Cover story the Glass Closet Latasha Byears' off-the-bench 'dirty work' helped the Los Angeles Sparks win two wnba championships. Then a sexual assault allegation ended her career

August 21, 2005

(Mark Boster / LAT)

(Mark Boster / LAT)

At 5-feet-11 and 203 pounds, Latasha Byears epitomized the power in power forward. She used her girth to set body-crunching picks that freed up Los Angeles Sparks center Lisa Leslie to score. On defense, she snatched rebounds and dogged the opponent's best shooter. If a player physically rubbed her or a teammate the wrong way, Byears exacted payback, committing hard fouls while helping the Sparks win back-to-back championships.

Then, in June 2003, a few weeks into the team's drive for its third WNBA title, Byears was dealt a blow of her own: She was accused of sexual assault following a party at her Marina del Rey condo.

Less than a month later, a similar allegation would be leveled against Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant by a Colorado hotel worker. The athletes shared more in common than the specter of a criminal trial. They also worked for the same corporate family, an L.A. institution that would treat the two ballplayers—one famous and the other relatively obscure—very differently.

The Los Angeles Lakers stood by Bryant. The team's general manager, coach and fellow players publicly supported him throughout his arrest, teary declaration of innocence at a televised Staples Center news conference and court appearances. NBA Commissioner David Stern said that Bryant should "absolutely" continue to play until proven guilty.

In contrast, as a police investigation was opened, the Sparks wasted no time in releasing Byears. She hoped to be picked up by a different team, but the woman who had worn the number 00 on her uniform found zero interest among the other WNBA franchises. She took a series of odd jobs, including a stint slinging JC Penney merchandise in a Buena Park distribution center that lasted seven hot, boring days. "It's not that the work was bad," Byears says. "I just couldn't take it. Playing basketball is what I've been doing since high school, and it's all I really know how to do."

In some ways, the uneven treatment of Bryant and Byears speaks to the obvious: Bryant is a marquee player—so famous beyond the arena that, like Arnold or Oprah, he is widely known by only his first name. He sells millions of dollars' worth of tickets and merchandise for a big-time sports franchise. Byears generated no discernible income for an unprofitable enterprise, and she had already made some other missteps on and off the court. What's more, in its effort to project a wholesome, family-friendly image, the WNBA is more sensitive to bad press than is the NBA, which could field a pretty decent All-Star team of players who have rap sheets.

And yet the 32-year-old Byears believes her particular predicament stems from something other than her largely unheralded status as a player or her reputation for unladylike behavior. She's convinced she has been ostracized for another reason: She is gay.

As a child in Millington, Tenn., a small town near Memphis, Byears related to boys. She was tall and heavyset, big enough to hold her own on the basketball court with her brothers and male cousins. And like them, she desired women. "I've been gay for as long as I know," says Byears, who goes by the nickname Tot-o, a moniker inspired when her grandmother called her "Tot" while she was growing up.

Byears says she never hid her sexuality from her family, which she says supported her. At Bolton High School in nearby Arlington, Tenn., a few people dared to pick on her, but she had found a refuge. "I loved women," she says, "but I was serious about basketball."

The top colleges in women's basketball wooed Byears—until they got a look at her transcript. Anemic grades and low admission-test scores sent her instead to a two-year college, Northeastern Oklahoma A & M, where she continued to bash bodies and score big. Division I schools were watching.

As a transfer student at DePaul University in Chicago, Byears averaged 22.8 points and 11.7 rebounds a game during the 1995-96 season, a performance that earned her a first team All-American slot. Along with impressive stats, she picked up a reputation as a tough competitor who once was suspended for taking things too far. "She talked some trash, did some 'signifying' to the other players and coaches, got upset at the referees, things like that," says Doug Bruno, DePaul's head coach for the past 19 years. He notes that while he found Byears to be "a pleasure to coach" and "inside is a really good person," she's "a nonconformist who knows she needs to conform, but sometimes has a tough time with that."

Despite her rough edges, Byears expected to be an early selection in the inaugural WNBA draft. Back home, she and her family gathered at a barbecue to await the call and celebrate the beginning of her pro career. "It never came," Byears says.

The disappointment of being passed over in the draft faded when the Sacramento Monarchs invited her to training camp. Byears' confidence soared when she saw the other free agents—her competition. "It was the same girls I slaughtered in college," she recalls. "I called my mama and said, 'I'm on the team,' before I even picked up a ball."

Byears not only made the team but posted solid numbers as a starter for three straight years. In her fourth season, 2000, head coach Sonny Allen shook up his roster and yanked Byears from her starting position. Miserable on the bench, Byears asked to be traded, and that November she joined the Sparks.

It was a team on the cusp. The Sparks had put together a league-best 28-4 record in 2000 under new coach Michael Cooper. But the season ended in late summer with a second straight playoff loss to the then-indomitable Houston Comets. The Sparks hoped Byears would toughen them up around the basket, pushing them past Houston and into the WNBA Finals for the first time in 2001.

Cooper, a former Laker swingman whose defensive skills helped seal five NBA titles, gave Byears simple instructions. "My job was to do the dirty work," she explains, "guard the other team's best player and create some space for Lisa. I had a lot of respect for coach Cooper because of what he had accomplished, and I wanted to win, so I said, 'Fine, let's do it.' "

But before she could get down to business, Byears was suspended. A few months prior to the start of the 2001 season, she was arrested for drunken driving and pleaded no contest to a lesser charge of reckless driving. She sat out her first game. The following year, she was suspended for two games, for bouncing the game ball off the face of Michelle Marciniak of the Seattle Storm during an on-court tussle. In online forums, WNBA watchers started calling Byears a thug.

Still, as the first or second player off the bench, Byears did her job—and then some. She sank 60% of her shots from the field in her first two seasons, grabbed a team-record 10 offensive rebounds in one game and made six steals in another, tying the team record. The Sparks jelled, beating the Charlotte Sting to win the WNBA title in 2001 and again clinch the crown in 2002.

Cooper says Byears' hustle and grit factored heavily in the team's turnaround. "Latasha was a real team leader who pushed everyone in practices and in games," he says. "She was one of the most committed players on the team and a big reason we won it all. She was just huge for us, nasty and tough on the inside."

On June 5, 2003, just before the Sparks' first home game of the new season, Byears received her second WNBA championship ring—diamonds in several colors set in platinum.

That same evening, after a victory over the Sacramento Monarchs, Byears threw a party at her team-owned condo across from the Cheesecake Factory in Marina del Rey.

The next morning, someone—there are conflicting accounts as to who it was—reported to the Sparks management that Byears and male guests had sexually assaulted a woman, a former Sparks player. That person also urged the alleged victim to contact the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, which opened an investigation.

Byears won't talk about the party except to say that among the guests were current and former teammates. In the case of sex crimes, the names of the victims are kept confidential, and sheriff's officials won't release them. Attempts to contact the alleged victim, who reportedly lives overseas, were unsuccessful.

Whatever happened that night, it cost Byears her job. In a wrongful termination suit filed last fall in L.A. Superior Court against Los Angeles Lakers Inc. and LAL Women's Basketball LLC, Byears points to the organization's treatment of Kobe Bryant as evidence of gender discrimination against her. She also alleges that her sexual orientation played a role in her release.

According to the suit, Byears learned about the accusations against her the day after the party. The team was gathering at LAX for a flight to Sacramento when Karleen Thompson, then an assistant coach, told Byears that she had heard that she had been involved in a sexual assault. Byears denied it.

On the team bus headed for a hotel later that day, the legal complaint says, then-Sparks communications director Kristal Shipp gave Byears the news that she would not be playing against the Monarchs. As Byears recounts it, Shipp offered no explanation. "Nobody told me anything," Byears says, "other than I had to stay in the hotel, then when we got back to town, to just stay at home and not go to practice. I had no idea what was going on."

Byears flew back to Los Angeles with the team. The next day, Rondre Jackson, the Sparks' assistant general manager, delivered the word that Byears had been suspended with pay. (She was then making $60,000 a year.) He cited the ongoing police investigation, according to Byears. On June 10, five days after the alleged incident, Byears says she called Jackson to see where things stood. General Manager Penny Toler came on the line and informed her that she was being dumped by the team. She would no longer be collecting her salary.

"Penny wished me luck in the future, told me I was cut," Byears says. "Then she hung up." About two weeks later, Byears was told to move out of her condo, which the team was paying for, according to court documents.

When asked recently to respond to the account in the complaint, the Sparks declined to comment. In their response filed in Superior Court to the suit, the organization denies that Byears was wrongfully terminated and asserts that under WNBA regulations her complaint should be handled through binding arbitration. A trial date of Feb. 21, 2006 has been set in the case.

Few, if anybody, in the local sports media missed her. It was not until mid-August, after a TV news report on the investigation, that the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times and others picked up on the story. Byears remembers, she says, because the news broke right around what otherwise would have been another cause for celebration—her 30th birthday.

On a sunny day in late March, the Sparks' corporate offices near lax are buzzing with the activity of energetic young women in slick sweatsuits. This is the support staff for Sparks President Johnny Buss, whose corner office looks like the room of a kid with his own credit card. There are collections of lunchboxes and bobble heads, assorted board games and boxes of cereal, including Corn Pops, which he offers to visitors as refreshment along with coffee or water.

Buss, who wears a stud in the graying blond soul patch under his lip, makes the day-to-day decisions for the Sparks, and he happily admits that he consults with his father, Jerry, on the larger issues: "Oh yeah, I talk to him about the state of the WNBA. But he would rather stay out of it. He enjoys watching me make decisions."

Johnny Buss' moves include the trade that brought Byears from the Sacramento Monarchs to L.A., as well as her release. He says he cut her from the team mostly because of dissension among her teammates. She was, he suggests, just too much trouble to keep.

"We had just won a championship, we were waiting to exhale, and with it came difficult attitudes and problems beyond anything that happened with the alleged sexual assault," he says without elaborating. "We knew it was going to be difficult to trade her under the cloud. We make changes whether they are popular or not. It was a tough situation; I wish it didn't happen. I wish the publicity or the accusations never happened. People do things and get kicked off the team. Was the timing the worst for Byears? Yes."

A few weeks later at the franchise's nearby HealthSouth practice facility, now the Toyota Sports Center, a few of Byears' old teammates rally to her defense after a spirited session under new head coach Henry Bibby. Ignoring repeated "Don't answer!" directives from a hovering Ashley King, a Sparks communications staffer, center Lisa Leslie recalls that the team had good chemistry.

"Initially our team always hung out. Every day we would go to the mall, or hang out watching a movie in our hotel room in our pajamas. We had fun in practice with jokers like Tasha [Byears], Nikki T [Teasley] and Coop [coach Cooper]." On the court, she says, "We knew if someone came at us, we had each others' back, and Tasha was big for us that way because she was always there, especially protecting me. Latasha and I respected each other on and off the court."

Guard Tamecka Dixon puts it this way: "The first two years it was just an incredible cohesion. It made us a tough team to beat. In the last two years that hasn't been there, especially since Latasha was let go."

As for Cooper, recently named coach of the Albuquerque franchise in the NBA Development League, he never considered Byears a negative influence, despite what Buss remembers. "Latasha was not a problem with teammates that I saw at all," he says.

If Byears was a public relations liability, as Johnny Buss implies, she had nothing on Kobe Bryant.

On July 1, 2003, a 19-year-old woman accused him of raping her in a hotel room in Edwards, Colo., where he had gone for knee surgery. His arrest and the ensuing legal drama gave sportswriters a break from chronicling his public feud with then-Laker center Shaquille O'Neal and from speculating on his relationship with head coach Phil Jackson, who in his 2004 book "The Last Season" described Bryant as defiant and uncoachable. It also gave late-night TV comedy writers relief from skewering miscreants such as Saddam Hussein. Regardless of the front-page headlines and cue-card quips, Jerry Buss re-signed Bryant before the 2004-05 season, giving him a deal that will pay $136.4 million over seven years.

The charges were eventually dropped in the case of People of the State of Colorado vs. Kobe Bean Bryant. He and his accuser reached an undisclosed financial settlement in her civil suit stemming from the alleged incident. Nike recently began featuring Bryant in a new ad that doesn't mention the Colorado case, but casts him in the role of underdog—a sympathetic figure who has made mistakes.

But Byears can't even get a tryout. "All the WNBA teams knew about the allegations, and three general managers told me specifically they would love to have her, but their organizations couldn't touch her because of the negative publicity," says Memphis-based sports agent Ricks Mason, who represents Byears. "Let's face it. Males and females are treated differently in sports, and a gay woman has it even tougher."

With the loss of her salary and residence, Byears has found herself anxiously waiting for the phone to ring. But even though Cooper says he remembers other teams often asking about her in trade talks, none wants her now.

"They left me for dead," Byears says.

In the summer of 1996, as it finalized plans for a women's league, the NBA offered Lisa Leslie, the 6-foot-5 gold medalist for the United States at the summer Olympics in Atlanta, a personal services contract estimated at $300,000—then a sizable sum in women's sports. The WNBA hoped that Leslie, a scoring machine and sometime model with polished nails and manners, would help it establish an identity and attract a diverse audience: that is, both men and women.

Now in its ninth year, the fledgling league's marketing materials continue to showcase players such as Leslie, now 33, and Seattle's Lauren Jackson, who appears in the 2005 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Like tennis players Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams, they unabashedly embody a mix of athleticism and sexuality.

But it all begs a question: If these remarkably pretty women were also openly gay, would they be sales tools for the league?

The WNBA keeps a strong lesbian fan base, as well as its lesbian players, in what the University of Minnesota's Mary Jo Kane calls "a glass closet." Everyone knows they're there, says Kane, director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport, but no one wants to open the door.

Michael Messner, a sociology and gender studies professor at USC, agrees: The collective understanding in the WNBA is that if you're a lesbian, you'd better hush up about it. "It's OK to be who you are, but it's not OK to talk about it, and bring a male to the team party," Messner says.

Minnesota Lynx center Michele Van Gorp, one of the few openly lesbian WNBA players, certainly got that message. In an interview last year with a gay and lesbian magazine called Lavender, Van Gorp said that when she played for the New York Liberty in 1999, a coach invited her to lunch specifically to discuss her sexual orientation. "It was actually a big issue . . . and within the [Liberty] it seemed very taboo," she recalled in the article.

Byears says she received a similar lecture from the Sparks, having arrived in L.A. with a history of hard partying in gay nightclubs. Byears says it was Shipp, then the team communications director, who "told me not to speak to any gay and lesbian magazines and to use discretion regarding the clubs I like to go to." Shipp declined to comment on any specific conversations with Byears but acknowledged that all players receive media training.

Byears didn't talk to the gay press. She did, however, give the readers of GQ an earful. In a July 2003 profile titled "Beauty in the Beast," she was depicted as a martini-slugging, foul-mouthed loose cannon, telling the magazine how she "didn't go to no all-white Catholic school, didn't live next door to no doctors and lawyers."

"I lived next to pimps … pullin' up in their big Cadillacs with a lot of wimmins," she was quoted as saying. "That's what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a pimp growing up. Trust me, I'm gonna be a millionaire someday. Man, I'm gonna buy my momma the biggest house in the world. And I'm gonna open me a restaurant or a nightclub. Whether it's a strip club or a gay club, I don't give a damn."

For his part, Johnny Buss says that Byears' homosexuality was not a factor in her firing: "What I have learned over all the years, you're just better off being blind to certain lifestyles."

"We've discussed homosexuality in the NBA and WNBA," he adds. "We don't ask. If you look at the general population, you could come up with statistics on who is homosexual and who is not. I don't know why that would be any different in professional sports. Now it's one of those things that people won't come out and disclose. I think they should. I know there's a lot of prejudice in America and it's sickening to me."

It's unlikely this sentiment will help Byears, at least anytime soon. Her agent tried and failed to get her a training camp invitation for the season now underway. "I was like, this is crazy. I play basketball. That's what I do," Byears says.

These days she has to do it overseas, playing in a Turkish league during the winter. When she's home, she shares a small Pasadena apartment with friends and works odd jobs—none of which have lasted much longer than the seven days at JC Penney.

On a smoggy June day, Byears arrives at a Fairfax district café wearing a baggy Rocawear shirt and jeans, her hair in cornrows, to talk about the frustration of being out of the WNBA. "Maybe they're scared of me because I'm gay," she says, sounding amazed at the thought. "Maybe it's just because I'm outspoken and I love women."

It is impossible to measure the impact of Byears' 2003 release, if any, on the team's performance. Their dream of a "three-peat" died that season in the WNBA championship finals against the aptly named Detroit Shock. The following year they flamed out in the Western Conference semifinals, losing to the team that tops this season's conference standings, the Monarchs.

And yet Byears knows that she is no Kobe Bryant, on whom an entire franchise hinges. She understands, too, why the Sparks and the WNBA would have found it easier to back a player with the soft-spoken star power of a Lisa Leslie.

Even so, it may be harder than ever for the league to ignore Byears.

Late last month, authorities officially closed the two-year-plus investigation into the alleged sexual assault. Byears was never arrested or charged in the case. Gina Satriano, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney, cited "insufficient evidence" for the decision to drop the matter.

When Byears hears the news over the phone she lets out a loud yell, a whoop of relief and celebration, and then begins to cry. "You can't believe how happy this makes me," she says. "I'm so happy that part is over."

But where it will lead is uncertain. Johnny Buss declined to comment on the closing of the case. Whether Byears will be invited back to play for the Sparks or another WNBA team is unknown.