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A leader from abroad
It passed with scant notice -- just a few glyphs of agate type in Thursday morning's papers. The Washington Mystics of the WNBA had named a new coach. But the hiring of Tom Maher, who led the Opals, Australia's national team, to a place among the elite of international women's basketball, deserves to be broken out into something more. If there's ever been another instance of a non-North American taking over a U.S. professional basketball team, I can't think of it. Maher, 48, is no "evolved," Alan Alda- esque, politically correct male. He's a former Aussie Rules footballer, a devotee of fair-dinkum mateship, who spent time as a laborer in Australia's Northwest Territories. He had already found his way into coaching by his early 20s, and eventually married one of his players -- Robyn Maher, a longtime stalwart of the national team. (If the coach is going to marry a player, best that it be his team's captain and finest defender.) Maher refers without apology to his players as "girls." The Opals thought nothing of dispensing with the stilted honorific "Coach" and called him "Tom." There's a fresh breeze of bluntness to his manner. You could feel it all the way from Sydney in the aftermath of his appointment on Wednesday, when he said, "To make sure I'm educating myself about the U.S., I've been watching Jerry Springer. " In essence, he's the kind of guy who might say, "We've got a shrimp on the barbie," and be referring to a matchup problem posed by Lisa Leslie. He'll be welcome in Washington, where the Mystics have been completely confounding in their brief existence. They won exactly three games in their first season and still led the WNBA in attendance. A year later they went 12-20, and last season they canned their coach, Nancy Darsch, in part because she and star Chamique Holdsclaw couldn't figure out how to coexist. Maher's challenge will be to bring peace to the locker room and build on last summer's underperformance, in which Washington went 14-18 and was swept in the first round of the playoffs by the New York Liberty. As a forceful personality with a light touch, the Mystic of Oz could be just the person to coax the most from former U.S. national team members Holdsclaw, Vicki Bullett and Nikki McCray. Down Under, Maher's players adored him, but they respected him, too. His teams won six of the past dozen titles in the WNBL, the Aussie version of the WNBA. And he led the Opals to the semifinals of the last four major international competitions they entered -- this after the Australian women had advanced that far only once in their history before Maher took over in 1993. As we take stock of the historic nature of this news, let's raise our eyes to the horizon, where we're sure to see more and more blurring of basketball's borders. The foreign will further bleed into the domestic, the male into the female. Eventually no one will much notice, so long as all parties speak the lingua franca of hoop. The next barrier to fall? My guess is it'll be a female coach taking over a men's major-college or professional team Stateside. If Tennessee women's coach Pat Summit were only willing, it might well have happened already. Sports Illustrated senior writer Alexander Wolff is author of Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Odyssey, forthcoming in January 2002 from Warner Books. He can be
reached at awolff@si.timeinc.com.
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