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FIBA World Cup 2022: How Lauren Jackson made basketball’s … – Code

She retired six years ago in a world of pain to live the quiet life as a single mum. What has driven Lauren Jackson, 41, to embark on a stunning comeback?
In April 2021, Lauren Jackson was in the worst shape of her life. Twenty kilograms ­overweight, muscle tone shot. At 40, she could barely manage backyard play with her young sons without running out of puff. For a lark, the ­greatest women’s basketballer of all time agreed to team up with a few mates for the mixed ­basketball competition run by Albury City ­Council in her country NSW hometown. No crowds, no fanfare. Just some local physios and uni students awestruck to be playing on the same court as this once-in-a-century player, a four-time Olympic medallist and three-time Most Valuable Player in America’s WNBA professional league, in a sports stadium that bears her name.
Minutes into the first game of the season, her teammates pushed the ball straight to Jackson, coiled like a cobra just outside the arc, and she ­rattled in a three-pointer like she’d never been away. “It was unbelievable,” says Sam McDonald, her on-court trainer and best friend. “No disrespect to her, but she was out of shape. Everyone on our team was like, ‘Well, she hasn’t lost it’.”
Jackson out of shape is superhero stuff for ­ordinary mortals. In her prime – a knee injury forced her retirement in 2016 – she was transcendent. At 196cm (6’5”), she dominated every inch of the court, roaming the perimeter and reigning near the post, heaving miracle jump shots from the outer limits of imagination.
Taking to the court at the Lauren Jackson Sports Centre last year for those low-stakes weekly games, it became clear to Jackson that not just her skill but her passion remained intact. The smell of the court: waxed wood and sneakers. That sweet, sweet whoosh as the ball tumbled through the net. All the ambition came roaring back. “Truly, I think I was born to play basketball,” Jackson says now. “It’s always been such an intrinsic part of my identity, even when I retired, and I love that. It’s just who I am.”
Ordinary ­mortals may think that Jackson has nothing left to prove. Four Olympic medals with the Aust­ralian Opals, and a 2006 world title. Two WNBA titles with the Seattle Storm, five Australian WNBL titles, and a swag of ­personal accolades. If you were being thorough, you could fill this page with her conquests. And last year, her status as our nation’s greatest basketball player was cemented with her induction into America’s Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, the first Australian to rank alongside greats such as Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal.
Still, the seven-time WNBA All-Star couldn’t shake the way it had ended: beaten, in the end, by her own body. An anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tear and subsequent infection had stolen her gold medal dreams on the eve of the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. Jackson had been forced to limp off the world stage with plenty left in the tank. She still felt ripped off.
November 2021. Passion reignited, Jackson’s fitness training began in earnest. Each day at 6.30am she’d meet with McDonald, who is also the Albury Wodonga Bandits’ assistant coach, to work on her strength and stamina. Wary of her problem knee, careful not to overcommit, they started slow, building Lauren 2.0 from the ground up. A daily dose of medicinal cannabis stopped her knee from swelling, dulled the pain and cut her recovery time.
McDonald, who’s known the hoops superstar since they were kids, watched her drive re-emerge in those weekly mixed games with a kind of awe. “She got really, really competitive,” he says. “One weekend we were playing and the other team hit a couple of baskets. Loz called a timeout, turned to us and said, ‘They are not scoring any more in this game’.” His voice holds a mix of amusement and pride. “It was a mixed basketball game! We were up by 40!”
There was no endgame in those early days; Jackson just wanted to play ball. But perfection is her middle name; no point getting halfway fit. If she was going to do this, she was going all in.
Soon the hometown hero was breaking all the records at the local gym: bench press, deadlift, weighted squats. Jackson was lifting an astonishing 110kg – more than her body weight, now down to a streamlined 98kg. She was moving ­fluidly on the court, and could play a vigorous half-hour’s one-on-one with McDonald. Her game was starting to sizzle. “I never thought that I would play again, so even when I started training, it was just to get fit,” she says. “I’ve been really cognisant of the fact that I need to take it day by day and step by step, rather than looking too far ahead.”
Did she dream at that point of the spectacular comeback that has made headlines around the world? No. Did she imagine that Opals coach Sandy Brondello would be calling from New York to tell her she’d made the 12-player squad for the World Cup in Sydney this month? Or that her comeback would continue with a triumphant return to the WNBL, signing with Melbourne’s Southside Flyers? Never.
At that point, she didn’t even dare to dream she’d be selected to play for her hometown team the Bandits in February, let alone that she’d lead them to finish the season at the top of the ladder for the first time in their history. Jackson had no idea she was about to become the subject of the most dramatic, exhilarating and life-affirming Australian sports story of the year.
There’s something different about Lauren 2.0 and one of them is sitting on the couch beside her as she chats over Zoom from the sunny open-plan living room of her new-build country home. Harry, five, is sporting a black eye after an unfair fight in which brother Lenny, three, was armed with a large piece of Lego and he wasn’t.
“Yeah, he did that when I was in a Zoom ­meeting last Friday,” says Jackson, a single mum. Bandits president Luke Smith likens Lenny to the Looney Tunes Tasmanian devil, but today the boy’s whirling dervish energy is dimmed by a bout of bronchitis. The three-year-old is theoretically confined to bed but will make a number of impish cameos over the next few hours.
It’s a mellow scene, here on the well-watered outskirts of Albury, close to the brimming Hume Dam and just a kilometre away from the house where Jackson was born and raised. Former national team basketball players Gary and Maree Jackson – her mum and dad – live right next door. There’s a pool and a vegie patch, a junior basketball ring in the lounge room. Custom-made benches and doorways to accommodate Jackson’s height.
“She’s always loved coming home,” says Maree. Her daughter doesn’t like to fly and “hated” the amount of travel required of a globetrotting elite athlete. “She just likes the quiet life.”
Jackson was just 15 when she went to the ­Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra on a scholarship. She’d been playing since she was four and was identified as a future national player by the time she reached high school. Fast-tracked into the senior program, she made her Opals debut in 1997, the same year she began her WNBL career. “As a young girl, she was very skinny and very tall,” Maree says. “People sort of always had a dig at her being so tall, so when she went to AIS she felt as though she finally belonged.” Her determination bloomed early. “If she set her mind to something, it would happen; that’s always been the type of person she is.”
Basketball took Jackson around the world. The power forward-centre was the No. 1 draft pick for the WNBA in 2001 and was with the Seattle Storm for more than a decade. She played in China, won league titles in Spain, and was crowned MVP in the Women’s Korean Basketball League.
It was during a dark and dangerous stint playing in Russia that the big life grew too big. Nothing quiet about the world of silly money and lavish parties she inadvertently entered into when Shabtai von Kalmanovich, a former KGB spy turned businessman, signed her to Spartak Moscow in 2007. He paid her $US3 million for two seasons and put her up in a plush six-bedroom apartment in ­Moscow. She had a personal driver, was gifted diamonds for playing well, and flew on a private jet on holiday with von Kalmanovich’s wife and children. Jackson was 26. “It was just completely overwhelming,” she says. “It was too big. There was too much. And it was just too hard for me, you know.”
Von Kalmanovich was “an incredible human” who treated her well, but she grew uneasy with the excessive and dangerous world he inhabited. Her disquiet came to a head when she noticed his security detail following her around a shopping mall one day. Jackson longed for home.
In November 2009 she was in Canberra ­recovering from yet another injury when she learnt von Kalmanovich had been assassinated in the ­centre of Moscow. Two men had driven up beside his luxury Mercedes, “a car we drove in with him all the time”, and pumped 10 bullets into his body. “It was traumatising and bizarre and feels like a lifetime ago now,” she says.
She moved back to Albury in 2011, a decision that felt doubly right when her mother was almost killed in a car accident and needed years of ­rehabilitation. “I’m a real country kid,” Jackson says. “The safety, the quiet, I just like this life. There’s no rollercoaster of emotions; I know what I’m getting every day. Being able to take that into what I’m doing now on the basketball court and being able to come home to my life, my kids, my home, it’s perfect. I’ve never been happier.”
This snapshot of home provides a rare and true insight into who Jackson is now and, in a roundabout way, why she’s back on the court. The clue is in a new tattoo: Harry. Lenny. Everything. Always. It flashes periodically on her inner right forearm as she stretches her formidable length, or pulls back her hair to highlight angled cheekbones. “When I first had Harry, that was the moment in my life that it all made sense, like I was meant to be his mum,” she says. “I still get teary thinking about it. I felt that my whole life I’d been searching for something and the minute I had him I knew that was it. He’s, you know, the love of my life. They both are.”
It’s an interesting choice of words. When ­Jackson announced her retirement from basketball in March 2016, she referred to parting with “the love of her life”. Now here she is, in a casual grey tracksuit, wiping Harry’s nose, telling Lenny to put some clothes on. “I’m definitely a boy mum,” she says. “I’m so physically active myself; I wear tracksuits all the time. They love training with me, lifting weights, all that stuff. And then when I do occasionally get dressed up, they’re like, ‘Oh my god, she’s a princess!’”
To don the green and gold with the Opals again was never, Jackson says, the motivating force behind her “giving it another crack”. It’s gravy. “It was more just so the boys could see me play,” she says. “So they could be around a team, because I loved that when I was a kid. I loved travelling with my mum and dad on a bus to games. I got to know their teammates. It was like another family. And I wanted my kids to experience that.”
Her interview demeanour – polite, a bit careful – melts when she talks to her boys, though there’s a hint of a take-no-prisoners approach when it comes to discipline. Jackson does not suffer fools gladly, and never has. Just ask her WNBA opponents from the early 2000s, when she prowled the court with theatrical eyeliner and brightly dyed hair, trash-talking and cocksure after a pre-game rev-up to Marilyn Manson. “I definitely get white line fever when I step foot on the court,” she says. “I’m very competitive. Fiery.”
One might expect more ego from a player once dubbed “the Don Bradman of women’s sport”. But unlike the strutting roosters of the NBA, Jackson leaves her swagger on the court.
Albury locals are used to seeing her at the shops: fame aside, she’s pretty conspicuous. They generally leave her alone, although they’ve been packing out the Lauren Jackson Sports Centre for Bandits home games. After each game, a card table is set up and Jackson greets every one of the hundred or so kids lining up for autographs and selfies. More often than not, the line includes members of the team she just beat.
“I’m just a normal single mum, you know, with a job,” she says. “Look, I’ve been humbled in so many ways. When I was an athlete [I found] you can be on top of the world one minute and in the next breath hit rock bottom.”
She interrupts herself briefly and I’m treated to one side of a conversation familiar to any parent of an energetic three-year-old, even one who’s under the weather:
Mate, you should be in your bedroom. Go and have a lie down and I’ll be in there in a minute.
There’s a long pause.
If you’re quiet you can come out, but only if you’re quiet.
Victory! Lenny wanders in: he’s big, a bit blonder than his older brother and twice as bold. “I reckon Lenny will get close to seven foot,” ­Jackson says. “I think Harry will probably be my height.” Lenny’s already sinking shots in the living room’s junior hoop, while Harry can dribble with both hands and score baskets on a full-size court. He often sits on the bench with the coaches when his mum plays, drawing pictures of rainbows and copying down jersey numbers.
“Lauren’s always wanted kids,” says mum Maree. “And she’s a fantastic mother. It’s made her complete, to have those little boys.”
Jackson has another tattoo, this one on her leftarm. Carpe Diem, it says. It was her colleagues at Basketball Australia, however, who urged her to seize the day when she was wavering about whether to get back on the court. Jackson moved into basketball administration when she retired from playing and had been commuting part-time to Melbourne to head up the national women’s and girls’ strategy. (She has a degree in gender studies from Macquarie University.) “They said, ‘If you want to go and start getting fit again, we’d love to support you in that’,” she says. “So I did. And then one thing led to another.”
When Jackson laces up her sneakers for a fifth World Cup appearance on September 22, the wheel will have come full circle for her and head coach Brondello. They were Opals teammates at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and, 22 years later, will again join forces for a medal tilt in the ­harbour city. “I played two Olympics with her, she’s still pretty good,” Brondello told AP News last month. “She’s getting her legs back and looks in great shape. She makes good reads. She’s not the LJ of six years ago, but she certainly still shows a lot of LJ-like moves.”
Jackson says she is “the strongest and most focused” she’s ever been and she plans to have an impact off the bench. But the value of her ­inclusion in the Opals squad is as much about resetting the team culture, fractured in recent years due to drama around the polarising star centre Liz Cambage.
Cambage, 31, messily exited last year’s Tokyo Olympics squad over allegations she made racist remarks to rival Nigerian players. In July, the four-time All Star centre split with the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks after just 25 games. Jackson feels she has little to add to any Cambage conversation.
“I care about Liz,” she says. “We played together in 2012 [at the London Olympics]. I really don’t know what happened last year [but] I’m sad that she’s not still in the fold.
“In my ­opinion she has the potential to be one of the most dominant players in the world [and] I’ll be here if she ever wants to talk.”
Throughout her career, Jackson battled constant injuries – hip, Achilles tendon and both knees – and eventually had a partial knee replacement. She also came to rely on painkillers, anti-­inflammatories and sleeping pills in order to maintain high performance, and antidepressants to curb her anxiety and depression. In 2016, she’d had enough of living in “a fog” and spent two weeks withdrawing from everything. “I had the shakes, shivering, all that,” she says. “Mum stayed with me the whole time. She was awesome.”
After a conversation with her Storm teammate and great friend Sue Bird, Jackson signed up to a medicinal cannabis trial when she resumed training last year. “It was fantastic,” she says. “Especially in that first six- to 12-week period when I was really focused on just getting as strong as I could be.” (She had to quit when she began playing with the Bandits and is still waiting to hear about a therapeutic use exemption.)
Having slain her demons, physical and mental, Jackson brings valuable perspective and experience to the young Opals side. “I know what I went through and I feel like I came out of it on the other side,” she says. “So, I can definitely lend support to anybody who needs it, or just an ear.”
There are five WNBA players in the squad and, despite her legendary status, Jackson had to earn her spot by proving herself at intensive training camps in Canberra and New York in July. “Look, I know how I would have felt when I was younger if someone had been brought into a training camp this late before a World Cup,” she says. “I probably wouldn’t have been the most welcoming, so I really feel like [my teammates] did their best to try and embrace me. Then they got to see me on the court and in training and they were like, ‘Oh, OK, we get it, we know why she’s here.’ Those girls are professionals, they want to win. They want the best team on the court.”
This story is a sequel. It’s about the rebirth of a legend. Of a country girl who fell in love at four years old with a sport that would break her again and again but also give her the ride of her life. Between two hoops, Lauren Jackson found a way to experience the wider world and she’s about to reclaim her place in it.
Lauren 2.0 is older and wiser. Her body is stronger, her mind sharper. Crucially, she’s managed to find peace, snug and safe with her family by the mighty Murray River. “As an athlete, when I was young, I thought I was the centre of the ­universe,” she says. “And I’m not. I didn’t get that until I’d actually removed myself from it, had my kids and, I guess, just started my life as a normal human. And let me tell you right now, normal is so much better.”
Lenny, who has been remarkably patient for the better part of two hours, is finally starting to lose it.
Come here, mate, come and say bye.
There’s a soft thud.
Oh baby, did you just fall over?
Jackson, who once schooled the world in what female athletes can do and be, puts Lenny right-side up and confiscates the shoe he’s decided to chew on. “Yeah, this is so much better.”
The Weekend Australian Magazine

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