For The Fun Of It

Chamique Holdsclaw lost the joy in her game-and in her life. She found them both in Spain

Chamique Holdsclaw steps onto the court. Good. One foot in front of the--wait, no, maybe over there instead. It's just regular warmups. This is easy, right?

Ignore the crowd, she tells herself. Shouldn't be too hard, really. Valencia, Spain, isn't exactly a women's basketball hotbed. On this warm November night, two-thirds of the 9,000-seat arena is empty, which is just fine by her. She's about to make her debut for Ros Casares, Valencia's Euroleague team, and she can feel the nerves dancing underneath her skin.

It's been three months since she played a competitive game of basketball, since it all fell apart, since every breath felt so heavy that she thought her lungs might be filled with iron. She was a six-year veteran, the face of the Washington Mystics, but then she walked away from everything-the team, the WNBA, herselfbecause of depression so severe that she was ashamed to even talk about it.

She's gone through months of therapy and soulsearching and tears, and now it's led her to this. Go to Europe, her agent told her. Find out if you still want to be a basketball player. Find out who you want to be, period.

So she has come to this city of ornate churches and old stone buildings, this city that hangs on the eastern edge of Spain, tucked under the elbow of the Mediterranean Sea. And she has tried to adjust to how her new coach makes her run up and down the floor for half of each practice, much the same way she tries to look for herself in the mirror of the upscale hotel room where Ros Casares has put her up for the first few weeks of her stay.

Now she's taking the court in this orange-and-white uniform, with a marching band blaring out who-knows-what song in the corner of the arena, and warmups are almost over, and … okay, then. This is it. If she can play well, it will mean something, right?

But her timing is off. Her shot won't go where she wants it to go. Her legs feel like they've been run over by an 18-wheeler. She manages three baskets on nine shots and gets an assist in her 17 minutes on the court. After the game, she can't get out of the building fast enough. Drive. Drive.

She feels a rush of something awful and familiar; by the time she gets back to her hotel room, it's suffocating.

Is this all going to happen again? Is this really what she wants to be doing?

"I hate this feeling," she says. Maybe she should just go home. No. She is talking to herself out loud now, trying to remember her therapy, her sanity. Who do you want to be, Chamique?

"Wait," she says. "Just step back. It's a new experience. Just relax."

She takes a deep breath. No iron in the lungs. Interesting. She takes another one. She can breathe. And then she takes another step forward.

DEPRESSION WILL beat you senseless. There are plenty of worse illnesses out there, but there are few that trigger such a hostile takeover of not only your mind, but also your identity. Your whole life starts to float away, like a helium balloon, drifting slowly out of grasp, and then out of sight.

Chamique Holdsclaw knows who she used to be: winner of three NCAA championships at Tennessee, top pick in the WNBA draft, three-time All-Star, the woman little girls look up to. But that was before last summer. There was the Mystics game at Connecticut in June, an uneventful loss that brought her to tears in the locker room. There was the practice in Los Angeles in mid-July, when she stood annoyed as the rest of the squad joked around, snapping at anyone who came too close. It wasn't the first time she'd acted like that, so teammate Stacey Dales-Schuman decided to say something: "Mique, I want to help you. I'm here for you." Holdsclaw said thanks, then walked away.

Most of all, there was the dull ache that had started in her head, then crept down her body, settling in her chest. Every move was exhausting, like wading through tar; eventually, she just stopped. She closed the curtains of the high-rise apartment she was renting just a few blocks from the White House. She anchored herself to the living room couch, as if it were the only thing keeping her from floating away. Eating Corn Pops was easier than cooking, and sometimes hours went by with her munching straight from the box, humming along to Jill Scott and Erykah Badu, their soft, lush voices sympathizing with her through the stereo.

She missed a practice, then two. She skipped a team plane, then a game. She had no idea what was happening to her, or how to stop it. Growing up, she'd heard depression described as nothing more than a passing mood, something that could be solved by prayer, or a Hallmark card, or a good night's sleep. So how could she possibly explain it to anyone? She spent days staring at the brown fabric of her couch, tracing the material with her hand. And when she finally mustered the courage to tell Mystics executives how much she'd been struggling, she insisted that no one else know, not even her coach or teammates.

Club president Susan O'Malley agreed to keep the secret, telling the media that Holdsclaw had "a minor medical condition." The announcement sent Chamique's phone into a ringing frenzy, but she wouldn't answer it. The messages clogged her voice mail, but she didn't care. It went on like this for weeks, until her friend Tanya, a doctor, barged into her apartment. You're going to see a psychiatrist, Tanya said, even if I have to drag you there myself.

Chamique didn't want to go. But when she did, she discovered that what she couldn't tell her friends, she could tell this stranger. In turn, the psychiatrist helped her realize things about herself she'd never imagined. Like how every time something painful happened in her life, how every time she felt she was losing control, she would quickly stuff the emotion into a mental closet, convinced she had to be strong for the people around her. The anguish she felt when her grandmother, the woman who had raised her, died in 2002? Into the closet. The heartbreak of a failed relationship? Into the closet with that, too.

She told the psychiatrist about her grandfather's death last spring, how it had come in the same month her grandmother had died, how she figured she would handle it the way she always did. Be tough. Be the rock. Be an athlete. Her family was counting on her. Problem was, the closet had become overstuffed through the years. And now she could see that when the door popped open, everything tumbled out.

It wasn't an easy mess to clean up. Holdsclaw started going to therapy three times a week, trying to put into words how paralyzed she felt sitting around on her living room couch, with nothing but her Corn Pops and her fears. "Thinking about tomorrow, or the next day, is like a headache," she confessed. "It's unbearable." So was the thought of people knowing what was troubling her. "This is tearing me up inside," she told her psychiatrist.

She simply wasn't strong enough to face the lights and the noise and the people. So she worked on just going out in public, and trying to confide in her friends. One night, she asked teammate Murriel Page to join her at a diner in the Adams Morgan section of DC, and as the two sat at a table by the window, Chamique let it all spill out. It felt good, too. But then a man approached them and started yelping at her. "Why aren't you out there on the court?" he asked. "What's the matter with you?"

By then, the rumors that had been swirling since Holdsclaw started missing practices had turned into a hurricane of speculation. She was pregnant. She had Lou Gehrig's disease. She was addicted to painkillers. That one made its way up to New York, which led to a phone call to her mother back home in Queens. "No, Mom, I'm not a drug addict," Chamique assured her.

The gossip got only worse after the September phone call from her agent, Lon Babby, telling the Mystics she wasn't coming back, not for the rest of the season, maybe not ever. She knew she had to go public at some point, and she finally did one day in late October. Sitting in the conference room at Babby's office, Holdsclaw granted a few newspaper interviews, revealing the roots and depths of her depression. It didn't feel good, exactly, but it wasn't as bad as she'd anticipated.

Across the shiny wood table, she saw Babby looking at her, and she knew what he was thinking-that it was time for her to get back on the court. "I wasn't sure," she says now. "But I knew if I didn't give it a shot, there was a chance I was never going to play again."

BASKETBALL IS the easy part. After struggling in her first Euroleague game, Holdsclaw puts up double-doubles in each of her next five, and Valencia wins all of them. She earns Player of the Week honors in December, and by mid-February she's averaging 17.8 points, shooting 55% and leading Ros Casares into the Euroleague playoffs.

But she didn't come here to play basketball. Not really. She came here to see if she could withstand the pressure of the game and still keep her balance, to see if she could take another step forward. At first, she wonders if she'll be undone by the little challenges of day-to-day life, like when she shows up on time for a 6:30 p.m. doctor's appointment, and then finds out that in Spain, 6:30 really means 7:15. Or when she struggles to tell a plumber "no hot water" in Spanish.

She tries to ground herself by sticking to mundane tasks. Find a grocery store. Do the laundry. Suddenly, tracking down powdered Tide takes on a special urgency. Thank god for Murriel, she tells herself. As one of many WNBA players who spend their off-seasons in Europe, Page was already crashing the boards for Ros Casares by the time Holdsclaw showed up.

Thank god for Zakiyyah, too. Mique talked her Tennessee roommate, Zakiyyah Modeste, into coming to Spain, where they share a two-bedroom apartment. Modeste, a spiky-haired bundle of energy, has found work in Valencia as a dance teacher, but mainly she's an explorer, discovering adventures for herself and for Holdsclaw. They investigate the city's beautiful old quarter. They take a day trip to Barcelona. They bathe in the sun that always seems to be shining. They go out to clubs, dancing to music that's about as far from Jill Scott as it gets.

No one stops them to ask for Chamique's autograph. No one here seems to care whether she's playing or not, and the freedom is exhilarating. It's also a little terrifying, all that time with no distractions. She calls her therapist once a week, but there are still days when she wakes up feeling low, when she looks at the ceiling and sees the insecurities seeping in. Before, she would have just ignored them, but now she's trying to acknowledge them, and that can make her sad all over again. Those are the mornings Zakiyyah tries to cheer her up by belting out a favorite song, or when Mique meditates to calm herself. Sometimes she'll go for a run on the beach. Afterward, she and Zakiyyah just sit quietly and look at the ocean.

"I'm still going through it," Chamique says. "I'm learning, that's the thing. People are like, You're playing again, you're cured,' but it's not that simple. It's a work in progress."

A late-February evening finds her at home, with the Valencia skyline sparkling beneath her balcony. She walks to the living room bookshelf, reaches over the television and grabs one of the piles of letters the Mystics have been sending her in overstuffed FedEx envelopes. "Normally my fan mail is people wanting pictures, but these … "

Her soft voice trails off. Some of the letters are so full of sadness, she feels as if the paper could disintegrate in her hands. Some of them rustle with hope. Most of them wish her well and thank her for talking about a subject so few others want to discuss.

She pulls out a note from a teenage boy and reads it aloud: "I have never really been a big WNBA fan, but I am now a Chamique Holdsclaw fan. Our stories sound very similar. I now see a psychiatrist, and like you, I am starting to get my life back."

Piece by piece. Step by step. A few days later, Holdsclaw is sitting in a restaurant perched on the water, picking through the seafood paella that is Valencia's specialty. She's not crazy about the local custom of serving shrimp with the heads and antennae still attached, but she likes this place, with its white tablecloths and tall water glasses and pink mosaic tiles. At the next table, a pair of young boys, just 4 and 7, are making faces at her. She makes faces back, and within 10 minutes she's playing with them, picking up the youngest, asking the parents how they taught their sons to speak English. By now, she's learned enough Spanish herself to hold at least a basic conversation. "In a few years, I definitely want kids," Chamique says, and she half-smiles.

Six months ago, she couldn't even think a few days ahead. Now she's talking in years. This is progress. And there are more changes on the way. Her season with Ros Casares ends in the second round of the playoffs against Russian powerhouse VBM-SGAU. Three days later, the Mystics hold a press conference. The team has been talking with Babby since the day Holdsclaw first said she needed a break, and both sides have come to the same conclusion: going back to Washington would be too painful, with too many memories and too many broken fences. So on March 21, a deal is announced. Holdsclaw will head to LA in exchange for DeLisha Milton-Jones and the 13th pick in April's draft.

It's the fresh start that Mique wanted. But while there are plenty of things to like about the move—other stars to shoulder the pressure, a bigger market with more room to breathe—it's a little daunting to know that when she gets home from Spain, she'll have to start from scratch in a new city. And adjust to a new coach. And learn whether 6:30 really means 7:15. "Hollywood, all that," she says in a phone call back to the States. "Fun, but also I'm nervous. I've never lived on the West Coast before."

She knows there's speculation she may never put on a Sparks uniform. As one of the LA papers points out, the deal is final whether Holdsclaw reports or not. There are no guarantees in life, and at 27 she's learned the hard way not to worry about it. As she chats animatedly about a trip she's planning to Amsterdam to visit a friend, there's an ease to her voice, that same familiar command she had worried was gone for good.

She knows what she wants to do tomorrow, and the day after that, and probably the day after that, too. And right now, as steps forward go, that's enough.

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