#blackhistory: On July 7th, 1972, Women’s National Basketball Association great Lisa Leslie was born in Gardena, California

Two-time champion. Two-time Finals MVP. Three-time regular season MVP. Eight-time All-Star. Three-time All-Star Game MVP.

Los Angeles's own Lisa Leslie would amass all those honors and more over twelve years at the center of women's basketball.

As one of the Women’s National Basketball Association’s founding superstars, Leslie set the standard for women’s basketball greatness. Before the Women’s National Basketball Association's inaugural season in 1997, women basketballers - many of them African American - had few courts on which to meaningfully continue college basketball careers, the quadrennial spectacle of the Olympics and a handful of open slots in European leagues the only available options. That all changed when the WNBA debuted in eight American cities, Los Angeles chief among them.

Picked 7th by the Los Angeles Sparks in the WNBA's inaugural draft, Leslie arrived already a star. Over six feet tall before she was out the seventh grade (she would play center throughout her career), Leslie led Inglewood’s Morningside High School to the 1989 California state championship and was the team's leading scorer and rebounder. She went on to USC where she played 120 college games and averaged 20.1 points, setting Pac-10 Conference records for scoring and rebounding. She would also win an Olympic gold medal in 1996.

At first, Leslie thought college graduation was the end of her basketball life.

"I thought I retired from basketball in 1996," she would recall in 2016 on the occasion of the WNBA's twentieth anniversary.

"Once I played on the Olympic team that year and we won gold, I was done. No overseas hoops. Nothing. I signed a contract with Wilhelmina Models, came up to New York and tried to start modeling — doing some shows, going on auditions … mostly getting rejected for being too tall. But as for basketball? Those days were pretty much over.

I had mostly given up on the game because my dream of playing couldn’t go any further. Past the Olympics, there just wasn’t any real opportunity — in my mind — for me to play for a long time in the U.S. At the same time, there were talks of starting the American Basketball League for women to play professionally, but I opted out because it didn’t have the support of the NBA. And I didn’t want to play in Europe, which was really the only other option.

I needed to put basketball behind me. I felt like I had to make a decision and I couldn’t wait around any longer. I couldn’t keep feeling like I was standing on the sidelines, waiting for my name to be called, only to hear the buzzer go off before I got a chance to play. I moved on.

But then I got a call the following January …

The NBA was going to start a professional women’s basketball league and wanted me to join.

She would do more than join, leading the Sparks to back-to-back WNBA championships in 2001 and 2002, this while also helping extend  USA Women's Basketball’s unprecedented run of Olympic gold medals in 2000, 2004 and 2008. Leslie would also become the first woman to dunk the ball in a professional game on July 30, 2002.

Leslie retired at the height of her game in 2009 and has since pursued a varied career as an author, entrepreneur and sports commentator. She returned to the Sparks in 2009 but not to play basketball, Leslie joining the team’s ownership. She was 37 at the time, younger than current active NBA players Manu Ginóbili, Jamal Crawford and Pau Gasol.

"Everyone talks about age,” she told an interviewer after her retirement, "but it's not about age. It's about work ethic. Winning never gets old."