Chamique Holdsclaw with Jennifer Frey

$11.00 / Paperback / 200 pages

ISBN 0743212703

Simon and Schuster / 2001

You can’t live your life afraid you won’t fit in, or afraid of failing. You just have to keep practicing, keep working until it feels right." This principle has served Chamique Holdsclaw well. Known as the "female Michael Jordan," Chamique has been called the best woman basketball player ever, but the popularity of twenty four-year-old Chamique Holdsclaw is rooted not only in her skill, but also in her remarkable life. In this autobiography, Chamique tells the full story of her life on and off the court, shedding light on what makes her an all-around superstar. She speaks of her amazing journey from an inner city neighborhood and a problematic relationship with her parents to the blacktops of New York City, where she dominated the all-male teams, to her meteoric rise as the star player of the Washington Mystics.

Chamique’s narrative takes the reader inside her incredible record-setting championship seasons at the University of Tennessee, describes her elation when she became the first pick in the 1999 WNBA draft, and brings home her exhilarating but exhausting first year of playing professionally and living on her own. Chamique relates her amazing transformation from a fragile girl to a world-class athlete, sharing with the reader both a spectacular life story and her hard-earned maturity and wisdom that are certain to inspire others to pursue their goals not only in athletics—a diachronic metaphor of the human struggle for excellence and virtue—but in all fields of human endeavor.