Lusia Harris is the queen of basketball, a legendary ballplayer and women’s basket pioneer who was drafted into the Utah Jazz.
Lusia Harris’ story only gets better: she’s now won an Oscar.
And just like his longtime Los Angeles Lakers teammate Kobe Bryant four years ago in a different category, Shaquille O’Neal can call himself an Oscar winner.
“The Queen of Basketball” — starring two basketball legends in O’Neal and Stephen Curry among the executive producers and top promoters of the 22-minute film — won Sunday’s Academy Award for Short Documentary Feature.
It comes about two months after the death of Harris, who scored the first basket in Olympic women’s basketball history and became the first woman to be officially drafted by an NBA team. Ben Proudfoot directed the short film, which even introduced some avid basketball fans to the story of the trailblazer.
“If anyone out there is still wondering if there’s an audience for female athletes and if their stories are valuable, entertaining or important… let this Academy Award be the answer,” Proudfoot said at the awards ceremony in Los Angeles.
Harris, like O’Neal, is a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. But even the four-time NBA champion – widely regarded as one of the all-time greats in the game’s history – was unfamiliar with her story.
“I didn’t know who she was at first,” O’Neal said earlier this month.
Few did.
But the film, and the involvement of O’Neal and Curry — the Golden State star wore trainers with “Queen Lucy” written on them earlier this month — helped their story get told more and more.
Harris helped Delta State University win three consecutive national championships in the 1970s and won a silver medal for the United States at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. Harris was drafted by the New Orleans Jazz in the seventh round of the 1977 NBA draft, but she was pregnant at the time and never really attempted to make the team.
Her family was at the awards ceremony on Sunday.
Proudfoot also used the Oscar-winning moment to call President Joe Biden and urge him to secure the release of two-time Olympic gold medalist and top player Brittney Griner, who is being jailed in Russia. Griner was reportedly arrested after arriving at a Moscow airport in mid-February after Russian authorities said a search of her luggage found vape cartridges allegedly containing cannabis-derived oil.
Griner faces up to ten years in prison under Russian law.
“President Biden, take Brittney Griner home,” Proudfoot said.