WNBA playoffs 2022 - The price and payoff of Kelsey Plum's lifelong obsession with winning

PLASTIC BAGS DRAPED over her arms, a 9-year-old Kelsey Plum stomped across the backyard at her family's Poway, California, home. She bent down and scooped up the sunbaked droppings that her dog, Riley Jane, had left behind. Riley Jane was a greater Swiss mountain dog who weighed more than 120 pounds. The bigger the dog, the bigger the poop.

Kelsey's dad, Jim, had just beaten her in HORSE. Again. Her reward was picking up Riley Jane's poop. Piles of it. This wasn't a dainty, one-plastic-bag operation, like taking a beagle on a walk at your local dog park. Plum had multiple bags. And she'd fill them all. She could hear her dad gloating while she traipsed through the yard.

«It's so nice not having to pick up poop,» Jim said as he took a long sip of cold water.

Kelsey hated this. She hated picking up dog poop, but mostly she hated losing.

After finishing her task, Plum went back to the family's backyard basketball court. She planted her feet at the makeshift free throw line, bent her knees, and arched her left hand toward the sky to send the ball through the net. She did it again, and again, and again, pounding the ball on the pavement between shots with the fury of a third grader angry at her father.

She spent hours and weeks and years working on her shot. But those games of HORSE still ended with Plum trudging through the grass picking up after Riley Jane, listening to her father taunt her from yards away.

Until one day, she beat him. Then, she beat him again. She kept beating him, and throwing taunts Jim's way as he cleaned up Riley Jane's poop.

«Finally he stopped playing me,» Kelsey says now. «It took me years, but I got it.»

Plum isn't afraid of the long game; she relishes it. After falling short of expectations during