Out Of Africa

When Mwadi Mabika was a girl in Kinshasa, Zaire (now Congo), she lived across the street from an outdoor basketball court frequented by a women's team. Mabika and her friends, who were used to playing with a small, cheap basketball, would eagerly sweep the court of sand for the players in exchange for five minutes with a regulation ball. "One day they wouldn't give us the ball to play with, so we put all the sand back," she says.

Years later, there is still a cost to denying the ball to Mabika, a fifth-year guard with the WNBA's Los Angeles Sparks. "When the ball is in Mwadi's hands, something good usually happens," says L.A. guard Tamecka Dixon. "She can do things that few women can do."

Such as perform a spot-on impression of Michael Jordan defying gravity. On an NBC video that Mabika keeps among a neat stack of game tapes in her Culver City apartment, there's a clip of Jordan driving the baseline in a seemingly hopeless foray lei the basket, then floating past the defense and delivering an acrobatic reverse layup. Seconds later, another clip shows the 5'11" Mabika making the same move in a Sparks game. "Sometimes you find yourself standing there watching her," says Dixon. "She is so graceful in the air."

She doesn't need to be near the basket to thrill. Often employing what Sparks coach Michael Cooper calls "the best-looking jump shot in the game, men or women," Mabika scores from all over the court. She is particularly reliable in crunch time. "Mabika is a moan and a groan to guard," says Houston coach Van Chancellor, whose Comets lost 66-63 to the Sparks on Memorial Day, thanks in part to Mabika's 10 points. "She is a great outside shooter, gets the offensive rebounds and puts the ball on the floor. She is the most improved player in the WNBA from the first year to right now."

In fact, she's a big reason L.A. is favored to win the league title now that four-time champion Houston has lost stars Sheryl Swoopes to an ACL injury and Cynthia Cooper to the Phoenix Mercury, which she is coaching. Besides being the second leading scorer on the Sparks last year with a 12.3 average, Mabika finished in the WNBA's top 20 in assists, rebounds, steals and three-pointers and made her first All-Star team. She averaged 17.5 points in the playoffs and held Swoopes, the league MVP and leading scorer, to 15 points per game (3.8 below her playoff average) in L.A.'s loss to Houston in the conference finals. In the Sparks' first three games, all victories, this season, Mabika has averaged nine points, all but one of her field goals a three-pointer.

Mabika, 24, has learned most of her defensive skills since coming to the U.S., but she picked up many of her offensive moves watching the broadcasts of NBA highlights on Zaire's one TV channel. "Every morning, when I was between 14 and 18 years old, I'd play basketball with the guys," says Mabika, "and we'd copy the moves we'd just seen Jordan, Magic and [Clyde] Drexler make. That's basically how I learned the game."

It wasn't a bad education. Three years after joining her first Zairian Division III team, at age 12, Mabika became the go-to player on the national team. At 19, when she scored 20 points against the U.S. at the Atlantic Olympics, future WNBA vice president of player personnel Renee Brown took note. In 1997, as Zaire was in the throes of civil war, Brown, fellow Kinshasa native Dikembe Mutombo, now of the Philadelphia 76ers, and his brother Tshitingo appealed to the country's authorities to grant Mabika a visa to try out for the fledgling WNBA.

After beating out 300 WNBA wannabes in an open tryout to make the L.A. roster, Mabika learned English by listening to her teammates and watching Oprah and Montel Williams. Now fluent, the shy Mabika is no longer likely to shock teammates by announcing, "Everybody makes me sick," as she did at a 1998 team meeting when she intended to say, "Everybody makes mistakes."

"I love living in L.A., but I worry about my country," says Mabika, who brought her mother to the U.S. in 1998 and hasn't been back to the war-ravaged Congo. Like Mutombo, she wants to help others in her homeland. Though her WNBA salary is between $50,000 and $60,000, only about 1/250th of Mutombo's $14 million NBA compensation, she is thinking of ways to set up a foundation to help bring shoes, jerseys and balls to kids in Congo. "I want to help them with their dreams," says Mabika, "because I wouldn't be here if someone hadn't helped me with mine."