hen the WNBA started getting everything together to launch in 1997, the new women’s basketball league had the three stars they wanted to build around: Sheryl Swoopes, Lisa Leslie and Rebecca Lobo.

The league installed what it thought was its three tentpoles with franchises that made the most geographical sense, keeping Swoopes in Texas with the Houston Comets, letting Leslie play at home with the Los Angeles Sparks and planting Lobo in New York City just three hours away from where she became a college star at UConn.

Then the league signed 13 other players it would sprinkle among the eight franchises, aiming for competitive balance. With a pregnant Swoopes expected to miss most of the league’s inaugural season, the WNBA thought it would be only fair if Houston was assigned Cynthia Cooper, an eight-time Italian League leading scorer and two-time Olympian.

The league messed up.

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To be fair, no one knew it at the time. In fact, while toiling away in Italy, Cooper first tried to play in the American Basketball League, a rival women’s league that tipped off eight months before the WNBA.

“I was like, ‘I’m Cynthia Cooper, I’d love to try out for one of your teams, I played at USC,’ ” Cooper said on All The Smoke with Stephen Jackson and Matt Barnes earlier this year. “They were like, ‘We have enough guards.’ And I was like, ‘OK, looks like I’m going back overseas.’ ”

Learning a lesson from the ABL brush-off, Cooper went to work on a project before reaching out to the WNBA, diligently gathering box scores from her time overseas where she averaged more than 30 points per game and putting together a highlight reel on VHS. Before she sent it off, she placed a call to Renee Brown, the WNBA’s director of player personnel, just to give her a heads up the package was being dropped in the mail.

“She’s like, ‘Cynthia Cooper? Like in Italy?’ ” Cooper recalled. “I said yeah, and she said, ‘We’ve been looking for you. Where do we send the contract?’ ”

Houston Comets’ Cynthia Cooper celebrates their 4th straight WNBA championship after defeating the Liberty in game 2 at the Compaq Center.

Melissa Phillip/Houston Chronicle

A few months after Swoopes was assigned to the Comets, who still didn’t have a name yet at that point, the WNBA announced Cooper, who already owned a home in Sugar Land, would be joining her in Houston.

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“The league took (competitive balance) into consideration when they placed Cynthia here,” Rockets executive vice president John Thomas told the Houston Chronicle when he learned Cooper was coming to town. “Cynthia obviously having Texas ties made her a logical choice for us. The (WNBA) told us we would not have had Cynthia’s talents here if not for Sheryl’s pregnancy.”

Carroll Dawson, who was general manager for both the Rockets and Comets before Van Chancellor was hired to run the women’s team, knew the league’s mistake right away.

In her Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame speech, Cooper said Dawson, who died in 2024, told her a story about watching her tape before her arrival and waking up Rockets and Comets owner Les Alexander with a 2 a.m. phone call to tell him of their good fortune.

“Hey, I got this 33-year-old, and I think she’s the best player in the league,” he said.

He was right, and soon everyone would realize it.

“I think we blew it,” former WNBA president Val Ackerman told Andscape in 2016. “None of us realized just how good Cynthia Cooper was, because if we had, she would not have been assigned to the Comets. … If we had any inkling of how dominant a player she was, we would have … spread it. We just didn’t know.”

Who is Cynthia Cooper?

Comets Cynthia Cooper celebrates a three-point shot in game two of the WNBA Western Conference Finals Sunday August 29, 1999 at the Compaq Center.The Comets defeated the Los Angeles Sparks 83-55 to force a deciding game three on Monday, August 30, 1999. (Smiley Pool/Chronicle) SKYBOX HOUCHRON CAPTION (08/30/1999): Cooper’s 22 points lead the Comets over L.A. 83-55.
Smiley N. Pool/Houston Chronicle

Because the WNBA didn’t start until Cooper was 33 years old, she played just four seasons in the league, excluding a short-lived comeback at 40 years old in 2003 that was curtailed by a shoulder injury after just four games. In those four years, she was the league MVP twice, scoring champion three times and WNBA Finals MVP every season.

Early in the ABL’s tenure, before it folded after three seasons, there was some debate about which league had the most talent. Chancellor knew which league had the edge: The one that employed Cooper.

“I keep hearing the ABL has better players. If there’s a better player than Cynthia Cooper, I want to see her,” Chancellor told the Chronicle after her first MVP season. “There’s no better player in any league, on any planet, on any earth than Cynthia Cooper.”

Later, when Cooper, who also coached in the WNBA and in college but left Texas Southern in 2022 and faced a Title IX investigation for mistreatment of players, was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, a year before she went into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, Chancellor put it even more simply, saying, “Lord, can that woman play basketball.”

And Chancellor never even saw his star player, who was 33 when she was signed by the WNBA and 34 by the time the league played its first game, on the court in her prime.

“Can you imagine me at 27? In the WNBA? Come on, man,” Cooper said.

Why Cynthia Cooper defines Houston sports

Houston Comets’ Cynthia Cooper celebrates after the Comets beat the Phoenix Mercury 74-69 in overtime in Game 2 of the WNBA Championship series Saturday, Aug. 29, 1998, in Houston. The series is tied 1-1 and game Game 3 will be played Tuesday in Houston. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
DAVID J. PHILLIP/AP

The Comets hit Houston just six months after Bud Adams took the Oilers and high-tailed the franchise out of the city. That left an opening in the sports calendar in the summer of 1997 when suddenly no one in the city cared about football training camp. Cooper and the Comets took advantage.

Not only was Cooper the best player on the league’s best team, she had the biggest personality. While the league was hoping to average at least 5,000 fans per game in its first season, the crowds exceeded expectations, especially in Houston where 16,285 people filled The Summit for the Comets’ home opener, setting an attendance record at the time for a women’s professional game in the United States.

Cooper knew how to get that crowd off its feet, too, with her “Raise the Roof” celebration, pumping her arms with her elbows out and palms up, encouraging the crowd to turn up the volume. Cooper didn’t invent the celebration and no one is quite sure who did, not even this New York Times article that tried to credit its popularity to Sinbad, who was doing it on his 1997 talk show Vibe after Cooper already had made it popular.

Cooper actually wasn’t the first one on her team to do it, which Comets point guard Kim Perrot, who died from cancer during the team’s run to a third straight title, was always quick to point out.

“Cynthia became kind of like famous for it — it was a part of this kind of like in-game attire, she would always raise the roof,” Comets star Tina Thompson said in 2016. “People just started doing it because Cynthia was doing it all the time. Well, Cynthia actually stole that from Kim. It was something that Kim did but because Kim was our point guard, and she didn’t really score a lot, (and) Cynthia scored tons … she would kind of raise the roof after she did something really cool. Raising the roof, even then, was really lame. They just made it kind of like cool again.

“We were just laughing about it or whatever, and I just remember Kim standing up for her honor and telling Cynthia that she stole that from her. And that it was kind of like hers, and (Cynthia’s) getting all the credit, and she was just so serious about it. It turned from a really serious moment to us all just cracking up. She was just like, ‘It’s OK, you can have it,’ but we all knew where it originated from.”

Cooper doesn’t shy away from giving credit to Perrot, who she says was the coolest person on the team and taught Cooper and her teammates all the new trends, especially the one that caught on so rapidly in Houston.

“I would ride out the tunnel in my car and the fans would be over there raising the roof,” Cooper said. “It was endearing to me that everyone kind of grabbed onto it and held on to it tight, because it showed that I was making a difference (in women’s basketball), that I was making a platform for the next generation to show their talent.”

Cynthia Cooper’s backstory

Cynthia Cooper (22) in action at the U.S. Olympic Trials on May 28, 1992 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. (Photo by Richard Mackson/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)

Richard Mackson/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images

Cooper was born in Chicago, but grew up in Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood, raised by her mother along with seven other siblings in a home where the children slept three to a bed.

Cooper didn’t even start playing basketball until she was a sophomore in high school because she focused on softball at an early age before a line drive broke her nose at third base and her mother Mary Cobbs, who was a fixture at Comets games before she died from cancer after the Comets’ second championship, made her give up the sport.

So, basketball it was, except the guys on the playground and in the gyms in her neighborhood wouldn’t pick her to play in their games, so she made one of her brothers take her to a court and call “next,” then pick her to make sure she could get on the court. In just her third year of seriously playing basketball, Cooper averaged 31 points per game and led inner-city Locke High School to a California state championship.

That was enough to earn her a scholarship to USC where she spent time coming off the bench on teams led by all-time great Cheryl Miller and the McGee twins, Paula and Pamela. Even when she didn’t start, Cooper often finished games on a dominant squad that won back-to-back national championships in 1983 and 1984. Although she was the leader on her professional teams overseas, when she returned to play for Team USA in the 1988 and 1992 Olympics, she still was used more as a role player.

“When I was playing in the shadows of a lot of different players, first at USC, and then on the national team, one thing I’ve never, ever done is get down on myself,” Cooper told the Houston Chronicle in 1998. “I never felt I was less of a player because I had to play sixth man or seventh man, or because someone else was getting the publicity or taking all the shots on the team. I’ve always kept my self-confidence. I never let people tell me what I couldn’t do.”

In a bit of serendipity, Cooper actually bought a home in Sugar Land two years before she even made that initial phone call to the WNBA.

“I came to visit some friends and liked it there,” Cooper told the Chronicle when she got the news she had been assigned to Houston by the league. “Man, I can’t wait for this outfit to begin. Watch out Houston, because here I come.”

Cynthia Cooper’s legacy

Cynthia Cooper points to and thanks former Comets teammates during a ceremony retiring her number 14 at halftime of the Comets game against the Detroit Shock Thursday evening July 15, 2004 at Toyota Center in Houston, Texas. — (photograph by D. Fahleson, Staff Photojournalist for the Houston Chronicle newspaper). HOUCHRON CAPTION (07/16/2004): POINTED MOMENT: Cynthia Cooper’s No. 14 jersey was retired at halftime of the Comets’ game against the Detroit Shock on Thursday.
D. Fahleson/Houston Chronicle

James Harden was a walking bucket in Houston partly because of his deadly Euro step, the crafty move where a driving player plants one way, then takes a long step the other way to avoid contact with a defender and get to the basket. More than a decade before Harden put on a Rockets jersey, Cooper was doing the move in the same city.

The Golden State Warriors’ Šarūnas Marčiulionis is believed to be the first player to bring the Euro step to the NBA in the early 1990s, but it wasn’t really popular in the league until the Spurs’ Manu Ginóbili made it look routine in the 2000s. Still, Cooper was first.

“I brought the Eurostep here, not James Harden,” Cooper said with a laugh on the Knuckleheads podcast with Quentin Richardson and Darius Miles.

WNBA players who came after Cooper recognize the gift.

“She made very difficult things look easy,” said Sue Bird, who joined Cooper in the Hall of Fame this summer. “When you watch the highlights — the Euro step, her ability to shoot from anywhere, creating off the dribble — it’s so impressive. She read defenders one-on-one probably better than anybody you can think of.”

When Cooper went into the Hall of Fame in 2011, she was able to sum up her career best.

“In my life, if I had to speak of a legacy, I would say I’ve always been and will always be a finisher,” she said. “I was never happy with just being a participant. Tonight, this is as close to finished as I could possibly be. Tonight I can really feel like I’ve arrived.”