Is This Georgia Brown?

Dunbar lopes over to her. "Darlin'," he whispers. "Are you O.K.?"

"Why you fussin'?" Woodard says, popping back to her feet. "What are you do in'?"

"I guess she's a lot tougher than she looks," Sanders says.

She is. In fact, if she has a fault, it's that she tries to drive against the big guys instead of pulling up and lofting outside shots. "She doesn't take enough jumpers," says Klotz, "but she'll learn, the easy or the hard way." Woodard works hard at learning. For six weeks before the tryouts for the 10 women Trotter finalists, she got up every morning at five to lift weights, run wind sprints and jog five miles. "I have to refine my skills so that everything I do looks so simple it's unbelievable," she says. "That's the Globetrotter magic."

For an apprentice sorceress, she has certainly charmed the public. Surrounded by a swarm of kids in an Omaha hotel lobby, Woodard ignites a smile that could melt an M & M in your hand. She asks a straw-haired tyke named Joe (Kool) Powell his age. Kool holds up eight dubious fingers and blurts out, "The Harlem Globetrotters are the best basketball team in the world."

"The world?" an onlooker asks.

"Well, maybe not the world," he says. "But at least the states I've been in." Which turn out to be Nebraska, Iowa, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Tennessee.

"Better than the teams in the NBA?"

" NBA teams don't have all those tricks" Kool explains. And NBA teams don't have Woodard. "When she dribbles, it's like she's bouncing a big potato through a revolving door," he says. "And I like the way she looks." He blushes at the thought.

"In her uniform, that is."