Sunday Short Theatre – The Queen Of Basketball (2021)

We love Oscar winners, we love pioneers just as much. For this week’s Sunday Short Theatre we combine both of them to resent you with The Queen Of Basketball. A fascinating 22minute short film from Canadian filmmaker Ben Proudfoot about the electrifying Lusia “Lucy” Harris. Off course to many her name will be unknown, she is still a pioneer, as the only woman in basketball to be drafted into the NBA. She also scoring the first basket in women’s Olympic history and second woman to be inducted into the sports Hall Of Fame.

Sadly in January this year Luisa Harris died, even to this day Basketball enthusiasts very few know her name. If you are one of those fans, here’s your chance to learn who she was and what she did for the sport…

Lusia Harris — a pioneering athlete who became a basketball phenomenon in the 1970s, made history as the first woman to score a basket in the Olympics and was one of the first two women inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame — died on Jan. 18 in Mississippi. She was 66.

As a child growing up in rural Mississippi, Lusia “Lucy” Harris often stayed up past her bedtime watching her favorite N.B.A. players, dreaming of one day playing on the same courts. Reaching 6 feet 3 inches by the time she was in high school, Harris was often called “long and tall and that’s all” by her classmates — but she knew her height would be an asset on the court. And she wasn’t just tall enough to play the game. She was a rare talent who would go on to be a three-time national college champion and an Olympic silver medalist, making her a national sensation by the time she finished her college career.

For an electrifying young basketball player on the national stage, success often comes with a lucrative professional contract and brand deals — but Harris’s moment came in the 1970s, decades before the W.N.B.A. was founded, when few opportunities were available to female athletes interested in pursuing a professional career. In Ben Proudfoot’s “The Queen of Basketball,” Harris tells the story of what happens when an unstoppable talent runs out of games to win.

Source: New York Times