PlayGirlAfter a brief retirement, Brazil guard Hortência resumed her flamboyant reign as queen of the courtby Alexander Wolff
There's a country in this hemisphere where women's basketball is not a vogue stoked by sudden millions in marketing money. It's a place where the populace is not under the misapprehension that the game was invented by Sheryl Swoopes in 1993 and perfected by Rebecca Lobo two years later. It's a nation that expects to win the gold medal at these Olympics every bit as much as the U.S. does and a country where a female hoopster has the standing and fame of ... well, not Michael Jordan, exactly, because the equivalent standard in her homeland, Edson Arantes do Nascimento, a.k.a. Pelé, is tough to meet. But she is the next most venerable athlete.
The country is Brazil, and the ballplayer, born there 36 years ago in the town of Potirendaba, was named after the Portuguese word for the flowering hydrangea plant. The hortência, in case you're wondering, blooms perennially. The rest of Hortência's name is Maria de Fátima Marcari Oliva, but you don't really need to know that, for like most Brazilian sports heroes, she goes by a single moniker. After averaging 27.6 points to lead Brazil to its first world championship, in Australia two summers ago, Hortência retired, figuring that with that triumph and her other great international achievement—helping Brazil win the 1991 Pan Am Games title in Havana (and fielding congratulatory kisses from Fidel Castro)—she had done enough. If Brazil was to add to its trophy case the only major international crown still missing, the national team would have to do it in Atlanta without her.
But last spring news leaked that Hortência was going to rejoin the team for the Olympics, even though she had given birth to a son, João Victor, by cesarean section only four months before. On May 6 she showed up for practice, and afterward, in accordance with tradition, she and her teammates gathered at midcourt to engage each other in a three-point shooting contest with a $15 prize at stake. Hortência was one of two players to send her first shot cleanly through the net. In a shoot-off with the other player, the team's 6'2" power forward, Marta de Souza Sobral, Hortência bottomed out her second shot too. Brazilian television reported the feat that very night, and the next morning, papers around the country bannered the news:
"I couldn't go to a gas station without the attendant asking me to return to the game," Hortência says of her time away from basketball. "It was very hard to resist the pressure. And then there's the spirit of the Olympics. I dedicated many years of my life to Brazilian basketball and managed to go to only one Olympics [in 1992]. I think I deserve to participate—not as a savior but as an athlete who can help the team."
For 20 years Hortência has used her speed and court vision to shred opponents defenses.
photograph by
The role of nonsavior is wholly new to her. For nearly 20 years Hortência was the most celebrated and accomplished female athlete in South America's most populous country. She joined the national team at age 15, and once, in a Brazilian league game, she scored 124 points. Hortência isn't particularly tall (5'8") or strong (she weighs only 132 pounds), but she has a scorer's sixth sense for the basket, and she moves relentlessly without the ball. Always up on the balls of her feet, her ponytail flapping behind, she searches out gaps in the defense and angles to the hoop with the industry of John Havlicek or of Bill Bradley in his prime.
Like Brazilian basketball players of both sexes, she is not known for her defense. She let her guard down even for the Brazilian edition of Playboy, in 1988. That appearance, royalties from a Hortência doll and other perquisites of fame have helped her earn six figures annually, a generous chunk of which she earmarks for an orphanage.
"I feel sorry for any man who falls in love with me," she said in the mid-1980s. "I'm not ready for long relationships." But in 1989 she married José Victor Oliva, a São Paulo restaurateur and club owner known locally as the King of the Night. Pelé she may not be, but Pelé was best man at the wedding.
At the '96 Games, Hortência has been staying in the Olympic Village with her teammates, but José and little João have been quartered with a nanny at a nearby hotel. Whenever possible they make visits to the Village so the Queen can discharge her maternal as well as her basketball duties.
Almost as meaningful as Hortência's return to Brazil's Olympic squad was that of Maria Paula Gonçalves da Silva, 34, the unflappable 5'8" point guard who goes by Paula. Thus four of the five Magnificent Mononyms who started Down Under are back: Janeth, the slashing, 5'11" swing player (that's Janeth dos Santos Arcain for those of you scoring at home) whose buzzer-beater on Monday night defeated Italy 75-73; Hortência; Marta; and Paula, whose 29-year-old sister, Branca, is also in the guard rotation.
At the Carnival parade in '92 the Queen (left) vamped in a big headdress and little else.
photograph by
"This is a better team than in '94," says coach Miguel Ângelo da Luz.
Coming off her hiatus, Hortência wasn't expected to be a starter in Atlanta or even play more than 15-20 minutes a game. "I haven't yet regained my form, and it's hard to say how much more I'll be able to improve," she said before the Games began. "During my career I never stopped playing for any reason, so this is a new experience. Sometimes I know what I want to do, but my body doesn't respond."
U.S. coach Tara VanDerveer knew better than to believe such disclaimers. "The competitor that she is?" VanDerveer said of Hortência. "I'll bet my house that she'll play more than 15 to 20 minutes a game. And I live in California, so that's no idle bet."
Sure enough, Hortência started in Brazil's first three games in pool play, averaging 33.5 minutes and 15 points in victories over Canada and Russia before twisting her left ankle seven minutes into the Brazilians' defeat of Japan. She sat out the next two games, then scored 17 points in Brazil's 101-69 win over Cuba on Wednesday.
While the U.S. men's team is predestined to stand atop the medal stand, any of the semifinalists in the women's tournament could win the gold. And in the distaff draw there's even a grudge game in the making: a possible rematch in Sunday's final between Brazil and the U.S.
At the world championships the Australian organizers had set up a transportation system between the arena and the hotel that often obliged teams to share motor-coach rides to and from games. So it was that only two days after a 110-107 semifinal loss to a Brazilian team that shot 65%, the Americans found themselves sharing a bus with Hortência & Co., who had just defeated China 96-84 for the gold. (The Americans still shake their heads at how the Brazilians showed up at the worlds in lousy condition, got thumped by China and Slovakia in pool play and then—having played their way into shape—took the title by beating the U.S. and China in the semis and the final.) Even today, VanDerveer seethes about that bus ride, during which the Brazilian players made good on a promise to cut their coach's hair if they won. Eight U.S. players went on that humbling trip. One who didn't, Lobo, has nonetheless heard plenty about the raucous incident. "If Tara could," Lobo says, "she'd beat Brazil by a hundred."
Contributing to the anticipation of a Brazil-U.S. showdown is the fact that the two teams have circled each other warily during the past two years. Every effort by the U.S. to schedule Brazil for a pre-Games "friendly" was rebuffed, including an exhibition briefly set for Atlanta in April, which Brazil canceled.
According to a source in their basketball federation, the Brazilians' strategy has been to deprive the U.S. of experiencing their uniquely dervishlike and creative style of play, and thereby to take full psychological advantage of having beaten the U.S. the last time the two teams met. "If we played the Americans 10 times, we'd probably win once," says Hortência. "It's better not to use up our chances."
If that logic seems a bit convoluted to you, you're not alone. To a woman, the U.S. team thinks Brazil has miscalculated. "You must be afraid of something if you don't play somebody ahead of time," says U.S. guard Jennifer Azzi.
The Olympics themselves have put a sort of hex on the Brazilian women. Hortência and her teammates failed even to qualify in 1980, '84 and '88, and in '92 they finished a laggard seventh. But they're fortified by the knowledge that other Brazilian teams have thrived in the U.S., from the men's hoopsters who stunned the American team in Indianapolis at the '87 Pan Am Games to the soccer team that won the '94 World Cup at the Rose Bowl.
Standing in the Brazilian women's way is a U.S. team that will have been together as long—14 months—as Hortência spent away from the game. "I would love to be in the final with Brazil," says Ruthie Bolton of the U.S., who was among the guards outplayed by Hortência and Paula two years ago. "And I don't want excuses—no 'This player got hurt' or 'We were burned out.' If they beat us again, they deserve to win the Olympics.
"But that's not going to happen."
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