A high school performance so extreme it still feels unreal
Does Lisa Leslie belong in the same conversation as Wilt, MJ, Kobe, and the rest?
Of course, this was still a high school game, where the gap in talent is extreme. For every player who turns pro, hundreds will become accountants, engineers, or designers, and may never touch a basketball again.
Still, scoring outbursts have always held a unique fascination, more than any other statistical category. Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game is carved into the collective memory of basketball fans, but the same cannot be said for Kendall Gill and Larry Kenon’s 11 steals, or Elmore Smith’s 17 blocks. At the end of the day, the goal of the game is to put the ball in the basket, and those are the performances people remember.
Lisa Leslie, who would later be better known for her defense than her scoring, once caught absolute fire in a high school game. She is widely regarded as one of the greatest American players of all time, a cornerstone of the Los Angeles Sparks from 1997 to 2009, a four-time Olympic gold medalist, a two-time WNBA champion, a three-time MVP, an eight-time All-WNBA First Team selection, and a Hall of Fame inductee in 2015.
It is February 7, 1990. Lisa is 17 years old, in her senior year at Morningside High School in Inglewood, California.The opponent that night was South Torrance. For this final home game of the season, the Monarchs follow a simple plan: get the ball to their best player on every possession. Leslie, already standing 6-foot-5, is unguardable at this level, and the goal is clear, break Cheryl Miller’s high school record of 105 points, set in 1982.
Leslie started fast, 49 points in the first quarter, then 52 more in the second. 37 made shots on 57 attempts. 27 for 35 from the free throw line, hack-a-Leslie is very much in effect. Targeted all game, she takes plenty of contact and even splits her lip:
The points I scored weren’t easy. There weren’t many layups. They sent all five players at me the entire game, and I tried not to pay attention to it.
By then, the night had already become absurd. By halftime, the game is over. 102–24 for Morningside. The only point not scored by Leslie for her team comes from a single free throw. She is scoring at a pace of just over six points per minute, and beyond the 101 points themselves, it is the time it took to score them that feels almost unreal.
But the record will have to wait. Gil Ramirez, South Torrance’s head coach, refuses to send his team back out for the second half. Having started the game with just six players, South Torrance is down to four available players after two have fouled out. Journalist and former football player Lonnie White covers the story for the Los Angeles Times and speaks with Leslie afterward. Just four points shy of the record, she is frustrated:
I was heartbroken that I didn’t break the record. I asked the coach before they left the floor if they would let me score three more baskets, and he asked his team, and they said no.
This was girls’ high school basketball in 1990, which means there is, as far as we know, no footage of the game. Even though Lisa Leslie was already considered one of the best high school players in the country, there is of course no footage of the game. Like Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 points in 1962, this remarkable performance can only be experienced through the accounts of those who were there and the newspaper coverage from the time.
One notable, and debatable, detail: Morningside head coach Frank Scott was suspended for the remainder of the season, league officials ruling that he failed to uphold the standards of sportsmanship.
Cheryl Miller’s record would eventually fall in 2006, just weeks after Kobe Bryant’s 81-point game, when Epiphanny Prince of Murry Bergtraum High School scored 113 points in a 137–32 win over Brandeis High School.
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