Former Black Female Basketball Star Now Russian Orthodox Nun
T254
Former Lincoln star now serves a higher goal
When the shots stopped falling, Angela Aycock walked into a new life
Angela Aycock now goes by "Sister Paula", a black convent of the Russian
Orthodox Church Outside Russia.
By BARRY HORN / The Dallas Morning News
High above the playing floor of the sold-out college basketball arena,
Sister Paula of the Protection of the Virgin Mary Convent had to be praying
for a miracle.
All she wanted was to remain invisible.
Draped from head to toe in a black habit, she hardly melted in with the
upper-deck crowd of frat boys, sorority girls and rabid alums.
It didn't help that she stood 6 feet, 2 inches.
A 29-year-old novice nun still feeling her spiritual way, Sister Paula had
come all the way from her convent in western Canada for a halftime ceremony
to retire the jerseys of two University of Kansas women's basketball players.
One belonged to Tamecka Dixon, two-time conference player of the year and a
star guard in the Women's National Basketball Association.
The other jersey that would go up on the wall of honor in storied Allen
Fieldhouse, alongside those of Wilt Chamberlain, Lynette Woodard and Danny
Manning, also was worn by a former conference player of the year.
It belonged to Sister Paula.
Or Angela Aycock, as she was known at Kansas and back home in South Dallas.
Sister Paula didn't want to be there. She didn't want to give up her days
and nights at the convent devoted to prayer. She and her skeptical abbess
had to be talked into it through weeks of delicate negotiations.
In the end, it was agreed that Sister Paula would attend if she remained in
the shadows, attracting no attention.
So when Angela Aycock's No. 12 jersey was honored in February, the
announcer informed the roaring crowd of 16,300 that she could not
participate in the ceremony because of religious obligations.
The announcer did not point out that in an upper-deck portal, Sister Paula
was watching in silence.
Sister Paula was relieved, she later told her former Kansas coach who had
demanded her presence, that not a single soul had intruded on her 15 minutes.
Her only public comment came in a news release issued by the school.
"God willing," she was quoted as saying, "many more young women will be
inspired and challenge themselves as well as others not to limit
themselves, but strive for excellence in all things."
Soon after the ceremony, Sister Paula was off to the next stop on her
journey - a visit to a convent in West Virginia.
There Sister Paula divided her time between prayer and diligently making
chotki, the prayer rope fingered by Russian Orthodox Christians in silent
devotion.
Just what inspired a black, Baptist-born, former All-America basketball
player to walk away from her game to seek a monastic life in the
ultra-traditional Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, Sister Paula
won't explain.
She refuses to talk publicly.
Anything she says would attract unnecessary attention, violating her desire
to achieve absolute humility, an important element in any monastic life.
"I'll tell you this, Angela's has been such an unusual journey," says
Marian Washington, the Kansas coach for 30 years who would not hold the
ceremony without her.
The bond established when the coach recruited the All-America player from
Dallas' Lincoln High School in 1991 has remained strong.
When Angela Aycock played in the American Basketball League and the WNBA
and traveled overseas to compete professionally in Italy, Greece, Spain,
France and South Korea, the telephone was their umbilical cord.
They talked for hours. Early on, the conversations were primarily about
Angela's game and the loneliness of the road. They evolved into sessions
that focused on Angela's search for spiritual peace.
On this April afternoon, Sister Paula remains but a phone call away.
The coach picks up a telephone to inform Sister Paula an interview is about
to take place.
"Dear," Washington begins as she tells her former player she is going to
share what she knows of Angela Aycock's spiritual sojourn from South
Dallas' hardscrabble Turner Court Housing Project toward a monastic life in
a foreign-sounding church.
Soon after, the coach returns the phone to its cradle.
"Parts of her life have been a living hell," Washington says. "I know of
nothing like Angela's story."
Standing out
In a high school basketball world where stone-cold jump shooters or
powerful rebounders or sleight-of-hand dribbling artists are revered,
coaches worshipped Angela Aycock.
Back at Lincoln, where she played from 1987 to 1991, she grew into one of
the best players to ever come out of Dallas.
As a junior, she averaged 34 points per playoff game and carried Lincoln to
the 1990 state Class 4A semifinals.
In a game against Carter the next season, Angela scored 50, grabbed 27
rebounds, made 22 steals and passed off for 10 assists.
She was tall and strong and blessed with a hurdler's powerful legs. She
could play every position from point guard to center. And she could play
every one of them better than most anyone.
Her summer AAU team at the Red Bird Recreation Center was among the best in
its age group nationally. The roster was a "who's who" of top high school
players from Dallas and its suburbs.
"But Angie stood out," recalls Roosevelt Riley, who coached the Red Bird
team. "I told my girls, 'You can all play, but not in Angie's league.' "
Angela was in a league of her own off the court as well, Riley says.
"I had a team of mostly tough inner-city kids, but no one came from any
tougher place than Angie. She was from the heart of the 'hood. But ... I
could take her anywhere, and she could blend in. She was smart and
sensitive. She always listened."
Colleges craved Angela.
Her high school and AAU games became a hub for the country's top college
coaches.
"On the recruiting circuit, she was gold," says Michael Abraham, then an
assistant coach at Oregon State who unsuccessfully tried to recruit Angela
and later served briefly as her agent. "If there was a No. 1 kid in the 16
years I recruited Division I, she would be the one. She was amazing."
All the more amazing because Angela never played competitive basketball
before the ninth grade.
At Florence Middle School, she only ran track. Her specialty was the hurdles.
But no matter how impressive her times, she was undisciplined and
frequently in trouble.
"She was rebellious; she'd fight with other girls and boys," says Tonya
Aycock, Angela's older sister. "She skipped school. She was suspended from
junior high for fighting."
Tonya, 33, says her sister might have flunked out of school and confined
her running to the streets had she not met a kindly delivery driver who
noticed her one afternoon in a neighborhood gym.
Wilbur Lewis still spends much of his free time pushing South Dallas girls
toward basketball because, he says, there are so many "bad diversions down
here in the ghetto."
The first time he saw Angela, he knew he had come upon a special talent and
asked if she had ever played competitive basketball.
"No," she said.
He asked if she knew anything about it.
"Nothing," she said.
It took all of Lewis' powers of persuasion to convince Angela to give
basketball a serious shot.
Together, the delivery driver and the basketball neophyte worked in the gym
before the other girls arrived and stayed long after they left.
On Saturdays, when the recreation center gyms didn't open until 9 a.m.,
Lewis would pick up Angela two hours early in his red truck and head to the
playgrounds, where there were no doors to keep her from her lessons.
It wasn't long before teacher and pupil began cruising neighborhoods in
search of pickup games where Angela could put her lessons to work.
"She could whup the girls," Lewis says. "When we needed competition, we
went after the boys. She could be physical with the boys. I never saw her
back down from anyone. ...
"It was a beautiful thing to be part of."
'I can't get out'
But life was hardly beautiful for Angela. Even basketball brought her
little joy.
Quiet and reserved with people she did not know, Angela had always been
good at keeping her feelings locked inside.
In February 1991, as Angela's senior season at Lincoln was finishing, The
Dallas Morning News assigned a reporter to profile the best player on the
best team in the area.
It was supposed to be a feel-good, happy tale about a young girl well on
the road to success.
But reporter Debbie Fetterman found only a sad young woman who offered
little more than cryptic remarks about a painfully unhappy existence.
The News' story on Angela Aycock ran under the somber headline, "Trapped by
Her Talent."
In it, Angela credited Lewis for rescuing her from the streets and praised
another man, Willie Stovall, her sister Tonya's father, for helping out
financially when he could.
There was one reference to her biological father. She said she rarely saw
him. There was no mention of her mother, who had raised her in various
Dallas housing projects.
The recurring theme of the story was the intense pressure Angela felt.
"There's no way out," a teary-eyed Angela said. "The sky is coming down.
The walls are coming in. The floor is coming up. I feel like I'm in
solitary confinement. I can't get out. People think they understand, but
they don't."
Carmen Hardcastle, the Lincoln coach at the time, says outsiders began
whispering unsolicited advice about what college the star should attend.
Angela's family believed Hardcastle was trying to ride her star player's
coattails to a college job.
Some teammates were unhappy that Angela received so much credit and
attention for Lincoln's success.
Wilbur Lewis, who in addition to tutoring Angela worked with other Lincoln
players, says his prize player "had a lot of friends but didn't have a lot
of friends, if you know what I mean."
Stuck in the middle was Angela, who began running from recruiters' pitches.
"There was just so much pressure on her," says Hardcastle, now a high
school coach in Delaware. "She became sullen starting at the end of her
junior year. In her senior year, she became more and more withdrawn."
Coach and star player stopped communicating.
At home, Angela and her mother, Teena, almost never saw eye to eye.
Sometimes their arguments escalated into physical confrontations.
Hardcastle says that on several occasions, she had to drive from her Cedar
Hill home to try to restore peace in the Aycock apartment.
Some nights Angela sought serenity in her AAU coach's home. More often, she
retreated to the serenity of the suburban home of one of her AAU teammates
- Alana Slatter from Richardson Pearce.
Slatter says Angela preferred not to talk about her home life in the "three
or four days a week" they spent together throughout their high school years.
"She's a very guarded person," says Slatter, later a teammate at Kansas. "I
don't know if she ever let any of her teammates in."
And there was more than petty jealousies, recruiters pulling her and
problems at home affecting Angela's life.
In the same Morning News story in which she complained of feeling
suffocated, Angela lamented the deaths of three friends who had "taken the
wrong path."
She refused to identify them or say how they died. She said only that they
showed her where not to venture.
"I'm terrified of what they've done," Angela said. "There are so many bad
roads and only one good path. ... I dread going to the opposite side. I see
now what I would have been like."
Those who remain closest to Angela aren't sure exactly which friends she
might have been referring to.
They suggest several.
Chocolate, 20, a stabbing victim, could be identified only by her nickname.
Her former Lincoln coach couldn't remember Demetric Guinyard's name.
Sandra Boyd, who played at Lincoln with Angela, was 19 and pregnant when
she and her 17-month-old son were shot and killed in their South Dallas
apartment complex after violence erupted at a nearby dice game.
Quincy Porter, 19, who played football at Lincoln, was simply in the wrong
place at the wrong time when a bullet ended his life. Lincoln's Donise
Angton, 20, and Antonio Clayton, 18, were killed in a hail of 30 bullets
outside a neighborhood beer store.
"That's the type of environment we grew up in," says Kendrick Jackson, who
dated Angela in high school. "Everybody was doing everything. We were good
children who were sometimes influenced by bad people."
All died, however, after Angela made her cryptic reference. They wouldn't
haunt her until later.
But David Duffie, whom Angela played basketball with at Rochester Park, was
killed as she was finishing her junior year of high school. Duffie, 20, was
shot in what police believed was a drug-related incident.
Two days earlier, Darius Harris had been shot in the back. He was 17.
Angela and Darius had been schoolmates until he dropped out and started
running the streets and hustling.
"But Darius knew Angie was getting out," says Angela's sister Tonya. "He
looked out for her to make sure nobody messed with her. They were close."
And in 1985, just before her 12th birthday, her friend Dale Patterson, with
whom she often got into mischief, fell off his bicycle and was run over by
a bus close to their homes.
By the spring of her senior year, Angela, her stomach in knots, her nerves
on edge, had to be admitted to a hospital for tests. No one remembers the
diagnosis, but everyone remembers she had to wear a heart monitor for some
time.
"You never saw a girl who appeared to have so much in that kind of nervous
condition," says Willie Stovall.
Happy in the heartland
Marian Washington won Angela Aycock for Kansas at the eleventh hour of the
recruiting season.
Washington's assistant had been baby-sitting Aycock through the final days
of the process in April 1991. He called from Dallas to tell his boss he had
lost Angela to rival Nebraska.
She dropped everything and caught the next plane to Dallas.
Washington talked to Angela for hours, their first meaningful conversation
beyond the baseline.
She found a recruit "with no confidence in any decision she was being asked
to make." Washington says she "worked hard" to help Angela "see what a
beautiful person she was." The coach says getting away from Dallas was the
perfect tonic.
By all accounts Angela's four years at Kansas were a happy time, perhaps
the happiest of her life.
Angela started every game as a freshman and averaged 10.3 points and 5.2
rebounds per game. She was named team captain as a sophomore. As a junior,
she was the Big 8 co-player of the year. As a senior, she averaged 23.1
points and 7.3 rebounds and made several All-America teams.
When a teammate needed extra practice time, it was always Angela who
volunteered to stay and help. The All-American spent endless hours
rebounding errant shots of benchwarmers trying to improve their games.
She helped Kansas recruit, always willing to show high school stars around
the campus and tell them why Kansas was the school for them.
When Jennifer Trapp, a local high school golden girl, chose to stay home to
play at Kansas, Angela, two grades ahead, took her under her wing.
It seemed like an odd undertaking. The street-smart girl from the
single-parent home in Dallas, helping to make the hometown hero, daughter
of a local assistant district attorney and a dental hygienist, feel at home.
But Angela went out of her way to ease Jennifer's transition.
"Angela always helped her a lot," says Jennifer's father, Rick. "Angela was
the team's spiritual and emotional leader. Jennifer always told us how much
Angela meant to all the girls."
In lighter moments, Aycock, Tamecka Dixon and Charisse Sampson would
entertain teammates with their impersonation of the Supremes. Always,
Angela would step out of character and assume the brassy Diana Ross persona.
"I can't explain to you how much everyone liked her," says Koya Scott, a
Plano East graduate who followed Aycock to Kansas and is now an assistant
coach at New York's Fordham University. "She was so very easy to talk to.
She was a typical college kid except that she never did the dumb things
typical college kids did."
Angela's academic mentor found the creative writing major to be "very
bright, very creative, very kind and very funny."
"Angela never spoke ill of anyone," says Dr. Renate Mai-Dalton, an
associate professor of business. "She always wrote a lot but very rarely
shared her writing.
"And she always said, 'Thank you.' You'd be surprised how many never say,
'Thank you.' "
On the night her jersey was retired, Angela may have offered her biggest
"thank you" to Mai-Dalton when she asked her mentor to stand in during the
ceremony.
Angela grew so fond of Marian Washington that she once considered leaving
the program because she thought some of her teammates were not showing
proper respect for the coach.
Washington says that in addition to her basketball talent, Angela brought a
tremendous sense of guilt to college.
"Young people like her feel guilty because they have such an opportunity.
They ask, 'Why me? Why am I so lucky to be here when my family and friends
aren't?'
"It's so hard for so many to see their futures when they are dragging their
pasts."
Washington says she had to pay particular attention to Angela after she
returned from trips to Dallas. The coach came to dread them.
"When she had a good trip, it carried over," Washington says. "But when she
had a bad experience, she'd relive it and other bad experiences over and
over. ... There always seemed to be an event. It wasn't like she could get
through a year without something happening."
'Take good care' of her
The hand-printed sign on the front door of the Aycock apartment in the
Turner Court Housing Project reads simply: "Please Do Not Disturb This
Household."
In the living room, family photos cover the walls to the extent a visitor
would be hard-pressed to identify the color of paint beneath them.
After first telling a reporter she had no interest in discussing her
daughter, Teena Aycock had a change of heart.
"I know people have told you I'm tough and I'm crazy," she had said over
the telephone. "Come on down and meet me."
This day, Teena Aycock, a crucifix dangling from her neck, sounds tough
only when the subject is the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia and the
possibility that convent life may force her daughter to eventually sever
ties with her family.
"It's very upsetting," she says. "They better take good care of my baby.
... They can't keep me from my baby. ... They can lock her in a convent,
but I'll jump the fence. ... After all, I'm the one who gave birth to her."
Teena Aycock says she cannot understand where all the talk of teenage
friction between her and Angela originated. She loves Angela, and Angela
loves her.
"End of that story," she says.
The story is, she says, her daughter grew up a tomboy who never stayed in
the apartment. On the other hand, she was also sensitive and enjoyed
reading the poetry of Maya Angelou and writing her own.
Teena Aycock says she has no idea what prompted her daughter to enter a
convent, "although she has always been spiritual and was easily hurt."
Like so many others, Teena Aycock mentions that death may have affected her
daughter.
"One of her best friends committed suicide," her mother says. "She was so
upset."
Mother and daughter didn't have a serious theological discussion until
Angela left for Kansas.
"One day she called me to ask me where God started out," Teena recalls. "I
told her I couldn't answer a question like that. I told her to look in the
books in the library."
Willie Stovall says he was surprised one day when Angela, home from college
for a few days, brought religion into their conversation.
"She mentioned she was looking into Islam," Stovall said.
He had never known Angela to be religious or much of a churchgoer.
"I don't remember us ever going together other than when our grandmother
died," says her sister Tonya.
Transition to pros
If Angela's high school and college careers were measured in headlines, her
professional basketball career could be measured in agate - the tiny type
that reports players' comings and goings on waivers as well as free-agent
signings.
"It was like Angie had other things on her mind," says Michael Abraham, the
former Oregon State assistant, now an agent with a large clientele of WNBA
players.
In two full seasons with the Seattle Reign of the American Basketball
League, Angela averaged 6.4 points per game. She was enjoying her best
season, averaging 8.7 points, when the league folded early in her third
year in December 1998.
It only got worse in the WNBA.
She was placed on the Minnesota roster in May 1999 ... traded to Phoenix in
October ... and given to Seattle in an expansion draft in December.
She played one game with Seattle in 2000 before the team waived her ...
then was picked up by Minnesota and played three more games that season.
Her WNBA career statistics: 12 games, 43 minutes, 0.3 points per game.
Her play puzzled those who knew her best.
Renee Brown, the WNBA's vice president of player personnel, had been an
assistant coach at Kansas.
"I'll never know why she didn't do better in the WNBA," Brown says. "I
always wondered if she was simply afraid to do better."
Kevin Cook, who recruited Angela for Kansas, invited her to try out for the
Houston Comets in 2001. The assistant coach called her in France, where she
was playing for a second-division team in Reims, but she declined.
"By that time, she was searching for something higher than basketball could
give her," Cook says. "She had lost the fire in her belly. It was time to
move on."
The seminal moment during Angela's professional career, however, did not
come on the court. It came at a house in Lawrence, early in the spring of 1998.
On a March morning, ex-teammate Jennifer Trapp, 23, put a gun to her head
in her parents' home and pulled the trigger.
The suicide rocked the Kansas women's basketball program, which only the
night before had held a banquet celebrating Marian Washington's 25th year
at the school. Jennifer was there. Angela couldn't make it.
"I know Angela had taken Jennifer's death hard," says Jennifer's father,
Rick, now the sheriff of Douglas County, home of the University of Kansas.
"Angela wrote a poem for the memorial service. It moved us all."
What Sheriff Trapp didn't know was that on the night before she pulled the
trigger, his daughter had phoned Angela.
"It doesn't surprise me," the father says, his voice a whisper.
Tonya Aycock can still remember the pain in her sister's voice when Angela
called to tell her of Jennifer's death.
"She told me she should have known," Tonya says. "She talked to her the
night before. She should have known. She could have done something.
"It had such a terrible effect on Angie, such a terrible effect. She never
talked much about anything. But she talked about this. It took a major toll."
It wasn't long before Tonya began receiving telephone calls with a
different message from her sobbing sister.
"I'm ready for God to take me," Angie would cry into the phone. "I'm ready
for God to take me."
Stranger in strange land
The professional basketball landscape is far different for women than for men.
To supplement their incomes from the U.S. leagues, women often play
overseas, where the money is better. But it comes at a price.
"The women are away from home, and loneliness becomes a huge factor," says
agent Michael Abraham.
"Often, there is only one American on a team. The girls have no one to talk
to. Very often the only other foreign player on a club team in Europe or
Asia is an Eastern European player. There is little social interaction. No
one you know sees you play. There is no gratification for playing other
than the money. It can be a very lonely life.
"My guess is that when Angie was overseas, she kept mostly to herself."
Abraham estimates that a player of Angela's caliber earned up to $8,000 a
month in Europe. He says he once negotiated $10,000 a month for her to play
in South Korea.
No matter where she played, Angela was never far from the telephone.
Friends and family report similar conversations.
The woman who rarely attended church growing up in Dallas and was not
involved in groups such as the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in college
was becoming more and more focused on religion.
"I wasn't too surprised," says Mai-Dalton, her academic mentor. "Angela
always had a lot of faith. She was not religious in terms of showing it. It
was always on the inside. She yearned for a peaceful, beautiful life for as
long as she can remember."
Teena Aycock recalls one phone call in which Angela asked if she had ever
been baptized.
"I said, 'Sure,' all my children were baptized," Teena says. "She said she
didn't remember. I said, 'If that's what you think, go out and be baptized
again.' "
Marian Washington says, "Most of what we talked about was the Bible and
what God intends for us to do with our lives and how he helps us get
through challenges. Very often we would get something to read and read it
together. That way we could be miles apart and in the same place."
Tonya Aycock believes an interpreter assigned to her sister in Europe
introduced Angela to the Orthodox religion. She says her sister became a
frequent visitor to churches and cathedrals around Europe.
Angela loved the beauty she saw in Orthodox icons. She covered the walls of
her apartment with them.
When Angela played in Reims, she chose to live across from the city's famed
cathedral, which dates to the 13th century. It was in the Cathedral at
Reims that 17-year-old Joan of Arc stood at the side of Charles VII when he
was crowned King of France in 1429.
Angela told Renate Mai-Dalton she especially liked the Orthodox litany. It
allowed her to focus.
Her calls had a different tone.
"She started telling me how much she wanted to please God," Tonya says.
"She told me she was changing ... changing into somebody else.
"One night she asked me about salvation. We talked for hours and hours, and
we cried for hours and hours. It was that night she told me she received
Jesus Christ as her Lord and savior."
When Angela began asking theological questions her sister could not answer,
Tonya suggested calling her minister at Rhoads Terrace Bible Fellowship.
The Rev. E.D. Charles says Angela wanted to know his thoughts on Orthodoxy.
"She was struggling with the group of believers she was talking to," he
says. "Our conversations were centered on faith. She was looking for a kind
of discipline to keep her life in line. She seemed very vulnerable. I
thought we were connecting. But she found something else that influenced
her in her most vulnerable time."
Orthodox mentor
Father Dositheos, the Greek Orthodox abbot at the Monastery of the Holy
Archangels in the Texas Hill Country town of Kendalia, thought it odd when
he took Angela Aycock's call in 2001.
"I said, 'Wow, what's a basketball player doing calling me from France?' "
he recalls.
Angela explained that she had been using the Internet to help her study
Orthodoxy.
Her research initially led her to a convent in northeast Pennsylvania. The
abbess there told Angela that because she was from Dallas, she might be
better off calling someone closer to home and suggested Father Dositheos'
monastery about 40 miles north of San Antonio.
Father Dositheos was impressed with Angela's questions. He liked her
sincerity. The two talked on and off for about a year.
Angela told Father Dositheos she was beginning instruction to convert to
the Orthodox faith.
"She said she had read extensively about the Orthodox religion," he says.
"She felt it was right for her. She said she was tired of other
denominations and how they preached the Gospel."
Back from France last spring and living in Dallas with her sister Tonya,
Angela traveled to Kendalia to meet with Father Dositheos.
She told him that as soon as her conversion was complete, she hoped to
enter a convent.
Father Dositheos disapproved.
"I told her I thought she was rushing things," he says. "I wanted her to
convert and live in the Orthodox church, live the Orthodox life for several
years and then make a monastic decision.
"She didn't want to hear it. She said she was ready."
Except for a Christmas card, that was the end of their relationship.
"There are two things you can't tell anyone," Father Dositheos says. "You
can't tell somebody who they should marry, and you can't tell somebody
whether or not they should become a monastic."
By this time, Angela was spending many of her waking hours deep in prayer.
"She told me there has to be prayers going on all the time," Marian
Washington says. "She said that if it weren't for prayer to combat sin, she
didn't know where the world would be."
When Tonya returned home from work, she'd frequently find her sister
standing in a large walk-in closet reading a Bible or praying.
Bob Tallick