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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Progress, Writ Large With A Marker

Diana Griego Erwin Mcclatchy New

The kind of change that alters perceptions is usually so incremental we hardly notice it. It changes bit by bit, hue by hue, like dawn breaking to the east. It is unseen by the naked eye but felt in the heart.

I saw such a change as the morning sun bore down on a home near Sacramento’s Executive Airport. A young girl was playing there, sunlight dancing off the golden highlights of her still damp hair. She could be a poster child for the next vista in women’s professional sports.

It was her thinking rather than her raw talent that made this true. It also was a fact to which she was completely oblivious.

Her father offered encouragement as the child, 6-year-old Chloe Mortensen, dribbled a basketball around the family’s back yard. She passed the ball to her 2-year-old sister, Noel, who let the ball carom off her chest - and laughed.

“Show her your bounce pass, girls,” said John Mortensen, their father.

A high school dropout (“I was bored”) who later graduated from Cal Berkeley and now designs pools, John Mortensen has no qualms admitting he delights in seeing his daughters dribble, pass and roll a basketball around on the patch of asphalt outside the house.

Mortensen readily says he’s “indoctrinating” his young daughters to share his passion for the game.

“I needed to have some women in my family who would watch the game with me,” he said, laughing. “Brooke (his wife) thinks it’s just a stupid game.”

And so do a lot of other women, women whose life experiences meant they never saw the game as having anything at all to do with them.

Fifty-eight-year-old Jill Sorris of Folsom, who started a bunko club in 1989 for “basketball widows,” is typical of many women of her age.

“Why would I relate to basketball?” Sorris asked. “I never played basketball; I never knew any girls who did. My husband has watched the game forever and I still don’t know most of the rules. Of course, I don’t want to know them, either.”

Chloe, on the other hand, started watching the game with dad when she was about 2.

Mortensen said Chloe would sit on his lap during televised NBA games and soon came to have favorite players. She keyed in on Bobby Hurley and Charles Barkley, the latter because she believed he was named after a famous dog on Sesame Street.

When the Women’s National Basketball Association formed, no one short of the players was happier than John Mortensen. He saved the inaugural issue on the league and started watching some of those games with his daughters.

He didn’t think it made much of a difference what games they watched - basketball is basketball - until he noticed Chloe seemed troubled by something. She’d watched the WNBA logo flash on the screen and then went to examine her NBA basketball.

“What’s the ‘W’ for, Dad?” Chloe finally asked.

He told her it stood for “Women’s,” as in a women’s league. Her ball didn’t have a “W.” She demanded to know why not. She got a WNBA basketball soon after.

“What’s really neat about this is our daughters are growing up in a world much different than ours, a world where they don’t recognize that a women’s professional basketball team is unusual,” Mortensen said.

While his and previous generations were marked by tides of women’s firsts, Chloe’s is a world where girls who want to play basketball or other sports can. Not only does she not have to be someone who beats the odds to play, she doesn’t even have to think about that scenario.

Mortensen said he didn’t realize how important the presence of women sports professionals might be to a little girl until Chloe, the quintessential big sister, announced with a glow the big favor she’d done for her little sister.

Retrieving her old NBA basketball, by then passed down to Noel, Chloe showed off the large, neat “W” she’d scrawled in permanent marker in front of the NBA logo.

A new letter, “g,” has also appeared on hers.

“For girls,” she explained.

It means something. There is a team and she and her sister belong to it, just because they want to.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Diana Griego Erwin McClatchy News Service