,” which won an Academy Award in 2022. Harris died just weeks before the ceremony at the age of 66.
In December, the Greenwood City Council renamed Cherry Street, where she had lived for many years, in her honor.
Maraniss said he gained a sense of the high respect Harris’ teammates had for her.
“Just talking to her teammates and talking to Billie Moore, the coach, I began to understand it,” he said. “Even though there were other women on the team who later became better known, like Pat Summitt or Nancy Lieberman or Ann Meyers, they all really respected Lucy as the heart of the team.”
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he was unable to meet Harris in person, but he did interview her over the phone.
He said she was “very humble” and proud of the fact that she scored the very first points in the opening game at the 1976 Olympics.
“You could tell that she had reached a point in her life that she was kind of willing to look back on it,” he said. “She had all these scrapbooks her whole life that her mom was keeping during her playing days, but she never looked at it. She didn’t want to be distracted or get a big head that she was this star in Mississippi. You could tell in retirement that she was taking a look back at that and (was) really proud of what she was able to accomplish.”
During his research, Maraniss said, he was surprised to learn that the 1976 team wasn’t expected to qualify for the Olympics.
“Even USA Basketball had no confidence that we would qualify,” he said. “They hadn’t even planned or prepared or budgeted for that period between the tournament and the start of the Olympics. All they had done was bought airplane tickets back home for each player. They were so certain that they would lose and be eliminated.”
His book also details some of the long history of women’s basketball. He said women began playing the game shortly after its invention in the 1890s and saw peaks and valleys of participation over the succeeding decades.
His next project is a series of books for young readers just getting into chapter books about athletes who have done important or interesting things for the benefit of other people.
-Contact Kevin Edwards at 662-581-7233 or kedwards@gwcommonwealth.com.
