Diana Taurasi, the all-time leading scorer in WNBA history and a six-time Olympic gold medalist, usually starts preparing for her upcoming season on January 1. She gives herself four months to work on all facets of her game before training camp with the Phoenix Mercury begins. This New Year’s Day, however, hit different. “I just didn’t have it in me,” Taurasi, 42, tells TIME from her home in Phoenix. “That was pretty much when I knew it was time to walk away.”
In an exclusive conversation with TIME, Taurasi reveals publicly for the first time that she’s retiring from basketball. “Mentally and physically, I’m just full,” says Taurasi, who played all 20 of her WNBA seasons for the Mercury. “That’s probably the best way I can describe it. I’m full and I’m happy.”
Taurasi leaves the WNBA with a strong claim to the title of women’s-basketball GOAT. “I have a resume,” says Taurasi. “It’s not up to me to grade it.” Besides her record number of points (10,646 in the regular season, nearly 3,000 clear of the runner-up, Tina Charles), Taurasi hit more three-pointers than anyone in WNBA history and is fourth all-time in assists. She won a trio of WNBA championships (in 2007, 2009, and 2014), three in the NCAA, six Euroleague titles during her 12-year overseas career in Russia and Turkey, and the six Olympic golds, an all-time record for a basketball player. She was the 2009 WNBA MVP, a two-time WNBA Finals MVP, a three-time Euroleague MVP, and a three-time Russian League Player of the Year. “Until someone comes along and eclipses what she’s done, then yes, she is” the GOAT, says Geno Auriemma, who coached Taurasi in college and at the Olympics in 2012 and 2016.
My scoring record, or the six gold medals, someone’s going to come around that has the same hunger, the same addiction to basketball, and put those records in a different way, a different name,” says Taurasi. “That’s what sports is all about. That’s going to be fun to watch. Hopefully not soon.”
She leaves a WNBA on stronger ground than when she entered. Her excellence played a key role in the league’s survival and success. “You can’t tell the story of the WNBA without Diana,” says NBA commissioner Adam Silver. “She helped build the league into what it is today and inspired generations of fans and players, including many who have gone on to play in the WNBA. Diana had an outsized role in the growth of women’s basketball.”
During Taurasi’s peak years on the court, you couldn’t keep your eyes off her. She played the game with a confidence and fluidity that appeared unmatched in the women’s game. Every time she touched the ball, you expected her to make something happen: perhaps a no-look pass over a smaller guard whom the 6-ft.Taurasi towered over, or a spin move around a taller player who couldn’t keep up with her, or a three-pointer going to her left, to her right, off the dribble, standing still. “It’s just the full package,” says Sue Bird, the WNBA’s all-time assists leader and Taurasi’s teammate in college, on five Olympic teams, and for seven seasons in Russia. “You add on some swag to that, some sh-t talking to that–the more you piss her off, the better she plays, people are entertained by that.”
Just seeing her transcend the game, watching little girls want to play like her, her style, her flair, her bravado, you know, her swagger, it’s been an unbelievable treat,” says the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, LeBron James. “She’s one of the all-time greatest, and she will leave her mark on the game of basketball the moment she ties those shoes up and throws them over the pole line. It’s been an honor. All love.”
Taurasi carried a cool quotient that the WNBA needed in its formative years. “Dee is the one that did have street cred,” says Bird. “You walk around airports, you’re in different cities, you’re over here, there, people knew Dee everywhere you go.” Bird has her biases in the whole GOAT discussion, but when she makes her best effort to disassociate her close relationship with Taurasi in the debate, she still lands on her friend. “There are players that have full games,” says Bird. “You can talk about Maya Moore in this conversation, Candace Parker, Lisa Leslie. You could talk about all these great names. The difference is the way she makes her teammates feel. The way she raises the level of her teams. That, to me, is the separator.”
Taurasi’s boisterous personality was clear from her earliest days, growing up in Los Angeles and in Chino, Calif., where she moved when she was 8. The daughter of immigrants—her mother Liliana is from Argentina, and her father Mario was born in Italy and raised in Argentina—Taurasi hung up bullhorns in her house that her parents brought back from their home country. She used the open end as an indoor hoop. “I don’t know how many times my mom was like, ‘Go outside, stop bouncing the ball,’” she says.
As a little kid, being a kid of immigrants coming to this country, basketball always made me feel a part of something,” says Taurasi. “It always made me feel comfortable. It brought me to a place where, you know, I could love others. I could love myself. It really is, to me, the one thing that always loved me back.”
Her parents sacrificed for her pursuit of basketball, once skipping out on the light bill when she was in eighth grade to buy her a new pair of Nikes she so badly wanted. College hoops power UConn offered Taurasi, who starred for Chino’s Don Lugo High School, where she graduated in 2000, a scholarship. Before Taurasi’s recruiting visit, the UConn coaching staff gave players a scouting report. “The message that came through was, ‘This kid likes to have fun,’” says Bird, who is two years older than Taurasi and won a pair of championships as UConn’s point guard.
So make sure she has a good time. Wink wink.” Bird found Taurasi charismatic, and someone you felt like was already part of the team. The players took her to Huskies, a UConn bar.
“She was a baby, but we got her in and she was in the middle of the dance floor doing all kinds of West Coast dance moves,” says Bird. “She had some sort of, like, robot situation happening.”
Auriemma pushed Taurasi, and the two stubborn competitors could clash. Taurasi was loath to draw offensive fouls, so in one practice, Auriemma told Taurasi to stand in the lane: he ordered each player to dribble down from half-court and run into her, and for Taurasi to take the hit and fall to the floor and take a proper charge. “I didn’t fall once,” says Taurasi. “I was like, ‘Nah, I’m good.’” Auriemma tossed her out of practice.
She told Auriemma she wanted to wear No. 0 at UConn. Auriemma objected; he didn’t like the negative implications of that number attached to a player of Taurasi’s caliber. “She goes, ‘OK, I’ll wear double zero,’” says Auriemma. “So that’s what we’re dealing with.”
He called her a double dumbass for the wisecrack and pushed her to wear No. 3., because Auriemma believed she could be the Babe Ruth of women’s basketball. She wore that number throughout her college and pro careers, and delivered three straight national titles to UConn, from 2002 through 2004, while also winning back-to-back Naismith College Player of the Year awards and Final Four Most Outstanding Player honors.
I wish I had $1 for every time I heard a guy say, ‘She’s the only reason I would ever watch a women’s basketball game,’” says Auriemma. “And this was 25 years ago, right? Obviously, we’ve evolved as men. But she had the ability to bring people to the game that otherwise would not think about watching a women’s basketball game.” And many of them stuck with it, giving some new thunderbolt—like, say, a Caitlin Clark—a solid base to expand.
If I had an opportunity to play basketball and compete, that’s what I was doing,” says Taurasi. “At the end of the day, the work and being able to compete, those are the things that I love the most out of anything. Those are the only things that resonate with me. Even now when I watch sports, ‘Are you competitive? Are you willing to do the work? Are you willing to evolve?’ Those are all the things that the game of basketball gave me.”
The Mercury selected Taurasi with the top overall pick in the 2004 WNBA draft. She more than met the sky-high expectations for her pro career. That same year, she also began her storied Olympic odyssey, helping the U.S. win gold in Athens by providing punch off the bench. “She rolls up to the first game, we get ready, we’re putting our stuff on to go warm up, and she brought two left shoes,” says Bird, who shared a Team USA backcourt with Taurasi in Athens, Beijing (‘08), London (‘12), Rio (‘16), and Tokyo (‘21). The team was staying on a cruise ship, the Queen Mary 2. “Somebody had to haul ass back to the boat and get her other shoes so she could play,” says Bird.
“Just like, dumb sh-t. She did that a lot.”
Taurasi won a lot too: she’s 42-0 in Olympic basketball games. “She can’t wait for the big game,” says Bird. “Can’t wait for the big moment. When you look next to you and see someone giving off that vibe, that aura, for a lot of people, it calms them. Because you’re like, ‘Oh, she’s going to play great.’”
At the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Taurasi spotted her hero, Argentine soccer icon Diego Maradona, in the stands at a men’s basketball game and asked Silver, then the NBA’s deputy commissioner, if he could help arrange an introduction. Someone escorted her to Maradona’s seat at halftime. “I think Diana was probably a little nervous,” says Silver. “But she would never let you know it, just like she never shied away from a big moment on the court.” She gave Maradona two kisses and a hug, told her she loved him, and snapped a photo with him. “That was the only person I’ve ever asked to get a picture with,” she says.
During the 2016 Rio Olympics, the women’s and men’s U.S. basketball teams again stayed on a cruise ship. Players from both teams, a group of NBA and WNBA stars, were sitting around one night, having a few laughs, a few drinks, and talking some serious smack, as is the habit of super competitive and successful athletes. Draymond Green, a noted NBA rabble-rouser known more for his defensive instincts, physicality, passing skills, and penchant for drawing technical fouls and suspensions than his shooting and scoring ability, was going on about something. Taurasi said, “Hey, Draymond, how does it feel to be the only person in this room who’s never been double-teamed?”
