MEET LUSIA (LUCY) HARRIS-STEWART

Lott sheds light on one of basketball’s lesser-known greats in this sports biography.

You may not have heard the name Lucy Harris, but according to Lott, she “completely changed the way women’s basketball is played and how women are seen as players.” This is in part because Harris played before the existence of the WNBA. As a high schooler in the Mississippi Delta, the 6-foot-3 Harris was a dominant force on the court. Used to playing with her brothers on the family basketball hoop, she wasn’t afraid to throw her size around. She led her high school, Amanda Elzy, to the North Central Athletic Conference title her senior year and to the Mississippi state tournament. She moved on to Delta State University, which, due to the recent adoption of Title IX, had reinstated its women’s basketball program after a four-decade lapse. Harris’ star continued to rise, earning her a place on the 1976 U.S. Olympic women’s team and inclusion in the first class inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame. She even won the distinction of being the first woman ever drafted into the NBA. With this short biography, Lott offers an overview of Harris’ career: her incredible successes, the glass ceiling that prevented her from playing professionally, and the inspiration she provided for subsequent generations of athletes. Lott has clearly done her research, though her prose is clunky. Here she describes the weather of the Mississippi Delta, her attempts at lyricism leading to confusing constructions: “The fall weather was cool, with a myriad of colors covering the variety of trees littering the landscape. Spring was active, with renewed animal and plant life sharing in the land.” Style aside, the book is fascinating not only for the information it provides about Harris, but for the picture it paints of women’s basketball of her era—a time of hugely talented and iconoclastic athletes who were never granted the laurels of their male peers.

An engaging, overdue look at the career of an athlete ahead of her time.