Perhaps part of the reason the basketball business is constantly looking forward with Parker is because her impact on the game itself is already so clear.
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“Whether this generation is the one to shatter the glass ceiling or this generation is the one to crack it open so the next generation can shatter it, it’s just about pushing it forward,” Parker says. As an analyst on TNT, a player in the league, an investor or a philanthropist, Parker understands that as a Black woman, she’s providing proof to younger Black girls that they can be the next Candace Parker in any of those fields. The social uprisings of 2020 also provided a powerful reminder for Parker of the importance of visibility. That led her to the Social Change Fund and broader efforts to put community involvement at the center of every partnership she forms, even if in a small way like helping local students. But as she looked around in 2020 and saw many new voices joining the conversation over social justice, Parker felt it was important to find people and organizations that truly walked the walk. Her latest partnership is with JBL, where she became the first brand ambassador from the WNBA, and brought in the Social Change Fund to help deliver headphones for students virtually learning in Knoxville, Los Angeles and Chicago, the three places she’s lived over the course of her life.īeing the first woman in a space is nothing new to Parker.
“That’s why I want to be considered and not limit myself to what people think that I can be.” “I want to continue to push the perception and what people envision women are capable of,” she says. She wants young women to completely divorce themselves from any limits put on what they can be. That belief drives Parker as a parent as well, and in the work she does in the community. “When you see your hard work open the door for other people, that’s really dope, but she was able to change people’s minds about women’s basketball as a whole, she was able to break the stereotype, transcend generations, transcend leagues and levels, transcend gender. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a girl or a boy. “Candace grew up in a place where her family preached if you’re excellent, be excellent,” Chambers says. That only partially explains how Parker makes being busy and successful seem so effortless. “She’s somebody that’s so multifaceted and has so many interests that she can talk to a CEO of a company, talk to a basketball coach, talk to an actor, and she’s going to have something in common with all of them,” Wade says. There is no counterpart for Parker in women’s basketball, and few in sport more broadly. That’s how high Parker has to reach to provide context for where she is, still with time left in her playing career and decades to go as a force in our world. Increasingly, Parker discusses herself in the context of other iconic figures, from Osaka to Wade to Magic Johnson to her former teammate Lisa Leslie - all game changers who expanded the horizons of what an athlete could be. There’s certainly more in the tank.īut her use of the Osaka quote helps explain another part of Parker’s persona, one that seems to drive her just as much these days as anything. Parker won her first-ever Defensive Player of the Year award and put together one of the most efficient scoring seasons of her career.
Her view is that she will retire when she can no longer get physically ready to compete.Īnyone who watched Parker in the WNBA Bubble last season would be hard-pressed to imagine the end being near.
Parker is firmly in that period of life now, and is still chewing on it. She brings up a quote from Naomi Osaka, in which Osaka said she would be done with tennis when a younger opponent came to her and said they played the game because they were fans of hers. But as she looks toward the end of her career, Parker is of two minds about what comes next. There were also back, knee and shoulder injuries that would test anyone’s dedication to the game. Many believed when she gave birth to her daughter, Lailaa, in 2009 that it might end her career, but she returned to win her second MVP award and eventually a championship. “Everything she claims to be, she is, and I think that’s incredibly dope, that somebody can be so authentically themselves.”Īt age 34, perhaps Parker never expected to be anyone’s idol, either. “They tell you to never meet your idols, but when I met her, I was never off-put,” Chambers says.
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