Monarchs Blog and Q&A

Bee staff writer Melody Gutierrez grew up in Twentynine Palms. At 14-years-old, she decided to combine her two passions -- sports and writing -- when she became a special assignments reporter for the Desert Trail, her hometown weekly newspaper. Melody headed to Northern California in 2000 to attend Chico State and has remained in the region ever since. She earned an internship with The Bee and subsequently became a staff writer in 2004 and has covered virtually every sport, starting with high schools, up through college and then the pros. Melody took over coverage of the Monarchs last season and chronicled the team's pursuit of a second straight league championship -- a quest that fell just short.

Melody welcomes your questions and will answer as many as she can as the season progresses.

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June 12, 2007

Truth will come to light on Holdsclaw

Months, maybe years, from now, we'll know the reason Chamique Holdsclaw left the WNBA so hastily.

We'll know what triggered her to walk away from a career destined for greatness by simply telling the Los Angeles Sparks on Monday she was retiring from basketball, effective immediately.

The shock and disappointment that is overflowing message boards is understandable. But to say I'm surprised? No, not at all.

Last June, I did a story on Holdsclaw right after she told reporters she was going to make the 2006 season her last.

"I've been doing this since I was 18 years old," Holdsclaw, 29, told me then. "I'm a creative person. I look forward to what else life has to hold."

Because life so far hasn't been easy, as she explains in her 2000 autobiography "Chamique: On Family, Focus and Basketball."

After Child Protective Services removed Holdsclaw and her brother from their parents, she wrote about how her disciplinarian grandmother began to raise them.

"So many people want to believe that it was basketball that got me out of the projects, that it was basketball that saved me," Holdsclaw wrote. "I don't believe that. I think it was my grandmother who saved me."

In the book, Holdsclaw writes she would listen to her parents' alcohol-induced arguments and try not to cry.

"It's not something I really talk about," she wrote. "I think that's why my personality is the way it is, and why I handle things the way I do."

After her grandmother died of a stroke in 2002, Holdsclaw was devastated. However, she didn't acknowledge the depth of that devastation until after her grandfather died in 2004.

"I remember everything hitting me at once," Holdsclaw told USA Today's Oscar Dixon in 2004. "It was weird. It was like I couldn't move. I couldn't talk."

Holdsclaw missed several games at the end of the 2004 season while in her sixth season with the Mystics. She sited "undisclosed medical reasons" for her absence at the time.

Months later, she said she suffered from depression.

"Everything was negative," she told the Washington Post in 2004. "Dark."

Thinking a new city would help, Holdsclaw asked to be traded. Los Angeles happily acquired Holdsclaw in 2005.

In 2006, Holdsclaw took a two-week leave of absence at the start of the season to be with her father and stepfather, who both were diagnosed with cancer.

This time, Holdsclaw is leaving five games into the season without an explanation. That leaves only speculation about whether depression has reclaimed Holdsclaw.

"There's nothing going on," Holdsclaw told the Los Angeles Times on Monday. "You have your good and bad days, but the place where I was a couple years ago, I haven't been back to. I'm not pregnant, I'm not going crazy, I'm not depressed, or anything like that. I'm fine, I just want to kind of kick back."

Look for the real reason to surface months, maybe years from now.

- Melody Gutierrez

Posted by Ahmed Ortiz, June 12, 2007 01:00 PM

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