When the Houston Comets took the court for the league's inaugural season in 1997, skeptics had already written them off. Experts predicted the team would finish dead last. Most pegged the New York Liberty and Los Angeles Sparks as the real contenders. The Comets were too old, the analysis went, a collection of aging veterans who had no business competing in a brand-new professional league.
Nobody told Cynthia Cooper, who was already 34 when the WNBA began that summer. Late one July night in Sacramento, after Cooper had dropped 44 points in a dominant performance, teammate Fran Harris sat across from her at dinner and marveled at what she was watching in real time. Harris told Cooper she couldn't believe how well she was playing. Cooper's response was matter-of-fact: "I know!"
That confidence would define the entire season. Cooper, who had spent years playing in Europe after her college career at USC ended in the mid-1980s, became the league's first MVP and the face of a championship team that experts had dismissed before a single game was played.
The Comets roster was indeed older than most expected, but age came with advantages. Coach Van Chancellor assembled a squad anchored by Cooper, first-overall draft pick Tina Thompson, and Sheryl Swoopes, a star player who joined the team midseason after giving birth. When Yolanda Moore, fresh out of college and a mother of two, showed up at tryouts on Mother's Day weekend that year, her former coach at Mississippi had been blunt: she had "a snowball's chance in hell" of making the team. Moore had only recently returned to training after delivering her second child in January with complications that required surgery.
Moore ignored the pessimism. She started working out again in March and made the drive to tryouts in May, where she endured cuts and elimination rounds until finally landing a spot on the practice squad, then the main roster. Harris, too, had obstacles to overcome, but once both players were secured, the Comets organization treated them like first-class athletes. The team arranged housing, helped players settle into Houston, and granted them access to the same training facilities where the NBA's Houston Rockets prepared after their back-to-back championships with Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon.
"We trained at the same place where the Rockets trained," Harris remembers. "We were like ships passing through the days with those guys." The NBA players came to the Comets' games. The women didn't feel like an afterthought.
On the road during that first season, Comets players shared rooms with teammates. Harris bunked with Tammy Jackson. Moore roomed with Thompson. The closeness built chemistry. When the team's first regular-season game arrived in Cleveland, an official crowd of 11,455 filled the arena, a sold-out house that signaled something unexpected was happening. "I was like: Woah!" Harris says. "The crowd for that moment was a big deal."
For women's professional basketball in the United States, the moment meant everything. The rival American Basketball League had launched just the year before with Olympic enthusiasm behind it, but without sufficient backing, the ABL would fold after two seasons. The WNBA, backed by the NBA's resources and machinery, had a real chance. Harris had been warned away from the ABL by a former teammate. She listened.
Cooper's Work Ethic Fuels a Rivalry
Cooper's dominance created an unexpected dynamic on the team. She arrived at practice hours early, working alone until she was drenched in sweat, then changing clothes just to be ready when the full squad arrived. Her ascent as the league's leading scorer sometimes clashed with Swoopes's status as the WNBA's first signee and the face of the league, complete with her own Nike signature shoe. When Cooper led the team in scoring but Swoopes got the headlines the next day, team officials called meetings to address the tension.
"It was This is my team, no this is my team, no this is my team," Moore recalls. "There was some pettiness and a lot of ego. But understandably so, because they both had earned the right to be in that space."
Despite the internal friction, the Comets steamrolled through the league. Picked to finish last, they posted an 18-10 record and won the Eastern Conference. The playoffs were a sprint. They beat the Charlotte Sting 1-0 in the first round, then swept the New York Liberty 1-0 in the Finals on August 30, 1997, in Houston.
History had been made. The first WNBA championship belonged to the underdogs. Harris felt the elation washing over her. Then Princess Diana died the next day in a car accident in Paris. The shock rippled across the world and reached the Comets locker room.
"We went from winning the championship to, like, What? To deflation," Harris says. But Houston moved forward. The city threw a parade for the victorious team, and the celebration was total. To Moore, a Black woman who had fought through pregnancy complications and a coach's doubt to reach this moment, the embrace felt profound. "The whole city shut down and showed up for us," she says. "Baby, that city was electric!"
Author James Rodriguez: "The Comets didn't just win a championship in 1997, they proved the entire skeptical sports world wrong and gave the WNBA a foundation that has lasted a generation."
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