1997

I had started playing basketball for the first time in my life in 1994 and absolutely LOVED it. I’d finally found my sport. And then the 1996 Summer Olympics were huge for women’s basketball (and women’s sports in general) – the USA Women’s Basketball team won the gold medal. Sheryl Swoopes, Lisa Leslie, Dawn Staley, Rebecca Lobo, Jennifer Azzi and many others became household names.

By then, I was on a women's team in the NY Urban Professional Basketball League and our team's name was "Title IX" - named after the 1972 law that prohibited discrimination based on sex in federally financed education programs and activities. That law meant, among other things, from 1972 on, girls sports had to have the same funding as boys sports. The dominance of American female athletes at the 1996 Olympics (and the explosion of women's sports in general in the mid-1990s) is thought to be a direct result of this law. These athletes were the first generation to grow up with gender equality in sports funding that Title IX mandated.

Then in 1997, what had seemed improbable became reality and the WNBA was started. My basketball friends and I became season ticket holders for the New York Liberty and I even tried out for the Washington Mystics when they held an open invitation tryout (as a pure lark, just because I could). So it was only fitting to do a basketball-themed card this year.

The court where we photographed this was on the lower east side and the “extras” in the photo were kids who just happened to be playing when we got there. I’m pretty sure we brought a ladder for Geoff to be able to get the overhead shot.

In 1997, I don’t think I even had an email address yet (most people didn’t) so computers were still relatively new. A friend of a friend who was a graphic designer offered to help me with the post-production of the cards and so this is the first year that I did not print the photos myself in a darkroom. Instead I got them printed in color, she scanned them in and then she used her photoshop and design skills to turn it into black and white and make it appear colorized, etc. It was an interesting process and easier to mass-produce them yet I found I really missed the hands-on-ness of printing the photos myself in a darkroom and hand-coloring them individually.

Rest-assured, that even though photoshop was used to manipulate the coloring of the photograph, I studied the font of Spalding on basketballs and I drew that Seasons Greetings on the ball. That part is real!

There were four versions sent out in 1997 – the three others are below.