Fran Harris remembers a late-night dinner in Sacramento. Her Houston Comets squad had just dispatched the lowly Monarchs by 10 points. To celebrate, she and a few teammates, including Cynthia Cooper, Tammy Jackson and Kim Perrot, decided to grab a bite. Cooper had scored 44 in the 25 July 1997 contest, and her talents dazzled even her dinner companions.
“I said to Cynthia, ‘I just cannot believe how great you’re playing – and I know how great you are!’” Harris tells the Guardian. “And she goes, ‘I know!’ She was just, like, Yeah, I’m the motherfucker! I was like, ‘You absolutely are!’”
But Cooper, an eventual two-time WNBA MVP and four-time champion, was not supposed to be the league’s top player. She’d played in Europe for a number of seasons after winning college championships at USC in the mid-1980s. But when the WNBA began in the summer of 1997, she was already 34.
In fact, her entire Houston Comets team, who would win the league’s first championship – as well as the next three – were predicted to finish last by many ahead of the inaugural campaign. (They could get a chance to add to their tally: on Wednesday the WNBA confirmed a franchise will return to Houston in 2027, 19 years after the original Comets folded.)
“They were very unimpressed with our roster for some reason,” says Harris, now a television analyst for the WNBA’s Dallas Wings. “When we read that, we were like, ‘This shit is funny! That is hilarious.”
The Comets were an older team when the league began. But age can help when it comes to winning trophies. And though the Comets weren’t only comprised of vets – they boasted the first-ever No 1 draft pick, Tina Thompson, and 26-year-old star Sheryl Swoopes, who joined later in the season after giving birth to her son, Jordan – the reputation was hard to shake.
“People just thought our team was too old to compete,” says Yolanda Moore, who was fresh out of college at the time, and a mother of two. “They thought the championship would be between New York and LA.”
When the WNBA began, professional women’s basketball was in a precarious state. The WBL, the first pro women’s league in the US, started nearly 20 years prior. But it folded within three years. After that, several more leagues popped up, including the ABL, which launched in 1996. That year, the US boasted an all-time Olympic team, and the league wanted to capitalize on the enthusiasm around their gold medal.
But things didn’t go to plan for the ABL. Harris, who had won a NCAA championship in 1986 with Texas, had heard about the ABL and was interested, but a former teammate working as a college coach warned her against joining, with the NBA getting ready to launch the WNBA.
Harris took note. The ABL, without big-money backing, folded after two seasons.
Tryouts for the Comets’ inaugural season kicked off on Mother’s Day weekend. “It was just survival of the fittest,” says Moore. “It was a free-for-all. We did your basic three-man-wave – that kind of stuff. But really we were just put into teams and played basketball. And at the end of every session, they would make cuts.”
The Comets’ first coach was Van Chancellor. A veteran of the college ranks, he’d been Moore’s coach at Mississippi. Still, he told her that she had a “snowball’s chance in hell” to make the Comets, she says. Moore, who graduated with a degree in journalism, initially wanted to be “Robin Roberts Jr”. When she heard about the WNBA, though, she had to jump for it.
It was no easy path. She’d given birth to her second child that January and set aside her sneakers for eight weeks. She’d had a complicated pregnancy, involving surgery. “It was really tough,” she says. But somehow she began working out again in March. “Then I went to the tryout in May,” she says.
She also didn’t listen to her coach’s negative attitude. Moore’s perseverance landed her a spot on the Comets’ practice team, and later one on the main roster.
Harris, who also had to navigate challenges to make the Comets, remembers the team being especially accommodating to the roster once it was set. They helped the players get apartments and everything else they needed to settle into a new city. The Comets were part of the Houston Rockets organization and shared facilities with their NBA sibling.
“They were coming off their world championships [in 1994 and 1995] with Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon,” Harris says. “We trained at the same place where the Rockets trained in Westwood. We were like ships passing through the days with those guys.”
“They came to our games,” Moore says of Rockets players. “We didn’t feel like the step-kids.”
Comets players also shared rooms with teammates on the road during that first season. Harris bunked with Tammy Jackson. (“We were like family,” Harris says.) Moore roomed with Thompson. (“She had her own routines, so I got to see that up close and personal!” Moore says with a laugh.)
Thinking back on the year, Harris vividly remembers the Comets’ first regular-season game. It was on the road in Cleveland with an official attendance of 11,455. “It was sold out,” she says. “I was like: ‘Woah!’ The crowd for that moment was a big deal.”
In a way, Harris says, that entire first year was like a dream. The WNBA marked the first time longtime women’s basketball stars could play against one another professionally in the US. “We had all played against each other in college,” Harris says. “Now, here we were playing against each other in a pro league. It was incredibly surreal.”
That the players were given the chance to show their skills in the WNBA was an honor, says Moore. But it was also something that demanded a big effort. The players wanted to win games, but they also wanted the league to continue into the future.
“Not only were we trying to prove ourselves in the league,” says Moore, a bench player in her first season before blossoming into a top backup center, “but we were women trying to prove ourselves to this sport, that we deserved to have this space. We were proving that this was our time.”
And no one embodied that like Cooper.
“You would go to practice,” Moore continues, “and she’s already there. She’s already been there for, like, two hours, working out. She would be drenched in sweat, having to change clothes just to get ready for practice.”
Moore says that Cooper’s ascent – she was the WNBA’s first MVP and first back-to-back MVP – at times clashed with Swoopes’s fame. “Our team was so competitive,” she says. In many ways, Swoopes was the face of the WNBA. She was the league’s first signee. She had her own signature Nike shoe, unheard of for a woman’s hooper at the time. Swoopes missed the first six weeks after giving birth, but she worked her way in for the final nine games of the regular season.
Cooper’s rise and Swoopes’s late start created some tension within the Comets. “It wasn’t anything that was hidden,” Moore says. “Everybody knew it was competition. It was, This is my team, no this is my team, no this is my team!”
Moore remembers team officials calling meetings because Cooper had been the leading scorer in a given game but Swoopes got the limelight in the next day’s newspaper. “There was some pettiness and a lot of ego when it came to that,” Moore says. “Understandably so, because they both had earned the right to be in that space.”
Those spats were nothing compared with the way the Comets ran through the league in 1997. (The trio of Cooper, Swoopes and Thompson would later be known as the WNBA’s original “Big Three”.) Picked by many to finish in the basement, Houston finished first in the Eastern Conference with a record of 18-10. Then came the playoffs.
“I remember the fatigue,” Harris says. “It was a condensed season. Even though you might think you shouldn’t be that tired, you’re packing a lot of games into 100 days. And not for a lot of money! I think my salary for the first year was $15,000.”
The WNBA playoffs were especially short that opening campaign. The Comets took advantage and beat the Charlotte Sting 1-0 and then the New York Liberty in the Finals 1-0.
“To make history and be the first team to win the WNBA championship in 1997 was absolutely incredible,” Harris says. “Of course, we were on a high. Then Princess Diana dies.”
The Comets beat the Liberty in Houston on 30 August 1997, and Diana was pronounced dead the next day after a car accident in Paris that left millions in shock. “We were torn up about that,” Moore says.
“We went from winning the championship – the news went from elation to, like, What? To deflation,” Harris agrees.
Life and basketball, of course, must go on. Shortly after the victory, Houston threw a parade for their victorious Comets. It was everything Moore and her compatriots could have hoped for.
“As a woman, as a Black woman,” Moore says, “pursuing your dreams, pursuing your goals, despite the obstacles, despite the challenges – to be embraced and celebrated, it just seemed like the whole city shut down and showed up for us.”
That wasn’t the case everywhere.
“It wasn’t like that in Orlando where I went [in 1999],” Moore says. “But in Houston, it was like, We want you here! What do you need?”
Indeed, Houston was simply the right place for the WNBA’s first champions to rise.
“That city embraced every single player from the first man to the 12th,” Moore says. “They were happy for us to be there. They wanted us there. To win that first championship for them – baby, that city was electric!”
