Lacey’s Human Victory Venus Lacey Overcomes Physical, Emotional Scars

All Olympic victories do not take place right before our eyes.

This is the story of a victory that became complete Sunday afternoon but began 25 years ago on the bare little sidestreets of Chattanooga’s westside, where Scott Lacy carried his sister to school on his back, because her legs were twisted and bent and encased in braces that were heavier than she was.

It is the story of a victory that was won one pain at a time, one tear at a time, one heartache at a time.

Nothing has come easy for Venus Lacey; she even came into the world with the wrong name, the fault of an administrative error by hospital officials, who added an E to her last name, were none was supposed to be.

Sunday - stuck with that extra letter because she had to use the extra letter from her birth certificate when applying for a passport to play basketball abroad - Venus Lacey scored eight points and had five rebounds in the United States’ 101-84 opening victory over Cuba at Morehead College.

She is not a star. She is not a starter.

She is a survivor and a winner, a woman who, at age 29, has overcome the physical and the emotional traumas of her life to reach the pinnacle in women’s basketball.

“When I went out there today it was like a warm feeling coming to me, saying, ‘Venus, it’s time to play,”’ she said.

She cannot tell you just what was wrong with her legs. She does not have in her head a name for the malady, only the recollection of what it was like to be little and to be different.

“The doctors said I wouldn’t be able to grow up and go out and play with other kids; they told me I’d never walk and run like normal kids again.

“And kids can be cruel.

“They’d call me Braceleg and things like that and when I had to go to the bathroom, I’d have to walk in front of the other kids in the class, so I’d hold it just a long as I could.”

Being different undermined her self-esteem. And besides being crippled, she had another problem, too.

“I had a speech problem, too, and I had to take a special class for that,” she said. “The words just weren’t coming out correctly.” Some days, when her brother would make that three-block walk with her on his back, she wished he would have left her at home.

Her family was not destitute. They could send her to the neighborhood clinic for periodical checkups, but couldn’t afford therapy and massages and the other kinds of treatment the doctors recommended to hasten her improvement. So her grandfather, Ben Garrison, would put a mat on the floor and massage her aching legs day after day. He had no medical training, just love in his hands.

“My father was there,” Lacey recalled, “and he did for us. But mostly, during that time, I just remember my mother and my grandfather. I have a great mother. It’s hard to devote time to one kid who had a problem when you have 10 children.

“I have to give her a lot of credit. I was wearing braces, with my legs turned around backwards, and she gave me my confidence.”

One day, when she was in third or fourth grade, doctors told her family they could take off the braces and see how she could do, if she could stand, if she could walk. They knew she could not run, and probably never would. “I remember seeing ‘Forest Gump’ running out of his braces in the movie,” she says, “but I didn’t break out of mine.”

She did stand. She did walk. And she ran. In ninth grade, she went out for the volleyball team. She was cut.

But she had found sports, and once a basketball was put in her hand, she had found the niche that made her somebody, that stopped kids from pointing to her and calling names.

She grew to 6-4 and there came a time in the south - when she was at Louisiana Tech - when there was no better college center.

But her disappointments weren’t over. She tried to make the Olympic team four years ago. They came to her, eventually, though, and said: No, thanks. Take your game somewhere else. Work on it, develop it, but don’t call us, we’ll call you.

For Venus Lacey, it was the last rejection she could endure. So when trials began to put together the team that has become America’s 1996 squad, she did not bother to show up.

“I just was afraid I’d be cut again,” she said Sunday. “I didn’t want my confidence hurt again.”

And then a miracle happened.

They DID call her. They did invite her back. And on May 24 - 46 games into their 52-game exhibition season - she joined this team for good, in a role she accepts and appreciates.

“I knock people around,” she said with a smile.

She has won the victory, over illness, cruelty and bitteress.

“I try not to look back,” she said. “I feel like I am really blessed.”

It is the kind of story that makes the Olympics worthwhile.