Nera White, who as a Tennessee farm girl powered the first women’s national basketball dynasty and became the game’s first female superstar, a dominance that led her into the Basketball Hall of Fame as one of the first two women to be enshrined there, died on Wednesday in a hospital in Gallatin, Tenn. She was 80.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, said her former daughter-in-law, Brandy White.
“I just don’t like to lose, so I go all out every game to prevent it,” Nera White said when she retired from the game at 33 in 1969. “If we do lose and I have gone all out to win, then I don’t have the loss on my conscience.”
White, who at 6 feet 1 inch could dunk the ball, personified every superlative of the sport. She led a team sponsored by Nashville Business College to 10 Amateur Athletic Union national championships from 1955 to 1969. She was crowned most outstanding player in a national tournament 10 times, and an A.A.U. all-American for 15 consecutive years. Her team won 91 of 92 consecutive games.
In those years, the A.A.U. was virtually the only league in which women could continue to play basketball after high school. The N.C.A.A. did not sponsor women’s basketball until the 1981-82 season, and the W.N.B.A. did not begin competition until 1997. In the A.A.U., women played for teams often sponsored by companies, like Hanes Hosiery, or by small colleges.
White also led a United States national team to a gold medal in the 1957 world championships, defeating the Soviet Union in a Cold War matchup. She was the team’s leading scorer and was named the most valuable player.
“Nera White was a true pioneer and trailblazer of the women’s game,” John L. Doleva, the president of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famein Springfield, Mass., said after her death, adding that she had “paved the way for the generations of tremendous female athletes.”
Sue Gunter, who was a college classmate and teammate of White’s and who gained renown as a women’s basketball coach at Louisiana State University(she died in 2005), once said of White, “She could do things on the court that I thought were impossible.”
The sportswriter Steve Marantz described White’s play in The Sporting News in 1996.
“An explosive leaper,” he wrote, “she positioned under the basket on defense. Her speed enabled her to snatch a rebound, trigger a fast break and catch up with the play before it reached the other end. As point guard, she was equally deft potting perimeter shots and dribbling the lane for layups. A defense collapsing on White was rent by a canny bounce or shovel pass to an unguarded woman.”
Nera (pronounced NEAR-ah) Dyson White was born on a farm in Oak Knob Ridge in Macon County, Tenn., on Nov. 15, 1935, the daughter of Horace White, a teacher, coach and farmer, and the former Lois Birdean.
She was a natural athlete who grew up playing basketball with her six siblings, all of them younger. By the time she reached college age, her skills on the court were unmistakable, and her interest in the game had grown more serious.
Attending George Peabody College for Teachers (now part of Vanderbilt University), she found it had no women’s basketball team, so she began playing for Nashville Business College in 1954 (wearing No. 11). She supported herself by working in a print shop that belonged to the owner of the college and the team.
At Peabody, she fulfilled all the requirements for graduation except completing a stint as a student teacher; painfully shy throughout her life, she declined.
She never married but adopted a son, Jeff White. He had been born to an unwed teammate who could not afford a second child. Along with her son, she is survived by a sister, June Fisher; a brother, Davis; and two granddaughters.
White was also an accomplished softball player; the Naismith Hall of Fame describes her as “one of the most complete female athletes in history.” But she was best known as a basketball player who could run and, if she wanted to, dunk the ball as well as many men. (Women played six to a side in her day; women’s teams adopted the five-player, full-court game in 1970.)
White was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1992, along with another dominant player, center Lusia Harris-Stewart. On her plaque, White is memorialized as “a player whose skill and athleticism was before her time.”
She was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, in Knoxville, Tenn., in 1999. Sports Illustrated ranked her 51st in its list of the greatest sportswomen of the 20th century and sixth in basketball, behind Cheryl Miller, Teresa Edwards, Ann Meyers, Nancy Lieberman and Anne Donovan, all of them stars of later decades. The Sporting News crowned White “the dominant women’s basketball player of her era.”
White worked in the Nashville print shop until 1982, when she was laid off after the death of the owner, who she believed had guaranteed her a lifetime job. She returned to the family farm, in Lafayette, Tenn., northeast of Nashville near the Kentucky border, and made her living raising cattle and growing tobacco and other crops. She lived there at her death.
She rarely reflected publicly on her basketball career, and when she spoke to Mr. Marantz of The Sporting News in 1996, she did so reluctantly.
“What did it get me?” White said of basketball in the interview. “Two worn-out knees. All for nothing. Dusty trophies. Certificates that don’t mean a thing.”
“Unless you never win one,” Mr. Marantz said.
“Perhaps,” she replied. “But when I look at what it got me, economically, all that work and sweat, nothing. No job security. Nothing.”
She added: “I have nobody to blame but myself — I made the decision to continue playing. I can’t say I believed it would get me anything of value. I didn’t deep down. I played because I wanted to.”
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