Miles, the faintest of smiles leavening her stoicism, didn’t try to avoid the situation. She didn’t back up, flinch or try to fend off the critique.
Compared to some debates she’s had in the sporting arena, this situation was downright decorous.
She knew she needn’t worry about a metal chair being slammed over her head.
She wasn’t going to receive a heavy booted kick in the stomach.
And she was sure no crazed WSU coach was going to come running, arm extended, and clothesline her at the neck.
All of that — and so much more — had happened to her in the past, but not on the basketball court.
Before she became a college ref, she was a big-time wrestler.
She starred in World Wrestling Entertainment as Shaniqua, a towering 6-foot physical specimen with ripped muscles, shiny black PVC hot pants and a skimpy bikini top.
Sometimes she carried a riding crop in her role as the dominatrix manager of the WWE tag team champion Basham Brothers; other times she was the main eventer, overpowering the other women she wrestled, able to power lift them up above her head before power driving them straight into the mat.
She wrestled on televised broadcasts and pay-per-view shows; performed in front of enormous crowds in Shanghai and Mexico City; and soon the WWE was marketing a plastic action figure in her likeness.
She had a dedicated fan following and some descriptive nicknames.
“Oh yeah, she was Hot Mocha,” Tamika Williams-Jeter, the Dayton Flyers women’s basketball coach, said with a laugh. “That was Linda.
“She’s always been vibrant and talkative and super aggressive. And she was just a specimen of an athlete.”
The two have known each other since they were teenage basketball stars on the same AAU team.
Tamika grew up in Jefferson Township and was a hoops standout at Chaminade Julienne. Linda, who is two years older, was from the Avondale section of Cincinnati and starred at Hughes.
Later, the two would battle against each other on the college court.
Linda was an inside force on the Rutgers teams coached by the iconic Vivian Stringer, while Tamika starred at Big East rival UConn where she played for the legendary Gino Auriemma.
“I can remember when I was a freshman and sophomore and we’d go to play UConn,” Miles said with a grin. “We’d pass the WWE sign (at the organization’s Stamford, Conn. headquarters) and I’d tell my teammates, ‘One day, I’m gonna be a superstar in the WWE.’”
Realizing a mistake
“I grew up in Avondale, one of the tougher neighborhoods in Cincinnati,” Miles said. “I’m from a big family, number seven out of 10 kids.
“My dad, Alto Miles, was from Alabama. He served in the military and was a good man they tell me, but he died when I was just three.”
Her mother, Wanda Woodard, died 6 ½ years ago.
“She was a phenomenal woman,” Miles said. “She was my superhero. When you birth 10 babies and raise them up like she did, there’s a real strength to you.
“She’s my angel now; she watches over me.”
She paused and her eyes began to glisten: “I don’t want to cry about it, but I know she’d be so proud of me now. I just wish...”
She couldn’t finish the thought as the emotion briefly washed away her voice.
Credit: Bryant Billing
Credit: Bryant Billing
Once recovered, she related how she didn’t play basketball until she was spotted by a coach as she walked through the school lunchroom. She was a tall seventh grader and he convinced her to join the basketball team.
Soon she would shine on a local AAU team too and that afforded her an opportunity to learn about the world “outside of the ghetto, the hood,” as she put it.
“When I’d go out to the suburbs, I’d see how some of my teammates lived,” she said.
When her team traveled to tournaments in other states, she learned there was an even bigger world out there.
She was mentored by several coaches along the way, especially Anita Burke at Hughes.
She became a top recruit sought after by schools in the Big 10, Big East, ACC and SEC. Along the way she became friends with Tasha Pointer, another sought after recruit from Whitney Young High School in Chicago and she said they made a pact to try to play college ball together.
Miles though had visited Rutgers and crossed it off her list. Soon after, Pointer told her, “Yo, I’m going to Rutgers.”
“At first, I didn’t really know anything about Rutgers and Coach Stringer and her past and what she meant to the game and young women like me,” Miles admitted.
After some quick research, she realized her mistake and had to call Stringer and ask for a second chance.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
She said that backstep was one of the best decisions she ever made in her life:
“Rutgers turned out to be the best place for me as a young lady. I began to understand the importance of role models who really make an impact on your life.
“I tell African-American women who are officials now that we — just like the players — wouldn’t be where we are now if it wasn’t for Coach Stringer and some of the other women like her."
She mentioned another pioneer, the late Bonita Spence, who began officiating in the late 1980s and for 27 years worked games in all the big conferences, did two Final Fours and spent a decade in the WNBA.
“We stand on the shoulders of those few female coaches and officials who broke the color barriers,” she said. “They opened it up for African American officials like me and got us coaches today like Dawn Staley.
“Those early women helped not just black females but white females too.”
A while back Miles officiated a game at Seton Hall and Stringer, who is now 77 and retired from coaching three years, came to watch her work.
“Dude, it was so dope to have her come see me in person,” she said. “That was a full circle moment.”
‘I’m tough enough to do all that’
When Miles was in her final season at Rutgers she said Barb Jacobs, the former Syracuse coach who then was coordinator of the Big East’s basketball officials, approached her and said she ought to think about being a referee.
She thought with Miles’ on-court presence, her personality and her appreciation of the game, she’d be good at it.
Miles said she wasn’t interested. She saw herself as a player.
She’d played 130 games at Rutgers, started 91, amassed 993 career points and 751 rebounds and helped lead the Scarlet Knights to the Final Four.
That led her to a tryout with the WNBA’s Seattle Storm. She was cut in the preseason and eventually saw a chance to pursue that pro wrestling boast she’d made to her teammates.
She applied to appear on the WWE Tough Enough reality show where contestants were given wrestling training, and the winners of each season would get a contract with the WWE:
“I remember coming home and making a video while surrounded by my family. I told about being the seventh of 10 kids and being raised in Avondale by my mom.
“I told how I was a former college basketball player who had played at the highest level for the great Vivian Stringer at Rutgers. I remember saying, ‘If I’m tough enough to do all that, I’m tough enough to be a WWE superstar.’”
She was invited to join the second season of the show in 2002 and that’s when her competitive nature kicked in.
“When you come out of the ghetto, the hood as they say, nothing is going to stop you from competing against other people, mano y mano,” she said. “I wasn’t going to let anything stop me.”
Eventually she and Jackie Gayda won the competition and that led to a couple of years training on the Ohio Valley Wrestling circuit and performances on the various bigtime WWE stages.
But she was a natural athlete and didn’t embrace the Diva role the WWE used to promote her and some other women then.
While she said WWE boss Vince McMahon “valued who I was and wanted to make me the next Chyna,” her outspokenness, coupled at times with her rawness in the ring, rubbed a few old school misogynists the wrong way and they let their disdain be known.
Eventually realizing wrestling wasn’t her passion, she was released from her contract in November of 2004.
She taught school for a while back in Cincinnati and soon remembered that conversation she’d had with Jacobs when she was a senior at Rutgers.
She missed basketball and she saw officiating as a way to reenter the sport.
“As a former player, it would be the way to stay closer to the game than anything except coaching,” she said.
She spent a year officiating seventh and eighth grade games in Cincinnati and by the next season she jumped all the way up to doing NCAA Division II women’s college games.
Now, 15 years into her career, she’s under contract to work in eight different conferences including the ACC, the Big East, the Atlantic 10, the Horizon League, and the Mid-American Conference.
Happy in the background
Some 2 ½ hours before the tipoff between Wright State and Oakland, Miles sat with me in a Colonel Glenn Highway coffee shop talking about everything from her career and the way today’s game and the athletes have changed to the 15-year-old son she’s raising and how she hopes to impart the lessons that will make him “a productive, good citizen.”
When she played at Rutgers from 1997-2001, social media wasn’t really a thing yet and the transformative Name, Image and Likeness deals athletes now get still were two decades in the offing.
If those opportunities had been around then, Miles — with her forceful play on the court and her oversized personality off of it — would have had a huge following.
“Linda Miles would have been a millionaire,” she said with a laugh.
But she doesn’t bemoan the fact that she missed out on some opportunities.
“Everybody has their own era. The athletes today benefitted from the things we went through just as we did from the women who came a generation before us when Title IX was coming in.”
She said her son — whose father also is a longtime referee — told her recently: “Mom, if you had stayed in the WWE, we’d be rich.”
She laughed and shook her head: “I told him if I had stayed in the WWE, he might not have been born.”
She talked about how life is different now; how wrestlers can be on the road 280 days a year.
And had she stayed in the WWE, she doesn’t think she’d be as happy as she is now, nor feel as fulfilled as she does as an official.
“This has enabled me to bring my life full circle,” she said. “I’m back in basketball again. It is my true passion.”
She said wrestling did prepare her for her officiating career.
“We travel now and back then we were on the road, going state to state, gym to gym. Thanks to wrestling, I learned to keep a schedule, to preserve energy and I began to understand the importance of fitness: mentally, spiritually and, of course, physically. As the players get faster and stronger, we must, too.”
The big difference between wrestling and refereeing is your presence, she said.
“In basketball we’re there to execute the rules and communicate with the players and the coaches. We’re the caretakers of the game, but we do it from the shadows.
“In the WWE, you are centerstage and you’re performing for everybody. That’s not my life now.”
She said her wrestling memorabilia is stored in her basement.
Those PVC hotpants and the bikini tops have been replaced by a black-and-white striped referee’s shirt. She sends directives now with a whistle, not a rider’s crop.
But some things have not changed.
When you are 6-feet tall and still fit and muscled and run the court better than some players; when you look like you could still play in the paint and you exude self-assuredness, you’re not exactly confined to the shadows.
Miles officiates a preseason scrimmage for the Flyers every year and will do some UD games later this season Williams-Jeter said.
“She hasn’t changed. The big personality, the confidence, it’s all still there just beneath the surface,” the Flyers coach said. “Linda is still Linda.”
She is still very much an action figure.
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