With the clock winding down, this gave West head coach Greg Williams the idea to encourage Hicks to try something she\u2019d never done in a WBL game before: attempt a dunk. \u201cShe was such a graceful athlete,\u201d he remembered. \u201cAlmost poetry in motion.\u201d The coach had total confidence in her abilities. \u201cYou go up there and play the way you wanna play\u2014just shake \u2018em!\u201d she recalled him saying. Hicks, known for her impressive vertical and magnetic charisma, was more than ready.<\/p>\n
What no one in Albuquerque knew then was that the 1981 WBL All-Star Game<\/a> would be the last event of its kind in the United States for the next 15 years. There was no way to envision how the impending void of any sustainable women\u2019s pro league in the U.S. would swallow the potential of thousands of elite women basketball players. For the next decade and a half, so many burgeoning pro careers would be shifted overseas, left untranslated and off camera.<\/p>\n The same fate awaited Hicks. Years after the All-Star Game, she\u2019d live in Europe, competing at the highest levels. But that February evening in 1981, Hicks was peaking in front of American audiences. On the next play, as the defense sagged back, \u201cshe goes flying in,\u201d Greg Williams said. \u201cAnd she’s definitely got her hand above the rim.\u201d<\/p>\n Then, at the last moment, the ball slipped from Hicks\u2019s grasp. As her hands clutched metal, the leather orb bounced off the back rim, clanging away from her. The crowd of over 3,300 sat stunned, according to the coach. Then the room erupted. \u201cEverybody’s slapping high-fives and yelling and cheering,\u201d he recalled. Hicks may not have finished the dunk, but the attempt itself was a moment of pure jubilation.<\/p>\n Speaking to Hicks now, it\u2019s as if she came out of the womb hanging from the rim. \u201cIt was never anything,\u201d she would often say whenever I asked her about dunking. Hearing this, I grew fascinated by the legend of her All-Star almost-dunk, especially in an era when it was virtually unheard of in the women\u2019s game. More broadly, I wondered how it was that by the time Hicks began a brief pro career in San Francisco, she had already developed such confidence as an openly queer African-American woman. Why had I never heard of her talent or personality, decades before the WNBA was imbued with that same unapologetic, progressive coolness?<\/p>\n It\u2019s because the career of Hicks, like many other women\u2019s basketball players of her generation, would remain frustratingly obscure.<\/p>\n I met Cardte Hicks in person in July 2025, at the first San Francisco Pioneers reunion<\/a> in the Bay Area since the team folded in 1981. As the city\u2019s original pro women\u2019s basketball franchise, and an expansion team in the short-lived WBL, the Pioneers ceased operations so suddenly that players weren\u2019t even able to say goodbye to one another. Until the summer of 2025, they\u2019d never been publicly honored by the WNBA. But the former team was adamant: They wanted to be part<\/a> of the Golden State Valkyries\u2019 inaugural season. When the WNBA\u2019s expansion team invited the Pioneers to their History of Bay Area Women\u2019s Basketball theme night on July 14, nine former players, including six who flew in from across the country, gathered in San Francisco.<\/p>\n \u201cOh, I\u2019m gonna see my girls again!\u201d Hicks practically sang to me that morning.<\/p>\n The day before that Valkyries game, we had gathered for a Pioneers reunion party I both reported on and helped organize<\/a>, hosted at Rikki\u2019s, a women\u2019s sports bar in San Francisco. Hicks walked in wearing a black Adidas tracksuit and baseball cap, beaming. Standing at a very reasonable 5-foot-9, it was hard to imagine her hovering above a basketball hoop. But her long arms extended as she called her teammates together, gathering group hugs. Once the team settled around a big table filled with drinks and snacks, all of the women\u2014now in their late 60s and early 70s\u2014began the traditional athletic ritual of razzing each other.<\/p>\n Former Pioneers center Cindy \u201cStretch\u201d Haugejorde<\/a> took the microphone for toasts, circling around her teammates. Stopping at Hicks, Haugejorde said, \u201cNow this person\u2014sorry, Molly, I\u2019m really sorry …\u201d This was a playful dig at Molly Kazmer, then \u201cMachine Gun\u201d Molly Bolin<\/a> and by far the most famous player from the team, who joined the Pioneers for the last few months of their final season. Kazmer was always a scoring threat in the WBL, holding the league record for the most points in a single game with 55. But standing behind Hicks and next to Kazmer, Haugejorde squeezed Hicks\u2019s shoulders instead. \u201cSorry,\u201d she said, \u201cbut this is my favorite player. \u2026 I sat there at the first practice, and Cardte went up for a rebound. And then \u2026 she grabbed the rim instead\u2014with both hands! I\u2019m serious!\u201d The whole table broke into laughter.<\/p>\n The WBL\u2019s three-season existence, from 1978 to 1981, was full of historic accomplishments as well as painful disparities among players. While the league was a dream come true for many, its athletes also experienced a wide range of uneven infrastructure and treatment<\/a>. Some women went for months without pay, had to practice outside, or faced racial discrimination when looking for housing. This was also an era when the national media darlings in women\u2019s basketball were white: former UCLA standout<\/a> Ann Meyers; \u201ccream of the crop<\/a>\u201d and top-salaried player Nancy Lieberman; and Faye and Kaye Young, twins who famously featured in a Dannon low-fat yogurt commercial<\/a>, one of the first national ads to showcase professional women\u2019s basketball players.<\/p>\n \u201cIf anyone should have been the marketed player, it should have been Cardte,\u201d Roberta Williams, a rookie for the Pioneers during the 1980-81 season, later told me. \u201cI feel that Cardte should have been the face of the WBL, with her talent, with her grace.\u201d<\/p>\n Unlike the heralded white stars who were considered faces of the league<\/a>, Hicks played the more utilitarian role. Head coach Frank LaPorte described her to the San Francisco Chronicle<\/a> as \u201ca super athlete.\u201d Hicks was one of only two players to spend both full seasons with the Pioneers, though her first was marred with injury. Coming into her second, her All-Star season, Hicks told the press, \u201cMagic is back.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey call Nancy Lieberman \u2018Magic,\u2019\u201d the San Francisco Chronicle quoted Hicks as saying in the fall of 1980. \u201cBut there are only two Magics in the world\u2014Magic Johnson and Cardie Hicks.\u201d (Aside from her preferred nickname of \u201cMagic,\u201d Hicks also went by her given name Cardie at the time, though she would change it to Cardte in the mid-1990s.) \u201cThis is the last year on my contract with the Pioneers, and I hope they have the money to keep me because I\u2019m not making the money Nancy Lieberman is,\u201d she added. It was true: Reports claimed that Lieberman made $100,000 during her first year in the WBL with the Dallas Diamonds, compared to the average player salary of about $10,000.<\/a> But Hicks was confident she could match Lieberman\u2019s abilities.<\/p>\n Throughout her time in San Francisco, Hicks was unapologetically herself. She loved the city, its culture, the beat of the Castro: \u201cThat bump, bump, you feel it wherever you are, you can\u2019t stop moving.\u201d She said she\u2019d go out to lunch with future San Francisco mayor and former Pioneers part-owner<\/a> Willie Brown\u2014\u201cUncle Willie\u201d\u2014and rock her afro while strutting out on the court for games: \u201cGirl, I looked good.\u201d She reportedly sang the national anthem, a capella, before a game during the Pioneers\u2019 first season. And she didn\u2019t care much for male fans who treated the WBL as a novel way to hit on women. \u201cI get approached all the time by men after the game,\u201d Hicks told the San Francisco Examiner<\/a> in 1979. \u201cMany of them I feel are chauvinists \u2026 for me, the game makes me feel like I\u2019m accomplishing something.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Indeed, Hicks moved with rare finesse. \u201cShe could play in any type of game, and she could make her teammates look amazing,\u201d former teammate Anna Johnson told me. Roberta Williams put it this way: \u201cShe knew who she was. And she loved who she was.\u201d<\/p>\n As Magic, Hicks wanted to stand out. But her career, like those of many other African Americans in the WBL, was also marked by the effects of systemic racism. This was something that went rarely acknowledged at the time, an era remembered more for striving toward equality for female athletes in the U.S. But racial integration in the sport, yanked into rapid evolution following the enactment of Title IX in 1972, remained an uncomfortable topic. It also meant that coming up as a Black women\u2019s basketball star in the 1970s was an experience that often made Hicks feel distinctly alone.<\/p>\n In high school, Hicks selected No. 10 as her jersey number, a quiet message to herself. It meant \u201cone and only.\u201d In other words, she was the only African American on the team. She never had a choice but to embrace being different.<\/p>\n Hicks was born to Jim and Mary Hicks in San Pedro, Calif., an industrial enclave of Los Angeles lined with jagged cliffs shaped by unrelenting ocean waves. She came from a large, religious family with five brothers and two other sisters, crammed together in a two-bedroom house. They were close: church-goers, singers, storytellers. Hicks would listen as her grandmother told stories about enslaved relatives who helped build the White House. In 1968, the family was rocked when their father died. Cardte was 13 years old at the time.<\/p>\n \u201cYou’re gonna be very, very needed.\u201d Hicks remembered Jim, a preacher, telling her before he died. \u201cYou’re gonna be so different.\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, she stood out: a 7-year-old playing basketball with the boys, first with a bicycle frame nailed to a telephone pole as a makeshift hoop in the alley, then in playgrounds across San Pedro. Her mother worked such long hours at the fish cannery that she never saw her child play. \u201cShe just knew I was a tomboy out there beating all the boys in the neighborhood.\u201d Nonetheless, Mrs. Hicks kept an eye on her youngest daughter. When Cardte explained that a neighbor was continuously harassing her with homophobic slurs, her mother remarked, \u201cWell, you got a good arm.\u201d Inspired by her mom\u2019s comment, Hicks said she started carrying oranges in her pocket, hurling them at the woman\u2019s rocking chair when she screamed her insults, until she \u201cknocked her right off.\u201d<\/p>\n Even though she had a sense of her own queerness from a young age, Hicks didn\u2019t have any gay role models in her family or conservative church community. \u201cI didn’t know anything about gay life,\u201d she said. Nonetheless, her older sister Mary, the most supportive of her siblings, would tell her, \u201cDon’t let nobody tell you nothing. You just continue to be you.\u201d And so she did.<\/p>\n During those years, basketball became an \u201cescape from it all\u201d for Hicks. In 1971 and 1972, she led San Pedro High School to the city championship twice, playing a fluid, \u201coff-the-cuff\u201d style of basketball that head coach Maureen Hosier still remembers clearly today. \u201c[My players] were beautiful,\u201d Hosier told me. \u201cI cannot tell you how beautiful they were.\u201d<\/p>\n Hicks kept building her confidence. She said her brothers would drag her to different neighborhoods on the city bus, promising young boys cash if they could beat their kid sister\u2014or else hand over their sneakers. \u201cSure enough,\u201d she said, \u201cmy brothers always had the best shoes.\u201d She\u2019d practice all day and night at Peck Park, the ball rolling methodically from her fingertips, springing to the rim in the pitch darkness. She said neighbors would often pass by and stop to watch, expecting great things from their local hooper, wondering if one day she\u2019d reach the Olympics.<\/p>\n \u201cI had the ability to move my body and do things with it that ordinary girls couldn\u2019t do,\u201d Hicks told me. \u201cOr they could do it, but they didn’t know how to do it.\u201d Often she\u2019d grab the rim, swinging for fun as if it were second nature. \u201cIt’s like eating your favorite hamburger.\u201d<\/p>\n By 1976, Hicks was a junior at Long Beach State University, once again the only African American on the team. \u201cI put a lot of pressure on myself,\u201d she told me. \u201cBeing gay and then being Black and being poor. But I wanted people to accept me for what I could do.\u201d<\/p>\n Hicks\u2019s teammates saw greatness in their star player. Cathy Fisher, Long Beach State\u2019s point guard and captain at the time, recalled Hicks as both \u201ceffortless\u201d and \u201chumble,\u201d as well as unquestionably the best player on the team. \u201cHer footwork, her coordination, everything \u2026 she knew the game. Her shot was just pristine,\u201d Fisher said. \u201cThe shock and awe, it just became normal. To see her go up for a rebound, to see her arms going up and the ball just slapping into her hands\u2014she was a woman among girls, a man among boys.\u201d<\/p>\n With support from Defector\u2019s Dan McQuade, I combed through newspaper archives from 1973-1976 at Long Beach State, eager to find details of Hicks\u2019s impact on the court, but reports were sparse, squeezed underneath longer writeups of the men\u2019s basketball team. One story from 1975, headlined \u201cLong Beach has another power<\/a>,\u201d called her \u201cthe team\u2019s best jumper,\u201d and also included this gem of a line: \u201cShe has been called for goaltending already this season, an almost unheard of happening in women’s basketball, particularly for a player of her size.\u201d<\/p>\n Off the court, the Long Beach State team was notably close. Hicks delighted her teammates with comedic impersonations, singing skills, and an \u201cinfectious personality,\u201d according to Fisher. The two women whispered dating encouragement to each other and frequented a lesbian-owned establishment called Que Sera,<\/a> where a then-unknown Melissa Etheridge performed<\/a> in the dark, windowless bar in the \u201880s. Hicks was so confident as a gay woman at the time that she even inspired her opponents. \u201cCardte was different, too. Man, she was out\u2014outright gay,\u201d former UCLA captain Karen Nash told me. \u201cDuring that time, when it was considered so taboo \u2026 she was so confident.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite chemistry with her teammates, Hicks faced a new challenge at the collegiate level: coaching. Unlike her high school coach Hosier, who encouraged the team\u2019s flexibility and flow, Long Beach State\u2019s Fran Schaafsma had a more structured approach. It didn\u2019t mesh well with Hicks\u2019s ability to read the court in motion, as a master of the fast break and a dynamic, positionless scorer. \u201c[Schaasfma] did the best she could do,\u201d Fisher remembered. \u201cBut she was limited. I don\u2019t even think she knew how to run a motion offense.\u201d<\/p>\n By 1976, Schaafsma had already been at the university for 14 years, the only women\u2019s basketball coach the program had ever known. She was clear about having her players fit into her system. \u201cI tell them this is the framework within which we\u2019re playing,\u201d Schaafsma told<\/a> the Long Beach Press-Telegram that year. \u201cI can understand if they lose their temper, but I also try to encourage them to modify their behavior.\u201d Indeed, structuring offense through set plays was de rigueur at the time, especially in Southern California, then the source of perhaps the most influential basketball coach: UCLA\u2019s John Wooden, who had retired a year prior.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the players at Long Beach State sometimes pushed back on Schaafsma\u2019s Wooden-inspired coaching style. \u201cAs a team, [Schaafsma] never even said, \u2018Run this ball,\u2019\u201d Fisher said. \u201cBut as a point guard\u2026 if it came out to me and Cardte was open, I was giving her the ball. We knew she could take it to the hole, she could pop from midrange, she could pop from long range. We knew. Or at least I knew. And I had the utmost faith in her.\u201d<\/p>\n While Long Beach State dispatched USC<\/a> and UCLA with relative ease, their biggest competition during the 1975-76 season was the Cal State Fullerton Titans, led by head coach Billie Moore, a close disciple of Wooden. \u201cBillie Moore was so headstrong and so determined and so structured,\u201d Fisher told me, remembering how tense the games would get. \u201c[Fullerton] had Billie Moore and they had the strategy. We had natural abilities \u2026 We\u2019d just run and run and run \u2026 and we were tight, we were together.\u201d<\/p>\n In February of 1976, Long Beach State lost a close one<\/a> to Fullerton, 64-60. Though Hicks led her team with 16 points, opposing center Nancy Dunkle put the game away by scoring 16 of her game-high 20 points in the second half, leading Moore\u2019s \u201cToast of the Coast\u201d program to victory. But that wouldn\u2019t be the last time Hicks and Moore would cross paths.<\/p>\n In May of 1976, Hicks was selected<\/a> to join the final tryout for the U.S. national team, which would go on to win a silver medal in Montreal during the first-ever Olympic women\u2019s basketball competition. That performance would help make household names out of players like Pat Summitt (then Pat Head), Ann Meyers, and Nancy Lieberman, though the team\u2019s top three scorers<\/a> were Lusia Harris, Nancy Dunkle, and Patricia Roberts. The 1976 squad was enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2023.<\/p>\n Months before the team\u2019s podium finish, Hicks flew from California to the final tryout in Warrensburg, Missouri. It was led by Moore, recently appointed the Olympic head coach.<\/p>\n Hicks was reluctant to talk about the tryout when I asked her, but I got a glimpse into that weekend in Missouri through Inaugural Ballers<\/a>, a historical non-fiction book for young adults and by far the most comprehensive account of the 1976 Olympic team. Author Andrew Maraniss conducted interviews with most of the players and coaches who participated, including Hicks and Moore. He described the atmosphere as a gantlet commanded by the coach: \u201cWith no time to waste, Moore made the most of every minute in camp, putting the players through two or three grueling workouts a day.\u201d<\/p>\n Moore was relentless in her vision for the kind of team she wanted. \u201cShe told her players they would all need to become interchangeable chameleons, willing to do whatever was in the team\u2019s best interest,\u201d Maraniss wrote. While she denied having an official vote on the Olympic selection committee, Moore also claimed to have directly recommended Lieberman as the final addition to the team. (At the time, Lieberman was just 17 years old, described in Inaugural Ballers as \u201cstill so immature and full of energy, she continually irritated the other women.\u201d)<\/p>\n Maraniss described Hicks as \u201cone of the most intriguing athletes at the tryouts\u201d and \u201ca phenomenal leaper.\u201d But despite Moore\u2019s close familiarity with one of the greatest foes of her own collegiate squad, she wasn\u2019t a fan. \u201cThey didn’t like it,\u201d Hicks told me. \u201cI mean, I played too much like a guy.\u201d She said the same thing when describing the tryout in a San Pedro News-Pilot feature<\/a> from 1979: \u201cMy moves are very unusual. Most women players are more feminine in their moves.\u201d According to the article, \u201cthe Olympic coaches tried to change her style, and she admits she rebelled.\u201d<\/p>\n By the end of the weekend in Missouri, the Olympic Committee posted the final list of names on the wall. Players bolted from their rooms to the hallway of the shared dormitory to see the results. According to Maraniss, when Hicks emerged, \u201cshe was stunned to see her name only on the alternate list, believing she had earned a roster spot but had been denied because she was Black. Rather than continue as an alternate, she confronted Moore with her theory and asked for a ticket home.\u201d<\/p>\n I spoke to Hicks about this moment, too. \u201cI went to the office,\u201d she said, \u201cand I told them, \u2018I wanna leave this trial. I don’t feel like I belong here or that you want me here.\u2019 And instead of [the coaches] saying \u2018That’s not true,\u2019 they said, \u2018OK, we’ll get you on the next flight.\u2019\u201d In Inaugural Ballers, all three of the former coaches interviewed\u2014Sue Gunter, Bessie Stockard, and Billie Moore\u2014denied that race was a factor in the roster construction.<\/p>\n But Hicks wasn\u2019t the only one who believed race did have an impact on roster selection. Maraniss noted that two other African-American players, Althea Gwyn and Michelle McKenzie, were \u201ccertain a limited number of Black players would make the team.\u201d Gwyn, who died in 2022<\/a>, would go on to have a venerated career in the WBL before playing abroad in Europe and becoming Hicks\u2019s close friend. I called up McKenzie, who lives in Albuquerque, N.M., and she remembered the tryout well. That spring, she had dropped out of college for a semester to train for the Olympic trials. When I asked her about the racial makeup of the weekend in Missouri, she responded, \u201cI was used to seeing a sea of white anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n McKenzie also spoke of the difficulty of balancing basketball while hiding her identity at the time. \u201cDuring those days, there were a lot of people that were in same-gender relationships, but we had to keep it on the down low,\u201d she said. McKenzie had recently dated her first girlfriend while preparing for the Olympics with an AAU team in Milwaukee. \u201cThere were so many things that we were trying to juggle at that time. On the outside, we were trying to fit in, and on the inside, all your feelings and connection and validation held inside.\u201d<\/p>\n McKenzie remembered Hicks as one of the athletes who was \u201cin sync\u201d on the court. In a tryout with so many talented players, \u201cthe game is in flow.\u201d After being named an alternate like Hicks, McKenzie was disappointed but told herself, \u201cThey gotta do what they gotta do, fine and dandy. I had to justify it.\u201d And yet, she said, \u201cCardte was known to the coaches in that part of the country, and she did well in the trials. The question is: Why didn\u2019t she get picked?\u201d Looking back, McKenzie told me, \u201cI think Cardte was the one who realized this is a bunch of crap and they discriminated against us.\u201d<\/p>\n Not long after the Olympic trials, Hicks suddenly left Long Beach State. In 1979, she told the News-Pilot that she changed schools for academic reasons. When I asked her about it, Hicks didn\u2019t provide one distinct reason, but referenced the tension between basketball and her identity as a queer Black woman.<\/p>\n \u201cYou gotta understand, when you’re living a certain lifestyle,\u201d Hicks said, \u201cand you’re dealing with being the only Black person, you got so many strikes already against you.\u201d The decision to leave Long Beach State was abrupt and full of frustration. Hicks referenced trauma in the family around that time, and her desire for different academic offerings, but was hesitant to elaborate. She did, however, linger on one thing being true: \u201cI didn’t take the time to express my feelings to the coach.\u201d<\/p>\n To this day, Hicks regrets leaving without speaking first to the coaching staff or her teammates, like Fisher. But Fisher doesn\u2019t hold a grudge; in fact, the two women remain close friends. \u201cMaybe [Moore] saw something in Cardte that she didn\u2019t like, that made her say, That\u2019s not my kind of player,\u201d Fisher said when we spoke about the Olympic tryouts. \u201cBut she was our kind of player.\u201d<\/p>\n Since women’s basketball was barely documented at the time, the archives didn\u2019t fully capture the racism within the sport. But it was prevalent. \u201cAs soon as you start to scratch the surface \u2026 you begin to find that there\u2019s this story about overt racism that no one is really interested in unpacking,\u201d said Theresa Runstedtler, a scholar of African American history and the chair of American University\u2019s Critical Race, Gender and Culture Studies Department. \u201cEspecially when you\u2019re talking about the \u2018post civil rights era,\u2019 when basketball was \u2018integrated.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Runstedtler is the author of Black Ball<\/a>, a book chronicling how race and racism were key to the evolution of men\u2019s basketball in the 1970s, particularly in the NBA. She notes that \u201cstreet ball,\u201d the style of play often attached to Hicks\u2014and more prominently to Black male athletes at the time\u2014was controversial. In her book, Runstedtler described the popular, racialized narrative about African-American NBA players: \u201cThey had imported their aggressive, flashy, individualistic and above-the-rim style from the playgrounds of Black neighborhoods to the pro game. A once honorable and disciplined white game of teamwork and set plays had devolved into anarchy.\u201d While stylized basketball is now the bread and butter of the NBA, this kind of play, along with the African-American men who embodied it, were often considered a threat during the decade when Hicks was in her prime.<\/p>\n Hicks wasn\u2019t the only standout women\u2019s basketball player in Southern California who was raised on \u201cstreet ball.\u201d Not too far away from San Pedro, in South Central Los Angeles, Hicks\u2019s future Pioneers teammate Anita Ortega<\/a> also grew up playing against the guys at her local park. Coached by Moore at UCLA, Ortega won the AIAW title alongside Ann Meyers in 1978; she led her team<\/a> with 23 points in the final against Maryland. To be great at UCLA, Ortega remembered adapting her game completely. \u201cStreet ball\u2014I would not compare that to playing at UCLA or Long Beach State. It was frowned upon,” she said. “They were saying, \u2018Why are you dribbling the ball behind the back? Through the legs? Stutter stepping?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n This exact type of questioning was common at the time, according to Runstedtler. \u201cAll of that language is racialized, even if it\u2019s not explicit.\u201d<\/p>\n After her Olympic hopes ended abruptly, Hicks was hurting. For the 1976-77 season, she transferred to Cal State Northridge, but the coaching situation was no better, though she did help her new team defeat Long Beach State<\/a> for the first time in program history. Then she was back in San Pedro, playing at Peck Park and competing in a summer league. Around that time, a Dutch basketball recruiter from the town of Oud-Beijerland in the Netherlands landed in Los Angeles for a trip to scout male players. But thanks to a tip from Bill Mallory<\/a>, a local men\u2019s basketball recruit out of Cal State L.A., the Dutchman found Hicks, too. He showed up to her mother\u2019s house in San Pedro the next day, and quickly offered her a contract.<\/p>\n \u201cI was afraid,\u201d Hicks said, remembering the airplane ride to the Netherlands. She\u2019d never flown across an ocean, and described it as \u201ctoo close to heaven.\u201d On the other side, she found something she\u2019d been craving: acceptance. \u201cThey treated me like a human being,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n Oud-Beijerland was home to about 15,000 residents and a basketball club sponsored by Vastgoed Strijen, a nearby real estate company. The team had finally built a new arena with the funding, leaving the parking garage where they competed until 1974, where cars had to be driven out before games. By 1976, the club was at a turning point, becoming the first team in Holland to infuse its women\u2019s roster with two Americans: Cardte Hicks and Susan Williams, Mallory\u2019s fianc\u00e9e at the time.<\/p>\n Along with the arrival of Hicks, Basketball Oud-Beijerland had another not-so-secret weapon: Carla Benschop-de Liefde, a nimble point guard and all-time Dutch player, once crowned the European female basketball player of the year. Hicks maintained that Benschop was one of the best women\u2019s basketball players she ever competed with or against. She died in 2006 at age of 56, but I spoke to her husband Wim Benschop, who played on the men\u2019s team in the late 1970s and still lives in the small village by the Spui river. Remembering his wife\u2019s friendship with the American, he said, \u201cThey completed each other.\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, the two women became fast friends. Together they led their team\u2019s dizzying, free-flowing offense. \u201cGirl, they used to tell me I had the green light,\u201d Hicks said. \u201cYou know, a lot of time I hit the girls in the head because they weren’t looking \u2026 that’s where I got the name Magic.\u201d Hicks and Benschop led the club to their only Dutch championship in 1979. According to Wim, \u201cI know some guys here in the village, and they still talk about [Hicks].\u201d<\/p>\n In the Benschops\u2019 collection of family photos, Hicks looks at ease: playing cards with Carla in the leafy backyard, relaxing during meals, sharing records, and petting the family dog, Oslo. Benschop told me that he and his wife were quite sad when Hicks left. They had a vision for the two women, how they could improve their respective games together. \u201cI think it was a pity for [Hicks\u2019s] development,\u201d Benschop said.<\/p>\n Hicks\u2019s time in the Netherlands also carried its own mystery: whether she ever dunked in a professional game. There\u2019s a photograph from that era, a grainy black-and-white image where you can see Hicks leaping, hands above the rim, as she\u2019s about to slam the ball through the hoop.<\/p>\n Many people attested to witnessing Hicks dunk. In one report from the Netherlands, Oud-Beijerland manager Bert Blaauw was quoted as saying, \u201cShe can do everything, is fast, has a strong shot, and is the first woman I have ever seen who can dunk the ball.\u201d San Francisco Pioneers owner Marshall Geller told the Berkeley Gazette<\/a>: \u201cCardie Hicks of our team is 5-10 and slam dunks.\u201d In the News-Pilot feature, Hicks reportedly dunked a volleyball during halftime exhibitions in the Netherlands. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Hicks dunked overseas, as did the Examiner. Former teammates Ortega and Fisher remembered seeing Hicks easily dunk a volleyball, while Roberta Williams recalled her dunking a basketball during warmups. And Hicks certainly remembered dunking in a game in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n And yet, the deeper I got into the life of Cardte Hicks, the more it became clear that her ability to dunk was not the most remarkable thing about her. Wim Benschop agreed. \u201cTo me, it seems like [dunking] should be the story of Cardte, but it isn\u2019t,\u201d he said. \u201cEverybody loved her, also the opponents. That\u2019s more the story about Cardte, I think to me\u2014everybody loved to see her play. All the other things are secondary.\u201d<\/p>\n With or without the dunk itself, it was her fluid play, her leaping ability, her overwhelming jubilation for the game of basketball that stood out.<\/p>\n Hicks remembered her time in the Netherlands as both full of love and isolation. While she was treated like a local celebrity, she also never felt so lonely in her life, she told me. But that changed when she started teaching basketball lessons to the local kids. \u201cIt was like it wasn’t all about me,\u201d Hicks said. \u201cIt was about the kids. And they helped me.\u201d This was just a year after the 1976 Olympic trials. \u201cThey helped me go through something that I really needed, that was a wound that hadn’t been healed, and they surely helped me heal it.\u201d<\/p>\n After the Pioneers disbanded in 1981, Hicks wouldn\u2019t compete again in the United States at the pro level. She spent the next 13 years in Europe, retiring in 1994 to take care of her ailing mother back home in California. By the time the WNBA began play in 1997, Hicks had moved on from basketball, working as a security guard<\/a> in Sacramento. But she still wanted a shot to make the league. She quit her job to train for months. At an open tryout for the Sacramento Monarchs, she joined hundreds of other WNBA hopefuls, only to seriously injure her knee minutes into playing, ultimately resulting in knee replacement surgery. It was her final basketball heartbreak.<\/p>\n In the process of reporting this piece, I reached out to Sue Wicks, a forward for the New York Liberty during its early years and the first openly gay player<\/a> in the WNBA. I wanted to know if she\u2019d heard of Cardte Hicks, to get a sense of how far her name had traveled. \u201cI knew about her through reputation,\u201d she wrote in a message. \u201cHer vertical leap was absolutely legendary. \u2026 She\u2019s a perfect example of a player who gets lost to history but who might have had a real cult following had she played in this era.\u201d<\/p>\n Unprompted, it was as though Wicks understood what I was really asking\u2014not just about the legend of Cardte Hicks, but about what it meant to share her story. \u201cThere are so many missing pieces in women\u2019s basketball history,\u201d Wicks wrote. \u201cOne interesting layer is that players themselves have always been the curators and carriers of that history. We told stories down the line and across generations because we were often the only ones interested enough to keep them alive. \u2026 We\u2019re used to being the keepers of these stories.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, the WNBA is at a critical inflection point\u2014not only because of a labor battle amid soaring profits, but also the history of its sport. The story that the league often fails to tell is the one that players from decades past must shoulder: that women\u2019s basketball long predates the success of this one league. The sport is actually shaped by its so-called “failures,” by the generations of women who insisted on hooping even without mainstream support or investment. It\u2019s the \u201ckeepers of these stories,\u201d women like Cardte Hicks, Michelle McKenzie, Anita Ortega, Roberta Williams, and thousands more, whose accomplishments and struggles developed the spirit of women\u2019s basketball as alternative, even radical.<\/p>\n Watching the success of the WNBA has changed Hicks, too. It proved that her own instincts about how women could play basketball were not wrong, just early. I think often of a quote she gave to the Sacramento Bee<\/a>, before her Monarchs tryout in 1997: \u201cThat showboating, showing off what you can do with your body. Not just on the ground but in the air. I just want another chance to do that.\u201d Hicks never got an opportunity to tell her story to the audiences of the WNBA, but now she watches players like Jackie Young and Caitlin Clark with pride. \u201cTo see what these girls are doing today, it just makes you think, Dang,\u201d she said. \u201cOnly if. That’s what we all say now. Only if.\u201d<\/p>\n These days, Hicks lives in Las Vegas with her wife Vida Ridley-Hicks, their two small dogs, and her older sister Mary, who recently moved in. Despite the ways in which basketball let her down, she still loves and preaches the game. Nearly three decades after starting her program The Legends: Kids First<\/a> in 1997, Hicks still runs camps and clinics with a passion she first developed through teaching hoops in the Netherlands. And she carries an ardent positivity, a lasting gratitude.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes, if you let it out, you can really release some of that pain that I’ve carried for most of my life,\u201d Hicks told me recently. \u201cI realized I wasn’t alone, you know, I’m not in this world alone doing and being who I was. Somebody out there is living my dream right now.\u201d<\/p>\n Dan McQuade contributed additional reporting.<\/p>\n Recommended<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As Cardte Hicks leapt toward the hoop, the audience at the Albuquerque Civic Auditorium suddenly hushed. These were…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":485845,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[99,434],"class_list":["post-485844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485844\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/cardte-fishermans-wharf.jpg\")
The San Francisco Pioneers sent three players to the 1981 WBL All-Star game: Cindy Haugejorde, Molly Kazmer, and Cardte Hicks, pictured here at Fisherman\u2019s Wharf. Photo courtesy of Molly Kazmer<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/cardte-super-athlete.jpg\")
Image via the San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 15, 1979<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/1973-cardte-san-pedro-yearbook.png\")
Hicks raises up for her high school team.Photo: San Pedro High School Yearbook<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/cardte-long-beach-state.png\")
The Long Beach State team celebrates with paper cups of water before a big game against Cal State Fullerton in 1976.Photo courtesy of Cathy Fisher<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/1976-usa-basketball-roster.png\")
Image via USA Basketball<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/cardte-netherlands-cow.png\")
Susan Williams and Cardte Hicks featured with local cows on the front page of the sports section of Vrij Nederland (Free Netherlands) in 1977.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/cardte-netherlands-collage.png\")
Cardte Hicks\u2019s time in the Netherlands as captured by the Benschop family photo album, including Carla and Cardte playing cards in the backyard.Photos courtesy of Wim Benschop<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/cardte-netherlands-dunk.jpg\")
A Netherlands newspaper clipping shows Cardte poised with two hands on the ball, above the rim. Photo courtesy of Cardte Hicks<\/p>\n