There was nothing Sheryl Swoopes couldn't do well on the basketball court, but a familiar scene always comes to mind when reflecting on her career.
It's the image of Swoopes intercepting passes -- even good passes -- at the top of the key, then zooming down the court for uncontested layups.
Opposing players knew that Swoopes could do this. They were warned about it. They saw it on film. But they still found themselves getting burned by Swoopes this way, again and again -- and then staring hopelessly at her as she raced away from them.
Swoopes will be inducted this weekend into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, an honor she seemed destined for since her college days at Texas Tech. The Lone Star State native put on a show in the 1993 national championship game that still has not been topped: 47 points, even though Ohio State did all it could defensively to stop the 6-foot guard/forward who seemed to be everywhere at once.
Nothing worked, and Texas Tech took home the title. Then-Ohio State coach Nancy Darsch said of Swoopes' ability to break through everything the Buckeyes tried to do: "She attacked our heart."
If you were in the Omni in Atlanta that April Sunday 23 years ago watching the NCAA championship game, you knew you were seeing a transcendent player. You lamented that there was no U.S. professional league for the senior to go to then. But you also rejoiced when the WNBA came around in time to let Swoopes' brilliance get the stage it deserved.
Swoopes was 26 and pregnant when the WNBA launched in 1997. She was able to play for the Houston Comets late in that season, though, as they won the first of their four consecutive WNBA titles. She would be named league MVP three times and win three Olympic gold medals.
Swoopes helped change the way the women's game was played. Her speed, precision, skill level, coolness under pressure, opportunistic defense -- they set a standard for what the WNBA could be.
There was a lightning-strike element to Swoopes. She did everything quickly without looking as if she were rushed. And when it was crunch time, Swoopes wanted to be the player who made things happen. Usually, that's exactly what she did. Marsha Sharp, her former coach at Texas Tech, described it best.
"Whatever it took to lift her team to a win," Sharp said, "she was able to take her game to that level."
Off the court, things have been more complicated for Swoopes. When she publicly acknowledged in 2005 that she was in a relationship with another woman, she became a kind of spokeswoman for LGBT athletes without ever seeming fully comfortable in that role.
When that relationship ended and she got engaged to a man a few years later, Swoopes found herself explaining that she never really wanted any labels in regard to her sexuality or personal life.
Swoopes went through some challenging times financially, too. And her exit from the WNBA wasn't what she'd hoped. She played for Houston from 1997 to 2007, then in Seattle in 2008. Swoopes was cut by the Storm at the start of 2009 and didn't play in the WNBA that season or in 2010. In 2011, at age 40, she averaged 8.2 points and 4.1 rebounds for Tulsa, and that season concluded her WNBA career.
Swoopes never got the big send-off from the WNBA that a player of her caliber deserved. Unfortunately, part of that was because the franchise that should have honored her, the Comets, folded in 2008.
Swoopes then got into coaching and was hired to run the women's basketball program at Loyola Chicago. But that ended this summer, with Swoopes fired after multiple player departures. She went 31-62 in three seasons at Loyola.
None of those things, though, are what this weekend in Springfield, Massachusetts, is about for Swoopes. This is about the amazing things she did while playing basketball, which were so frequent that they just came to be expected.
The word relentless would be good for Swoopes' style because she was always that -- both offensively and defensively.
When looking at Swoopes' WNBA numbers -- she averaged 15.0 points, 4.9 rebounds, 3.2 assists and 2.0 steals in 10 full seasons and parts of two others -- remember that she didn't play what would have been her first four seasons because the WNBA didn't exist yet.
In fact, after she finished at Texas Tech, one of the greatest basketball talents in the world was working at a bank, not sure how much of an athletic future she had.
USA Basketball helped fill the void. And by the time Swoopes was part of the traveling team in 1995-96 preparing for the Atlanta Olympics, pro women's basketball in the United States was on the horizon.
Swoopes was one of three "signature" players for the WNBA, along with Lisa Leslie and Rebecca Lobo, while many others went to the short-lived American Basketball League of the late '90s. The birth of her son, Jordan Jackson, delayed Swoopes' WNBA debut in 1997. She averaged 7.1 points in nine regular-season games then and didn't score while playing 14 minutes in the two playoff games that inaugural season.
But Swoopes was in full-on star mode by 1998, and that began an eight-year run -- not counting the 2001 season she missed with a knee injury -- in which she was regularly spectacular. Swoopes won her three MVP awards (2000, 2002, 2005) during that stretch.
Her best season statistically came in 2000, when the Comets won their last title. She averaged 20.7 points, 6.3 rebounds, 3.8 assists and 2.8 steals. Houston, at 27-5, actually didn't have the best record in the WNBA that season; Los Angeles did at 28-4. But the Swoopes-led Comets swept through all three playoff series, winning 2-0 over Sacramento, Los Angeles and New York. She averaged 18.8 points in the playoffs, capped by a 31-point performance in the title-clinching game against the Liberty.
That was in August 2000. Then in September and October, Swoopes was the second-leading scorer for the U.S. Olympic team that won gold at the Sydney Games.
Swoopes was a part of one more Olympic team, as she averaged 9.1 points for the 2004 gold medalists in the Athens Games. In 2005, even at age 34, Swoopes had another MVP season in the WNBA, as her coach Van Chancellor said she was playing as well as she ever had.
Swoopes was still at the top of her game in 2006 but played just three games in 2007 before being derailed by a back injury. She felt as though she was still not fully healthy for her 2008 season in Seattle and hoped for a redemptive 2009. But that didn't happen.
Her last season in 2011 with a Tulsa team that went 3-31 seemed a very anti-climactic way for such a player to exit the WNBA. Yet there was something profound in that effort, too: Swoopes still played hard, still flashed examples of why she was once on the very short list of the best players in the world.
That she could still do that at age 40, particularly after her debilitating back injury, was in some ways the ultimate testament to her talent and resolve.
Those qualities, ultimately, were what defined Swoopes as a player. When she was at her best, there was no one better. And even when she wasn't, she was still at a level that few others ever reach.