Doc Star of the Month: Cynthia Cooper, 'Women of Troy'

It's a crying shame that Cynthia Cooper is not a LeBron-level household name. Having won championships in college, at the Olympics and in the WNBA — where as a Houston Comet she was named MVP in the finals for four straight seasons (still a record) and anointed by fans as one of the Top 15 players in the league's history — does anyone doubt things would have been different had she been born into a non-patriarchal world? Hard to imagine any NBA athlete with that type of track record being exiled to 10 years of overseas play just to earn a talent-commensurate wage.

And now with the COVID19 crisis hitting women's sports especially hard, the WNBA draft coming up on April 17, the season opening a month later — and neither date is guaranteed — it's unfortunately perfect timing to finally right the sexist wrongs. Filmmaker Alison Ellwood does just this with her HBO doc Women of Troy, which checks in with b-ball's female trailblazers today (Cooper shares screen time with other WNBA Hall of Fame legends like Cheryl Miller, the dogged coaches and more) to look back at their unconscionably dustbin-confined history through thrilling archival footage of those pre-WNBA salad days, when Cooper and Miller led the USC Trojans to NCAA glory. And fortunately for Documentary, we were able to catch up with "Coop" herself a day prior to the film’s March 10th airdate on HBO Sports (the film is currently streaming on HBO GO and HBO Now).

To read my interview with the sports star doc star visit Documentary magazine.