The Legendarium: Ace Goes to L.A.

The rise of Candace Parker is a unique story in WNBA history and as she prepares to watch her jersey lifted into the rafters of Crytpo.com Arena, No Cap Space WBB takes you back to the start.

Jun 26, 2025

Candace Parker sat on a bed the night of April 8th, 2008, smiling for pictures with tears in her eyes. She was a two-time national champion, a legend who cemented herself as one of the greatest players at one of the greatest programs in women’s basketball history.

But between sips of champagne were tears borne of uncertainty. Was she doing the right thing? Winning two straight NCAA titles was great but was that truly the final act before the WNBA came calling? All through the night she and her friends waxed poetic on what was and teared up at the thought of what would be. It didn’t seem fair that one night in Tampa had to be loaded with so many complex emotions jammed into such a limited time frame.

Yet, that was life for the woman anointed to be the standard bearer for an entire sport. As night turned to morning, Parker and four of her teammates — Alexis Hornbuckle, Alberta Auguste, Shannon Bobbitt and Nicky Anosike — headed to the Innisbrook Resort and Golf Club in Palm Harbor. Within hours, the bright lights would be on again, cameras would be pointing at a main stage and commissioner Donna Orender would be waiting with a handshake to welcome the one they called ‘Ace’ — the new face of the league — to the WNBA.

The Missing Piece

To understand how Candace Parker made it to April 8, 2008, one must understand how to put together a puzzle.

So many different things had to — and did — go right for a Naperville native to end up at Tennessee and become one of the greatest women’s college basketball players at all time. But Pat Summitt never left anything up to chance.

“We always wanted to make sure that we knew who was going to be next,” says Nikki Fargas, who once went by Nikki Caldwell and was an assistant at Tennessee. “When you look at the University of Tennessee and you look at some of the Lady Vol legends, you’ve always got to be looking for who’s going to be that next legend.”

A lineage that started with the likes of Cindy Noble and Holly Warlick, that extended to Carla McGhee and Bridgette Gordon, Daedra Charles and Chamique Holdsclaw, was now yearning for its’ next superstar.

So Fargas started to put together a file on a young up-and-coming phenom from Illinois named Candace Parker. In a pre-social media era, her legend spread by word of mouth and the occasional press clipping. By her senior year at Naperville High School, the mystique began to break containment outside of her home state. As a sophomore in high school she had already made history as the first girls basketball player to dunk in an Illinois high school game. She was dominating the AAU circuit, winning state titles in front of sold out crowds in Chicago while winning every award available to a high school girls basketball player.

Fargas, fellow assistant Holly Warlick and Pat Summitt herself knew they had to have her.

It started at a Mexican restaurant in Naperville. Meeting there came at Candace’s request as it was a favorite place to eat. As time went on, the Lady Vols staff became closer and closer with the Parker family. Candace’s father, Larry, played college basketball at Iowa while her older brother, Anthony, was a first round NBA draft pick in 1997.

Fargas and Warlick would head up to the Chicago area in the summertime and got the chance for a home visit. They met the Parker family bulldog and had long conversations at the dinner table. Every program in the nation wanted to sign her but the Lady Vol coaches knew they needed to.

“She was a must for us,” Warlick explains.

The University of Maryland was hot on Parker’s trail as head coach Brenda Frese worked to load up her class with All-American high school stars like Laura Harper and Crystal Langhorne. But Tennessee had Pat Summitt and, in spite of a championship drought that was closing in on a decade, the legend still had a few tricks up her sleeve.

Which is how Parker found herself making a puzzle with a bunch of college coaches in Naperville one day.

“Pat, man, she had some good ones,” recalls Fargas. “We had a puzzle that we would take with us and the puzzle showed all the trophies and championships that we had one. And one of the things that you have to do is put the puzzle together.”

“Well, in putting that puzzle together, Pat would always keep a corner piece. So I’m like ‘hey wait a minute!’ We have all these pieces and now everybody’s looking under papers and stuff and Pat pulls it out and says [to Candace] you’re the missing piece of the puzzle.”

If that didn’t work, Summitt always had the cloudy water trick.

“There were times when [a player] would be clouded in their decision,” Fargas continues, “And I don’t know what tablet we had but we kind of got a glass and it muddied the water. You discolored it and Pat was like ‘this is where you’re at with your decision. It’s clouded. But I’m here to bring you clarity. I’m here to bring you a clear choice.’”

“It was almost like a magic trick. She’d plop in this one tablet and the water completely clears.”

Whether it was puzzle pieces or chemical compounds, Summitt’s message worked on Candace and the rest of the Parker family. She committed to Tennessee and, late in 2004, Fargas finally realized what the program was getting.

“She won the slam dunk contest at the McDonald’s All-American game,” Fargas remembers. “I mean, that was unbelievable to see this female athlete. We weren’t playing above the rim [at that time]. She showcased every level of how to set the tone of what a 6’4 point forward, positionless player should look like.”

Indeed, Parker was the first woman to ever win the McDonald’s All-American Game slam dunk contest and completely reset the expectation of what girls basketball players were capable of in the process.

ESPN writer Pete Thamel likened it to Billie Jean King beating Bobby Riggs in the now-famous ‘Battle of the Sexes’ in 1973.

The media attention was reaching a crescendo and by the time Parker finally arrived in Knoxville, a star was ready to ascend.

The Ace & Summitt Show

When Candace arrived on campus, one thing was clear: the superstar of the Lady Vols was its’ head coach, and deservedly so. Pat Summitt had built Tennessee women’s basketball into the premier program in the nation, leading the charge from the earliest years of AIAW basketball to the big business of the NCAA. Her rivalry with UConn’s Geno Auriemma had, by this point, become one of the most storied tales of mutual enmity in sports.

Everywhere the team went, people looked for a chance to see Coach Summitt. But soon, that would change a little bit.

Parker arrived on campus and immediately began to work with Fargas, Warlick and a new assistant coach named Dean Lockwood, who would eventually become one of her closest confidants.

“I said to myself ‘dang, we could have used her in Division II on the men’s side!” Lockwood jokes. “She’d start for me at Saginaw Valley or Northwood. Whether I had good or bad teams, that kid would’ve made somebody sit down.”

In many ways, Candace was a quintessential prodigy. For the early 2000’s, she was something the game had never seen before especially in the women’s game. Standing tall at 6’4, she Parker possessed a three level scoring touch, a unique athleticism that allowed her to run the floor and dunk in transition as well as the court vision to facilitate an offense as a forward.

“She’s a unicorn in so many ways,” adds Fargas. “She brought the razzle dazzle, she brought the flash. She brought something that a lot of people would say ‘Oh, Candace Parker should be inside on the block again.’ She was more than the paint. She was 94 by 50. She’s Candace Parker.”

But the issue that Summitt and other coaches sometimes had was harnessing the prodigal talents.

“She loved the game but really wanted to be challenged,” Dean says. “She could become bored at times with some mundane things but at the same time she was not averse to knowing the value of repetition.”

Warlick would sometimes instruct the practice players to deliberately go hard on Parker or play more physically. When the officials assigned to a Tennessee practice would handle a scrimmage, they would ignore her pleas for a foul. The coaches wanted her to get used to the idea of teams in the SEC going after her every night. Referees might not call it, they believed, and so Candace had to get used to the idea of being officiated differently.

“We just tried to put her in situations where she had to keep her cool,” explains Warlick, “And she learned to do that.”

After losing her freshman season to a knee injury, Parker started for the Lady Vols during the 2005-2006 season. She was the SEC Rookie of the Year, became the first woman to ever dunk in an NCAA Tournament game and the first to dunk twice in the Tournament generally, won the SEC Tournament Championship by hitting a buzzer beater against LSU with 17 seconds to play while being named a Kodak All-American. Quickly, her star ascended.

By 2007, Summitt and Parker both were draws of somewhat equal stature. But a young Candace didn’t seem to let the fame get to her or even make her feel differently about those around her. Sometimes, that success could feel uniquely isolating and she found kinship in an unlikely place: with the Lady Vols team managers.

“She was the one who always came in and sat in the manager’s office,” Justine Brown, who worked for the team at the time, remembers. “When I came to work a camp, I very much remember the first interactions with Candace. She was nice but she was definitely larger than life. But she was still all smiles.”

Day after day, Parker would work out in Tennessee basketball’s new practice facility while Brown would track rebounds and Lockwood would put her through drills that emphasized footwork, finishing with both hands and through contact.

The Lady Vols would enter the 2007 NCAA Tournament with a 29-3 record and a chip on their shoulder. Their only two regular season losses were to Duke and they had been upset by LSU in the SEC Tournament semifinals. Over the course of the next six games, Tennessee put on a defensive performance for the ages holding their opponents to a combined 34.6% shooting from the field, 24% from three point range while forcing over 15 turnovers per game.

Parker scored 17 points in the championship game, was named the Tournament’s Most Outstanding Player, the Lady Vols claimed a national title for the first time since the late 1990’s and her ascent to superstardom was complete.

Tennessee was now a two-woman show, at least for one more year. As the page turned to 2008, everyone wanted a piece of Candace Parker.

The Night The WNBA Changed

As Candace Parker sat in a Tampa hotel room, sipping champagne between tears with her teammates, WNBA commissioner Donna Orender was ready to toast to the future. The league was one night away from a historic moment, one where they would welcome in their next box office sensation.

“We were all aware that she had the kind of following and interest in terms of fan base and media that was going to be very helpful for her in her career,” Orender remembers. “We wanted to support her and work with her.”

Throughout Parker’s senior season at Tennessee, the hype continued to grow. Crowds would arrive to watch her play and Pat Summitt coach.

“I remember leaving the gym at Notre Dame,” says Brown, “And we opened the doors back to the bus and then closed them again. They’re like ‘we need security’”.

NFL star Terrell Owens was seen courtside at games while Parker’s own relationship with future NBA star Shelden Williams became easy tabloid fodder. While the talent was abundantly clear to WNBA franchises, Tennessee assistants would sometimes get questions about how the presumptive next big name in women’s basketball handled all the attention.

“I think playing for Pat at the college level, the WNBA coaches understood and knew that she was going to handle coaching and she could handle herself off the floor,” Warlick explains. “I think that was important to those coaches as well because Candace, she’s phenomenal off the court. That’s what makers her, to me, takes her to the next level.”

Her celebrity forced her into a role only reserved for a small handful of women’s basketball players, especially at that young of an age. Whether she understood it at the time or not, she was an ambassador for the game and tasked with moving the sport forward.

“You knew other professional athletes at the time, other entertainers, iconic figures were supporting and fans of hers even when she was in college,” adds Fargas. “When you look at how she was, from a cultural standpoint, for the black community, she became one of the most influential black women to our community.”

With the 2008 Beijing Olympics also on the calendar, Parker was being pulled in multiple directions. The call of Team USA was strong and everyone in her orbit was pretty sure she would be chosen. Tennessee was going for back-to-back titles for the first time since Chamique Holdsclaw was setting records in the late 90’s while the WNBA remained a certainty on the periphery of her mind.

Yet all of the major life choices seemed to take a backseat to the task at hand. The Lady Vols opened the season as the top ranked team in the country and instantly showed why, defeating five top 25 opponents in their first seven games of the year. Everything seemed to be falling into place as March rolled around as Tennessee’s star-studded senior class claimed an SEC regular season and tournament title.

Then April rolled around and things got chaotic.

It started in the Elite Eight against Texas A&M. While going for a steal in the first half, Parker stopped while running in transition and curled to her side. Team trainer Jenny Moshak met her on the court as everyone’s world seemingly stopped. Candace dislocated her shoulder but managed to rejoin the team, scoring six of the Lady Vols points in a crucial run with a brace to stabilize herself.

Pat Summitt was clear with her star: if the shoulder popped out again in a game, Parker would be done. On the night of April 5th before their Final Four matchup against heated SEC rival LSU, Justine Brown was woken up in her hotel room.

“I wake up and I can hear yelling and somebody banging on the door,” she recalls. “It’s [manager] Vicki Vaughn and she’s like ‘Where’s Jenny? Where’s Jenny!?’. I’m like, ‘You have a piece of paper with everybody’s room numbers on it, why are you running down the hallway in the middle of the night?’”

“And she’s like ‘Candace popped out her shoulder in her sleep.’”

Parker didn’t want anyone else to know what had happened. When the team arrived to the St. Pete Forum the night of the 6th to take on LSU, she was wearing a brace on her left shoulder. In what was one of the most gritty and defensive matchups of her collegiate career, Candace overcame a poor shooting night by grabbing 15 rebounds while Alexis Hornbuckle’s putback with .7 seconds left sent the Lady Vols back to the title game.

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"Every time she’d bring the ball up the court, they’d drop the double,” Brown explains, “She dishes it to Nicky Anosike for the perfect layup. Nicky misses it and Alexis Hornbuckle comes flying in out of nowhere, tips it in to win the game. It was insane. And it was also Candace making the right play instead of being the selfish superstar that takes the shot and misses the layup.”

Even though the WNBA Draft was merely days away, the focus was singular: the Lady Vols wanted a bit of revenge on the only team to beat them in the non-conference that year. Stanford was led by star guard Candice Wiggins and a sophomore defensive stopper named Ros Gold-Onwude and boasted a deep and athletic lineup. But destiny was on Tennessee’s side as Parker (17 pts, 9 reb, 4 stl) and Nicky Anosike (12 pts, 8 reb, 6 stl) had stat-stuffing evenings and powered the Lady Vols back to another championship.

The rest of the night was filled with every emotion ranging from joy to sadness. Some members of the Lady Vols prepared to leave Tampa and head back to Knoxville for a celebration the school was planning at Thomspon-Boling Arena. Candace, Alexis Hornbuckle, Shannon Bobbitt, Alberta Auguste and Nicky Anosike stayed back for the draft which would take place the next morning.

“I don’t live in regret,” Dean Lockwood says, “But one of the things [I do], is that I wish I would have stated for the draft. There were about five or six thousand people waiting in the arena waiting for us. And I know that was important to Pat with the fans and showing the appreciation. But as I look back, I say ‘Dang, I wish I stayed for the draft.’”

It was an impossibly quick turnaround for players and a gamble by the WNBA.

“The idea was that you had a built-in audience,” explains Orender. “We wanted people, more people, to talk about the stars of the college game making their transition to the professional game. So we thought it would be exciting to build on exciting championships.”

One day after she won her second and final national championship at Tennessee, Candace Parker walked up to Donna Orender at The Innisbrook and posed for a photo, jersey in hand. She was a Los Angeles Spark.

And the WNBA was about to change forever.

High In The Rafters

Parker’s arrival came at the perfect time for Orender and the rest of the league. After a period of contraction in the early to mid 2000’s, a group of talented players came into the WNBA led by Diana Taurasi and Sue Bird. But few had the cross promotional star power that Parker had.

Her presence in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where Team USA won yet another gold medal, vaulted her into a unique subset of sports superstardom.

“I wouldn’t mind being the female MJ,” she told ESPN Magazine in early 2009, “I want to have major crossover appeal.”

Indeed, it was pretty easy to see why she had that much confidence so early in her WNBA career. With almost no rest between the college and pro seasons, Parker stepped into her role alongside WNBA legend Lisa Leslie and immediately put the league on notice.

“When you win Rookie of the Year and MVP in the same season, that’s where she became bigger than basketball,” Fargas says. “People who didn’t really watch sports, they still knew who Candace Parker was because she became a household name.”

Around the same time, Orender and the league office were working on a somewhat revolutionary idea: a direct-to-consumer video product. While ‘League Pass’ wouldn’t be ready for quite some time, a sports league deciding to actually handle their own production in house to expand coverage for their fans was somewhat novel at the time.

Parker’s presence helped push that along.

In her first season, she averaged 18.5 points, 9.5 rebounds, 3.4 assists and 2.3 blocks per game in the WNBA. Her MVP honor was well earned, as was the growing target on her back from the rest of the league.

“Much like Caitlin [Clark] as well, veteran players had their eyes [on Candace],” Orender adds. “They were ready to know her and what the big time really meant.”

For the remainder of her career, Parker never averaged less than double digit scoring until her final truncated season with the Las Vegas Aces. She won titles with three different franchises: Los Angeles in 2016, her hometown Chicago in 2021 and with Las Vegas in 2023.

Her retirement announcement — a quick post on Instagram — took the entire basketball world by surprise. Many fans were hoping that she would want to take a farewell tour, to get her flowers from every franchise and allow her name to ring in the streets of women’s basketball for just a while longer.

“It’s really a selfless act,” Fargas, who is still the President of the Las Vegas Aces and led the team the year Parker retired, says. “The Diana Taurasi’s and Candace Parker’s, their focus is on the team and they feel as though that may pull away from it. It’s not easy knowing that your career is coming to an end. We may want to give them their flowers but that can be a heavy load for them to carry.”