Rebecca Lobo’s shoelace was untied.
If it had been anybody else wearing morning sweats, standing in line for mediocre espresso in a lodge foyer this month, the stray lace may need gone unnoticed. However in New York Metropolis, hours earlier than her former group, the New York Liberty, was set to play only a few subway stops away at Barclays Heart in Brooklyn, her followers couldn’t let it go.
As Lobo waited for her caffeine repair, two completely different individuals cautiously reached as much as faucet the 6-foot-4 Lobo on the shoulder and let her know concerning the shoelace. Every time, she was grateful and gracious.
“I’m like my very own youngsters — ignoring the nice recommendation I’m getting,” she mentioned with a smile.
Lobo’s approachability belies the truth that, within the historical past of ladies’s basketball, she is royalty. On the College of Connecticut, she was the star of the 1995 group that received the primary of this system’s 11 nationwide championships. She was a part of america’ gold-medal-winning group on the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. And Lobo, Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes had been the primary three gamers to signal with the Girls’s Nationwide Basketball Affiliation when it was based in 1997.
Now, greater than 20 years since her enjoying days ended, Lobo, 50, once more finds herself in the course of a pivotal second within the sport’s historical past. As the highest analyst for ESPN’s W.N.B.A. protection, she will probably be calling maybe probably the most anticipated postseason the league has ever seen.
“We’re on the ascent,” Lobo mentioned of the game in an interview.
The W.N.B.A., whose playoffs started over the weekend, has been one of many hottest subjects in sports activities for months. A star-studded rookie class, led by Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, has generated unprecedented curiosity, shattering tv scores and recreation attendance data. That has additionally invited a variety of commentary, from the knowledgeable to these approaching the sport as if it had come out of nowhere.
What units Lobo aside from the recent takes of social media is her depth of information. It’s troublesome to get extra institutionally conscious than somebody who has been with the W.N.B.A. since its founding.
“That is the primary 12 months anyone’s actually cared concerning the institutional a part of it,” Lobo mentioned. “This season I felt a should be just a little bit extra like: Listed here are some details I’m going to current you, after which you are able to do with them what you want.”
Basketball doesn’t really feel like work for Lobo. It’s each how she unwinds and the way she recharges. It’s been that manner since she first began taking pictures hoops in her childhood driveway in Southwick, Mass.
“In these days I’d have been characterised as a tomboy as a result of I favored sports activities,” Lobo mentioned. “Being out in my driveway, taking pictures, was a spot that I felt a form of belonging.”
Lobo had a rocky begin at Connecticut, the place she and Coach Geno Auriemma initially butted heads. Coach and participant finally reached an accord, Connecticut received the nationwide title in 1995 and Lobo turned the face of ladies’s basketball in a single day. By her senior 12 months, Lobo was “Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers and Angel Reese all wrapped up into one,” Auriemma mentioned.
There was only one drawback: There was no skilled American league for her to play in. Lobo contemplated regulation college.
Then the W.N.B.A. was fashioned and Lobo went from being school basketball’s hottest star to the league’s poster baby, a trajectory many have in comparison with that of Clark. Clark always has been in comparison with her fellow rookie Reese, with a number of the commentary at occasions showing to pit the 2 in opposition to one another as a result of Clark is white and Reese is Black. In her expertise, Lobo mentioned, she by no means felt that pressure throughout her personal enjoying years.
“I really by no means felt a extra racially harmonious atmosphere than a locker room,” she mentioned. “There wasn’t any racial tensions inside a locker room. Perhaps that’s as a result of I’m a white lady, however I didn’t really feel it from the skin, both.
“Nobody ever mentioned to me, ‘, you’re solely getting all of this consideration since you’re white,’” she added. “I generally felt on sure groups that I used to be getting consideration due to what I did in school and I needed to show myself going ahead.”
Lobo performed 4 seasons with the Liberty earlier than being traded to the Houston Comets in 2002 and ending her enjoying days with the Connecticut Solar as recurring knee accidents pressured her physique to decelerate.
“These two accidents curtailed what might have been one of many biggest careers, due to her intelligence, due to how she learns and her arduous work,” mentioned Sue Wicks, a former Liberty teammate. However Lobo channeled those self same qualities into her tv profession, working to enhance every little thing from her evaluation to the cadence of her supply.
By Lobo’s personal admission, she was horrible at first. Tv executives advised her agent that Lobo wanted “extra vitality,” she recalled.
“It felt like I needed to discover my manner again,” Lobo mentioned.
She slowly did, first as a sideline reporter at ESPN with important pointers from Doris Burke, the longtime N.B.A. announcer and analyst. Nonetheless, alternatives had been few and much between, given that ladies’s basketball was not broadcast recurrently.
By the mid-2010s, the tide had begun to show. The W.N.B.A. started to burst by the nationwide consciousness as gamers leaned into social justice points in 2020. New consciousness of the league got here after Brittney Griner was arrested in Russia. After which got here this season.
“She’s carried out a extremely good job weaving all these feelings which have come into the sport,” mentioned Andraya Carter, a fellow ESPN analyst. “She has simply been constantly regular and reliable.”
Lobo’s basketball season runs from mid-March, when the N.C.A.A. basketball match begins, by the W.N.B.A. championships within the fall. It means a variety of time away from her 4 youngsters — Siobhan, 19; Maeve, 18; Thomas, 15; and Rose, 13 — and her husband, Steve Rushin.
The household used to name spring the season of “melting meats,” as a result of Lobo would put together meals in a sluggish cooker early within the morning for dinner that evening, then go away for the studio.
“It’s utterly regular to us,” mentioned Rushin, who met Lobo when he was a reporter for Sports activities Illustrated. “It’s simply type of the rhythm of our lives.”
It’s why her group of Ryan Ruocco, who’s in his eleventh season as a play-by-play announcer by Lobo’s facet, and Holly Rowe, who has been a sideline reporter since Lobo’s enjoying days, is so vital to her personally and professionally.
Rowe has been a selected affect. She sneaked Siobhan, Lobo’s oldest, her first lip gloss, and has taken Lobo searching for make-up and on-air wardrobes. She additionally inspired Lobo to drink espresso for the primary time throughout a visit to Minnesota 5 years in the past. What began as just a little deal with morphed right into a day by day routine. (Lobo’s go-to is brewed espresso with an oat milk creamer.)
The dynamic amongst Lobo, Rowe and Ruocco seems seamless on tv, however it’s the product of days of cellphone calls, textual content messages and conversations, generally proper as much as the ultimate buzzer.
“She has an expansive mind for gathering all of those potentialities that may occur, so when it does occur, she’s throughout it,” Rowe mentioned. Probably the most excited she ever sees Lobo is after video games when she offers “little squeaks and squeals” if a group runs a play she was ready for.
“She needs us to be good collectively,” Rowe mentioned. “I feel that takes a uncommon particular person. She’s been a well-known particular person eternally. Somebody of her caliber — to wish to be so good — she’s keen to say, ‘Assist me.’”
Ruocco, who additionally calls baseball and males’s basketball video games, known as the moment chemistry he shared with Lobo within the sales space a rarity.
“What feels completely different for me is I really feel utterly comfy and my truest self once I’m along with her,” Ruocco mentioned. “I simply really feel completely comfortable once I’m on air along with her.”
Take the event of Clark’s scoring her 3,000th profession level final 12 months throughout her senior 12 months at Iowa.
As quickly as Lobo noticed Clark contact the ball within the backcourt, she stopped her on-air evaluation. Clark stepped again to take certainly one of her signature deep 3-point photographs, and because the ball swished by the ring, Lobo gave Ruocco the house to make the decision he had ready: “Historical past in flight.”
“Rebecca Lobo is nearly as good an analyst as there may be in sports activities, interval,” Ruocco mentioned. “I don’t care in the event you’re watching soccer, males’s basketball, ladies’s basketball, baseball.”
After the Liberty recreation this month, Lobo slipped again into her sweats and placed on her backpack. Outdoors Barclays Heart, she let loose a yip of pleasure when a Liberty fan walked by carrying her outdated jersey. As she waited for a automotive service to drive her three hours again house to Connecticut, Lobo greeted every fan who stopped her, doling out hugs and selfies.
“That was one hell of an environment,” one mentioned.
Lobo replied, “Fairly unimaginable, huh?”
Seeing the league break by has been “tremendous gratifying” for Lobo and her fellow analysts, she mentioned.
“It’s been like this hidden gem for us that we didn’t wish to be hidden, and we’re attempting to do as a lot as we will to make individuals extra conscious,” she mentioned. “Now it’s getting the eye it deserves.”