Lisa Leslie
There's no good time to tell your employer you're having a baby, and when USA women's basketball co-captain Lisa Leslie told the Los Angeles Sparks she was pregnant with her first child, her timing couldn't have been worse. In December of 2006 she publicly announced plans for a season-long maternity leave. The news totally blindsided the Sparks, who—on that very same day—were holding a news conference to announce the team had been sold and introduce its new owners.
"I went from thinking I was letting down our owners and my teammates," says the three-time league MVP, " to also thinking I was letting down my new owners, who obviously were relying on me."
As the Sparks struggled to compete without their top player and finished tied for the league's worst record, Leslie struggled with the changes her sinewy six-foot-six, 170-pound frame was undergoing. "I compare it to a werewolf movie," says the part-time actress and model, who gained 35 pounds while pregnant. "It was like one moment I had this flat belly, and the next thing I had this bump. It just kept growing and growing, and the next thing you know there's an elbow sticking out, a foot's sticking out ... then—oh, my God—there's a head!"
But when all that shifting put her baby in breach, Leslie opted for a bikini-incision C-section to preserve the majority of her core muscle mass, the essential muscle group for propelling explosive activity like rebounding and shooting.
Otherwise, the birth of 8-pound-11-ounce daughter Lauren Jolie—who arrived on June 15, 2006—ravaged her body. But within days, she was pushing Lauren in a rolling bassinet around Cedar Sinai's 929-foot maternity ward six times a day.
"I'd do squats with [Lauren], I was so determined," says Leslie, who was walking three times the doctor-recommended frequency. "My thing was I needed to be able to do more than what a regular mom would do. I had to be in the 'supermom' category."
Even with the bikini-cut C-section, says Leslie, "recovering ab strength is a lot harder" than after a natural birth. However, after about two weeks of working out (with help from husband Michael Lockwood), she was back in her prebaby jeans. Four weeks after that, she was ready to take on team drills at practice.
On June 14, opening night of the 2008 WNBA season, she rejoined a Sparks team that, as a result of all those losses they suffered in her absence, secured this year's top draft pick: the six-foot-five basketball prodigy Candace Parker. Together they've led the Sparks to one of the WNBA's best records, and Leslie has retaken her familiar place among the league's top scorers, rebounders, and shot blockers.
In Beijing, Parker and Leslie will anchor a U.S. women's basketball team seeking to win its fifth Olympic gold medal, and Leslie will be shooting for her fourth straight gold. Rejuvenated by her time away from the game, she's ready to compete. " You can never plan it perfectly," she says, " but everything worked out for the best."
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