A former star athlete herself, Tatiana Ovechkina made sure her boy Alexander, the high-scoring Capitals winger, got what he deserved -- a record NHL deal, that's what

Alexander Ovechkin and his mother Tatiana Ovechkina. Simon Bruty/SI

The most powerful woman in hockey was watching from a balcony as some of the Washington Capitals shot hoops on an indoor court, when the team's majority owner, Ted Leonsis, urged her to come down for a free-throw-shooting contest. Leonsis, by his reckoning, has game. He played guard at John Jay High in Brooklyn in the early 1970s, the backcourtmate of a player who earned honorable mention all-city. Tatiana Ovechkina's basketball bona fides are more formidable.

"In an instant she goes from this" -- Leonsis pantomimed a staid middle-age woman -- "to a player." He paused, then smiled. "I think she beat me."

Ovechkina, 57, was the on-court leader of the Soviet Union national teams that won Olympic gold medals in 1976 and '80, one world championship and six European titles, and she was later voted best female point guard of the 20th century by readers of the Russian newspaper Sport Express. As for the free throw contest, when asked about it later, she complimented the engaging Leonsis -- "He's moving so good, great coordination" -- but she didn't have to "think" about the outcome. She knew.

Just as when she did most of the negotiating on the 13-year, $124 million contract signed last month by her son -- the incandescent Alexander Ovechkin might be the most exciting player since Bobby Orr -- Tatiana shot straight and came out on top.

If Alexander technically represented himself in arranging the NHL's first nine-figure deal, he made no move without Tatiana's approval. She is not nominally her son's agent. She is so much more. She is the matriarch, the progenitor of her son's extraordinary athletic genes, his intractable resolve and his jersey number; Alexander wears number 8, the same as she did. Tatiana gives her son love, counsel, toughness, dinner -- when she and her husband, Mikhail, make periodic visits to his home in the D.C. suburb of Arlington, Va. -- and the occasional beating at games of H-O-R-S-E. "If you are a boss on a basketball court," she says through an interpreter, "you bring the same qualities to life."

Fourteen months after the Ovechkins fired respected agent Don Meehan, the family sat across from Leonsis, Capitals president Dick Patrick and general manager George McPhee wrangling over the details of a new contract. In a session that lasted more than four hours the parameters of the deal expanded and contracted: six years to 12 years, back to six, 12 again and, finally, 13. Tatiana's English borders on the rudimentary, but she knows the language of negotiation: As president of the Moscow Dynamo women's basketball team, she's usually on the other side of the table.

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