“Practice makes perfect.” It’s an age-old sentiment, dating back to the 1500s, but Sheryl Swoopes knows what it takes firsthand. She remembers the adage being bandied about in the WNBA, where the Texan was the first player signed in 1996, the year before the league tipped off. She’d go on to become a three-time MVP, four-time champion with the Houston Comets, and three-time Olympic gold medalist. How many hours of practice does that take?
Swoopes called up artist Deborah Roberts to talk about the pursuit of greatness. Roberts—whose mixed-media collages and paintings evoking childhood have landed in collections stretching from the Whitney Museum of American Art to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in her native Texas—can relate to the need for resilience. Here, the two women trade stories on stumbling, falling, and getting back up to go further than before.
Did you both grow up sports fans?
Deborah Roberts: My love of sports came from my father. He would bet on the football games. Every Sunday I would have to read him the line to see if he won anything. I was a big fan of the Lady Longhorns and the University of Texas. But [while playing for Texas Tech] you beat us so badly…
Sheryl Swoopes: Just a couple times.
Roberts: Still hurts.
Swoopes: I started playing basketball when I was 7. The more I played it, the better I got and the more committed I was. I wanted to be great. I’m sure, Deborah, when you decided this is what you were going to do, you wanted to be great.
Roberts: I didn’t have anyone in my circle who was an artist who could even tell me about art. It was a lot of figuring it out, falling, getting up. It’s the same thing with any field—just a dedication that one must have to build on their dreams.
Swoopes: They say in sports, practice makes perfect. I don’t know how many times you probably started a drawing and got rid of it, or did another one and had to go back and fix it.
I got pregnant when the WNBA first started. There was a moment when I was coming back, when I stopped and questioned myself: Will I actually be able to do this? You’re competing at the highest level with some of the best players in the world. It wasn’t an injury; it was a pregnancy, which is really hard in this field. I thought, This is no different from other times that I’ve been knocked down.
Roberts: It’s impressive. I work with unforgiving material sometimes, where you can’t make mistakes. Every time you put something down, you’re hoping that it’s going to say and mean something to someone else, and create a dialogue.
In both your fields, there are larger conversations about representation. How have you seen those change over the course of your careers?
Swoopes: I remember when the WNBA started in ’97, there were so many people who said it wouldn’t last five years. Here we are in season 30. That says a lot about the growth of the game, about women’s sports, but it also says a lot about women. When we’re given an opportunity, we make the most of it. When brands catch on and they want to have a piece of these women, you’re not just getting an athlete. You’re getting an athlete, a businesswoman, an entrepreneur, a mom, a sister, a friend. As far as we’ve come, we still have so much more work to do. But you have to start somewhere.
Roberts: During the recent big boom of Black art, everybody was buying. If you weren’t buying Black art, you weren’t buying art. Dior came, Louis Vuitton came. We have to be smart when that stuff happens, to center yourself in a way, financially, that you’re secure for the rest of your life. Everything ebbs and flows. Museums are collecting fewer and fewer Black women artists. You really have to be 89 and in Pampers and a wheelchair in order to get collected. The men have it a little easier, but not that much. It’s always a struggle, but you have to keep focused and keep expanding your work in a way that is intentional.
For female athletes, there’s often this criticism of masculinity within the female body. How do you feel about being exposed so openly, and people picking apart the things that make you historically, racially, you?
Swoopes: I didn’t personally, but I had friends and teammates who did. We’ve seen all the criticism of Serena Williams before she retired. When I look at the women in the WNBA, when I look at all these little girls out there—Black, white, brown, doesn’t matter the color—I think about how social media has created this image of what a beautiful, strong, healthy, gorgeous young lady should look like. That’s where a lot of us in the WNBA come in, because our voices are powerful.
Roberts: It’s hard trying to dismantle the standard of beauty, and we know most times it doesn’t include us. You have these little Black girls, Hispanic girls, looking at these images of this blonde-haired, blue-eyed person who’s 95 pounds. When I came out of the womb, I was 95 pounds.
Swoopes: The beauty standards for a Caucasian woman and a Black or brown woman are very different. When I look at Serena Williams, I see beauty, strength, and power. People want to talk about her muscles and her butt, like, “She’s too big.” My response is, “Too big for who?” As a Black woman, lots of times we look at her and we’re like, Dang, I wish my butt could look like that. There are times I’m like, Serena, what are you doing? I want those muscles, I want those legs, I want those thighs. I’ve never allowed myself to listen to what other people think of my body size and my looks. It’s all in me.
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