Former Sky coach Teresa Weatherspoon didn’t like it when members of the media called her by her first name during press conferences and interviews. “Coach,” “Coach Spoon” or even just “Spoon” was the way she felt it should be. Using her first name was too familiar or not quite reverent enough, seemed to be her position on the matter.
I didn’t like that she didn’t like it. Or more like I didn’t care. I rolled my eyes so hard at it, they might still be rolling.
But you know what? I can be a real ninny. As I learned just this weekend — nearly two years after the Sky fired her — Weatherspoon’s objection wasn’t about ego or hubris. It was nothing more than where she comes from and how she was raised.
I picked this up watching her seven-month-old appearance on former Sky star Angel Reese’s podcast, “pologetically Angel.” In it, Weatherspoon described her childhood in rural east Texas, in a tiny town where the two most oft-spoken words were “sir” and “ma’am.” All adults were addressed that way, according to Weatherspoon, who is 60. It wasn’t an expectation but rather a demand.
Maybe I’d have figured this out sooner had she been here for longer than one season before the Sky showed her the door. One year isn’t much time to get to know anybody in any setting, especially if you’re a know-it-all columnist showing up around a team only every now and then.
Weatherspoon was at the United Center Saturday in the capacity of “general manager” of one of the WNBA All-Star teams — a nod to her excellence as one of the 30-year-old league’s first star players — so I asked her about it. No, not about the name thing. About the kicked-to-the-curb-after-only-one-year thing.
“Nothing stops the show,” she said twice. “I’m not the only person in the world that this has happened to, you know? I’m not.
“But one thing about me, it doesn’t hold me down. Nothing holds me down and I move forward, and that’s the most important thing is moving forward and knowing who you are and what you bring. … No one can stop that.”
Weatherspoon has a job coaching in the Unrivaled league, but she would “absolutely” like to get another crack at the WNBA.
She won a national championship as a point guard at Louisiana Tech, where she later took the reins as coach. She was the WNBA’s first assists and steals champion as a rookie and became a five-time All-Star. Before going to the Sky, she was an NBA assistant coach with the Pelicans. But when it comes to being a WNBA head coach, all she has on her résumé is a one-and-done with the Sky in 2024.
Talk about a kick in the gut. It had to hurt.
“It was a tremendous shock for me,” Weatherspoon said on Reese’s podcast.
The stuff of coaching and leading has coursed through Weatherspoon’s veins since she first picked up a ball, she recalls.
“I love it,” she said. “I love just studying it. I love the grit and grind of it all, and then the wit — like how quickly [things] have to happen — and the challenge of it all, and then playing chess. If you’re playing checkers, you’re going to get beat.”
Weatherspoon meant a great deal to Reese and still does. At All-Star media day on Friday, Weatherspoon surfaced in a crowd of reporters around Reese and asked a couple of admiring questions — neither having to do with herself — but Reese took it as a chance to reflect praise onto her first WNBA coach.
“Coming into my rookie year, I didn’t know what I was going to be,” Reese said. “I think you put a lot of everything into me, from energy to love to support. I was the No. 7 pick and didn’t [know if] I was going to do anything … [but] you put a lot of conscience into me and I’m thankful for that.”
The player-coach relationship didn’t last, at least not officially, but they continued to talk “every day” during Reese’s second and final year with the Sky, according to Reese.
And after news broke that the Sky had fired Weatherspoon, the first text and first call came from Reese.
Weatherspoon seems to have gotten over the sting.
“I don’t want to sit in a place where I’m holding a grudge,” she said on the podcast. “I can’t do that [or else] you win. I’m not going to do that. I’m going to move to the next phase of my life.”
But she definitely doesn’t appreciate the manner in which she was fired — over the phone, rather than face-to-face — as she articulated to Reese.
“I’m going to always be respectful regardless of situations and circumstances, and I expect the same,” she said. “Because of what I give, I really want to have it back. But I didn’t get that. I got a phone call.”
That just wouldn’t have flown back in the day in east Texas.