Twenty years before women's soccer became an Olympic sport and two decades before the formation of the WNBA, the '76 US women's basketball team laid the foundation for the incredible rise of women's sports in America at the youth, collegiate, Olympic, and professional levels. Though they were unknowns from small schools such as Delta State, the University of Tennessee at Martin and John F. Kennedy College of Wahoo, Nebraska, at the time of the '76...

Perry Wallace was born at an historic crossroads in U.S. history. He entered kindergarten the year that the Brown v. Board of Education decision led to integrated schools, allowing blacks and whites to learn side by side. A week after Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, Wallace enrolled in high school and his sensational jumping, dunking, and rebounding abilities quickly earned him the attention of college basketball recruiters from...