Leslie’s Glad She Listened to That Voice in the Crowd

Lisa Leslie remembers the man’s words but not his name and for that she apologizes.

Leslie was a second grader, terribly tall, terribly shy. The man came to her school assembly and began to speak.

“He started out by saying something like, ‘I’m not going to quiet you down. If I’m here to speak to just one person, I’ve done my job.’

“I don’t know why,” Leslie says, “but I focused in on this man and he spoke. He said he was gonna reach me, that I could do anything I wanted, be anything I wanted to be.

“When I think back, it was a lot of cliches, but after he was done, I started writing down my goals. I was 7 years old and I wrote that I wanted to be a newscaster or a model. That man made a great impression on me.”

That man wasn’t a mentor in any conventional sense but he did some mentoring that day.

Leslie hasn’t become a television newscaster. Yet. She has been a model, though, and also is one of the best women’s basketball players in the world, the proud owner of an Olympic gold medal, a prouder member of the Los Angeles Sparks WNBA team and the proudest owner of a degree from USC.

Last week, Leslie was honored by the Los Angeles Women’s Foundation as a Mentor Awards 2000 standout. As part of Nike’s community outreach division, she has begun a mentoring program called “Takin’ It Inside With Lisa Leslie.”

In partnership with the Olympia Girls Development League (OGDL), Leslie works to teach inner-city girls--”And I was an inner-city girl,” she says--about growing up, playing hard, studying harder, thinking well of oneself and believing in oneself and succeeding at something.

Girls like Ebony Hoffman have been paying attention to Leslie for what seems like forever. Leslie laughs at this idea. She isn’t 30 yet. She is only 27 and can still feel like a kid, giggling with teammates, eager as a rookie to start a fresh WNBA season. Eager as Hoffman is to finish her senior year at Narbonne High and head off to USC.

Hoffman has been in the OGDL since she was in sixth grade.

“That’s when I first met Lisa Leslie,” Hoffman says. “But I’ll bet she doesn’t remember.”

Sixth grade was about the time Leslie met Lynette Woodard, the first female player on the Harlem Globetrotters, who had come to an OGDL gathering to speak about self-esteem, having it; setting goals, reaching them.

“I thought that, wow, this is pretty cool,” Leslie says. “Women can play basketball outside of school.”

When Leslie spoke at Hoffman’s OGDL meeting, Hoffman said she thought, “Wow, what a cool person. She’s got her stuff together. I can do that.”

As Hoffman got to know Leslie, as she watched Leslie negotiate college as a star, as she watched Leslie gracefully juggle modeling assignments and competitions for U.S. national teams, as she saw Leslie not just preach but practice her commitment to education, Hoffman realized something.

“Lisa has been successful for a reason,” Hoffman says. “You have to do something right to get where Lisa is. You know she doesn’t preach. She’s talkative, she listens, she tells you what’s important by the things she does. She gives back to her community. It has a real impact on kids, you know, when someone you see on TV and in the newspapers comes to your gym to talk to you. Kids pay attention to that. Girls don’t always have that.”

A nationally honored high school basketball player, Hoffman is planning to return to the OGDL as a mentor. She plans to return with a USC degree.

If she were to graduate from USC but never play basketball again, “That would be OK,” Hoffman says. “That’s what you use your education for, to prepare for life.”

Leslie says Hoffman gives her too much credit.

“I haven’t talked to Ebony that much,” Leslie says. “I try to spend time with kids having trouble and Ebony has always seemed to have things together. Ebony is someone you’d want to sit down and have lunch with and talk to and I think you’d learn something. I’d learn something.”

John Anderson, director of the OGDL, says that Leslie has never needed to be coerced into coming to OGDL and talking to rooms full of kids. Leslie says she learned something important from that man who spoke at her second-grade assembly.

“I’ve always remembered how he said that if just one person listened and learned something, then his coming to school was worth it,” Leslie says.

“Wherever I go, if just one kid listens and learns something, then that’s what matters to me. It’s so important for girls from the environment we’ve come from to see that you can make it and that it’s up to you. It is such a good feeling if one girl sees me and believes she can do something good too.”

And so believes Hoffman. It is no coincidence that Hoffman is going to play basketball for USC, same as Leslie did.

“There’s Lisa, there’s Cheryl Miller, there’s Tina Thompson,” Hoffman says. “If all these people came out of USC, then I can continue that tradition. They’re good people, successful people, role models.”

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.