Big Girls On The Ball

They're bigger than you, they're tougher than you, and they've got a better serve, drive, or spike than you, too. They're the big women of sports. Take a look.

SHERYL SWOOPES scored a record 47 points in one game when she played basketball for Texas Tech University in 1993. In 1996 she won a gold medal as a member of the U.S. Olympic team. She started playing professionally in 1997, and has led her WNBA team, the Houston Comets, to four national championships.

GABRIELLE REECE is 6'3", 160 pounds, and a former star of the women's beach volleyball circuit. She played at Florida State before moving on to the big time; her height and good looks also began to get her high-profile modelling jobs. In 1994 she signed on with Team Nike and remains a spokesperson for the sneaker company.

STEFFI GRAF's powerful strokes earned her the nickname 'Fraulein Forehand.' At 5'9" she's tall enough to rip a serve or smash an overhead with a certain extra degree of force. In her prime Graf was nearly unstoppable, winning 21 Grand Slam titles.

At 5'6" and 145 pounds, BABE DIDRIKSON ZAHARIAS barely qualifies as a 'big' woman at all. But she played huge. Zaharias was absurdly talented, easily picking up sports from tennis and track to basketball and baseball. (She also spent a little time on the vaudeville circuit.) She's best known for her two decades in golf, during which she won over 80 tournaments.

REBECCA LOBO dominated basketball at the University of Connecticut. Her 1995 team didn't lose a game, going 35-0 and winning the NCAA championship. After college Lobo took her 6'4", 190-pound frame to the WNBA, where she played forward for the New York Liberty for five years. An original WNBA All Star, Lobo also played for the Houston Comets and the Connecticut Sun before retiring in 2003.

Although not known as a ball-player, Olympic running champion WILMA RUDOLPH first made her mark on the basketball court when she was a teenager. Although Rudolph started out as a sickly baby weighing under five pounds, she overcame poverty, racism (she was African-American), polio, scarlet fever and pneumonia to become a star athlete. Her speed on the basketball court was recognized and she was recruited to a track and field team at Tennessee State University. In 1956 she made the U. S. Olympic team and helped the relay team win a bronze medal. At Rome in 1960, Rudolph became the first U. S. woman -- black OR white -- to win three gold medals, and her story of overcoming adversity became a bestselling book and a movie.

Some other great women athletes, big in the history books:

MARGARET SMITH COURT came out of Australia, husband and baby along, to dominate women's tennis by 1970. In her career she won a total of 62 Grand Slam events, more than anyone.

In the early 1960s Margaret Smith Court had a famous rivalry with tennis champion BILLIE JEAN KING. At Wimbledon in 1962, King (then Billie Jean Moffit) upset Court, the defending champion. King later gained notoriety for a publicity stunt in which she beat Bobby Riggs in a so-called "Battle of the Sexes."

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