by Dave Zarum

Sportsnet Magazine

"Emerson Thomas isn't easily impressed. So you can imagine Dwight Walton's surprise when he got a phone call from his fellow Team Canada basketball alum one afternoon seven years ago. "Dwight," said Thomas, "I just saw the greatest girls" basketball player I've ever seen in my life." Nirra Fields, in Grade 7 and not yet 13, was the only girl on a court full of older boys in the Montreal borough of LaSalle. And she was dominating. Dribbling behind her back, weaving through the lane like an ambulance speeding through rush-hour traffic, absorbing contact and finishing at the rim with ease, it was obvious Fields was a special player. "She was doing things at 12 that you can't teach," says Walton. Raised by a single mother in nearby Lachine and the youngest in a family of brothers, Fields was used to the competition. She even played running back for the boys" team in elementary school as early as age 11. "She's a strong individual, and you'd have to be," Walton adds. "It's taken her where she is today."

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