4B
Monday, March 10, 1997
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Tamecka
New Jersey playgrounds were her classrooms; guys who came to play were her teachers. The result: a killer game and a killer attitude.
Chris Hamilton / KANSAN
Continued from Page 1B
However, Dixon could tell what her dad was thinking, that he wanted a boy to craft into the kind of player he had been.
Bowers didn't have a son then. He just had Tamecka but decided to mold her in his likeness anyway. With or without a Y chromosome.
Bowers quickly discovered that his daughter wasn't like the other girls. Even in elementary school she showed a love for the game, but many women and men who love the game eventually end up as accountants, factory workers or secretaries, not basketball players.
Still, Dixon had skills, including an uncanny ability to dribble. Especially to cross-over dribble.
"That's the first thing we put in," says Bowers, who is better known as "Boo." "I believe it's the best offensive move in the game. You can shake your defender down and make them look stupid."
Bowers made his share of defenders look stupid during his pride. As a collegiate player at American University in Washington, D.C., Bowers became the school's all-time leading scorer — 2,056 career points and 22.1 points a game.
He seemed to be a lock for the pros.
"Ijust remember him being unstoppable in college," Dixon says. "My dad was really, really popular. Whenever I was with him, we always got thronged by people wanting autographs."
The security of an NBA contract seemed particularly important to Bowers, who supported Portia Dixon and their daughter. Boo and Portia were 17-year-olds when Tamecka was born. They never married but remained close due, in large part, to their daughter.
Young Tamecka lived with her mother while her father played at American, and even as games, practice and school filled Bowers' life, he took every opportunity to spend time with his daughter.
- Often he combined Tamecka time with practice time.
Dixon doesn't remember her earliest days on a basketball court, but her dad is quick to tell her and everyone else the stories.
"I'd let her get the rebound for me and throw it back out to me," Bowers says. "She was constantly around basketball."
One summer while Bowers was home from college, he worked out at a nearby elementary school. Tamecka went along like always.
"He was doing his drills and running suicides. I was holding his towels, but I was doing the suicides with him," she says, recalling the intense wind sprints.
Dixon can't help laughing and smiling as she tells ___ the story.
"I used to ask him: "Dad, am I sweatin', too?' And there wouldn't be any sweat dripping from me or anything," she says. "I'd be completely dry."
Thousands of miles didn't end the father-daughter workouts. A knee injury limited Bowers' NBA career to two years before he had to take his game overseas. Amid the ashes of an NBA dream, though, Bowers started to see the game he loved catch fire in his daugh
ter, a youngster who could do things that no one else her age — girl or boy — could do.
Pam Dishman / KANSAN
three-pointers. If the guys wanted to go one-on-one, she wanted to go one-on-one.
Dixon first played organized basketball in junior high. Her team would score 40 points; she would have 30. She could play.
"I guess I style my game after any athletic male point guard who can attack the basket hard and play defense hard," Dixon says.
But it was on the playgrounds of New Jersey and New York where she really played ball.
"I've played against so many great players — so many," Dixon says. "It was Jace Vaughns. It was Scot Pollards. People who could play."
"People" isn't exactly the right word "Men" is more to the point.
Male point guards?
"Any male point guard who can take over the game," she says with a short laugh, "with his offensive skills and his defensive skills."
The men she played against taught her to take her game to a whole different level. If the guys were shooting three-pointers, she was shooting
Growing up, Dixon couldn't watch women's basketball on television.
simply wasn't on. Girls didn't have female basketball idols like today.
No Sheryl Swoops.
Swoops.
NoLiga Leelie
No Rebecca Lobo
"I don't think if I'd grown up playing with girls all my life that I would be as skilled as I am with the
So girls either picked up what they could from each other or they looked elsewhere for their basketball education. Dixon found her teachers on the playground.
ball, with the dribble, with everything,
"Dixon concedes."
Don't think that her skills have gone unnoticed.
"Tamecka is as difficult a back-court player to guard as anyone we've every faced," says Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma, whose Huskies defeated the Jayhawks 85-64 earlier this season but allowed Dixon to score 22 points.
Quite a compliment considering that this year alone Connecticut has faced potential All-Americas such as Tennessee's Chamique Holdsclaw, Western Kentucky's Leslie Johnson and Georgia's La 'Keshia Frett.
"One-on-one, she may be as good a player as we've ever gone up against." he said.
Dixon's dribbling and shooting and
rebounding aren't the only results of her time on the playground. And those who have seen her play know... She has an attitude
It seeps from her. It reveals itself in her steely eyes, her flinty glare, her fiery outbursts.
"I'm going to show it emotionally on the court," Dixon says. "I'm gonna let you know."
However, standing over someone after you've blocked her shot isn't exactly the way things are done in the Midwest — a place where ladies let gentlemen open doors for them.
Not everyone appreciates that in-your-face style. It sets many Big 12 Conference players back on their heels. They never saw anything like Tamecka Dixon back in Chickasha, Okla., or Vinton, Iowa.
Dixon may not win any popularity contests. Her emotion draws glares and an occasional elbow to the head.
"All in all, I think people saw my emotions as bad." Dixon says. "At home, it was just, 'She gettin' her team hyped. She just loves the game."
Emotions are still part of Dixon's game, but they are a far cry from three years ago when they carried her to the heights or dragged her to the depths.
"As a freshman, sometimes my emotions took me out of games rather than help me," Dixon admits. "Now, I control it to a point where my emotions are always helpful."
Her toned-down emotions still have helped the Jayhawks on more than one occasion.
A tie up and ensuing stare down in Colorado guard LaShena Graham earlier this season made the difference in Kansas' victory. Coach Caeal Barry conceded that her team never recovered after the incident.
Graham complained that Dixon had elbowed her throughout the game. Dixon shot back that Graham had swung at her.
To see Dixon trying to push through another Colorado player to get at Graham made it clear that she had no thought of backing down.
"I don't care what people think for 40 minutes," Dixon says. "After it's all over with, then I'm back."
When Dixon uprooted that New Jersey-style game and relocated it in
See TAMECKA, Page 11B
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