Dawn Staley's road to Tampa begins in Philadelphia - ESPN

ALMOST 40 YEARS ago in North Philadelphia, Dawn Staley was walking home from high school one afternoon with a friend from the neighborhood, when something remarkable happened. Or more to the point, didn't happen.

She lived in a rowhome in the Raymond Rosen housing projects. Her friend, Charles Gathers, had grown up in the high rises across Diamond Street but had recently moved to Staley's side of the projects. The two of them, and Gathers' cousin Patrice, were making their way back to Raymond Rosen, he remembers, when a man jumped in front of them and tried to grab Patrice. Another man, this one with a knife, followed on his heels. Gathers was about to step in, when the men recognized Staley — that short girl who can play basketball with any boy. Whatever their plans were, Gathers recalls, seeing Staley changed their minds. The men retreated. Basically vanished.

This was the nature of Staley's slice of the city: «If you lived in a certain area, you couldn't go outside your area to even play a game, because of the various gang affiliations,» says Doyt Jones, who was one of Staley's high school coaches. But with Staley, «Nobody was going to threaten her or anything like that, because they recognized her athletic ability.»

Her game was her passport. She was small but played big. She was young but played old. She was a girl but had no problem playing against the boys. Her game felt as if it were made for Philadelphia, made of Philadelphia, brimming with the same «extraordinary mental and physical toughness» Bo Kimble says the city and its people did. Kimble, who grew up in North Philly, played college ball in Southern California and professional ball all over the world, but nothing, he says, was tougher than Philly ball.

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