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Her first day in Dallas, the self-described smart aleck from Queens, N.Y., was asked how she liked Texas.

"I don't even know how I'm going to get around," Nancy Lieberman cracked. "I don't have a horse."

In 28 years since the Dallas Diamonds made her their first draft pick and she found a new home, Lieberman has proved she knows how to get around just fine.

How's this schedule: She recently spent four days in Los Angeles in a driving school, preparing for the Toyota Pro/Celebrity Race next month.

"Four days with John Salley," Lieberman said, "is a little much."

On the way back to Dallas, she made a stopover in Aspen to spend a couple of days with longtime friend Martin Navratilova, whose mother recently died.

"She's like my family."

Once home, Lieberman picked up her 13-year-old son, T.J., for sushi and a friendly debate over the men's and women's NCAA Tournament brackets.

Coming next: Nine games over 13 days in her work with ESPN and NBA TV.

But Lieberman's roots are here, where she does her most important work. Or at least that's how she describes her basketball camps, which this year will mark their 25th anniversary in Dallas.

The camps have come a long way since she ran her first free clinic at Red Bird, where she drew some quizzical looks from the customers.

"I know, I'm white," she said, and paused.

"Yeah, I'm a girl, too."

But she told the kids a story many of them could relate to: growing up poor in a single-parent household in the '60s and '70s . . . nights riding the train alone to Harlem to play basketball with the boys . . . enduring taunts that she was embarrassing her family . . . drawing inspiration from a boxer who proclaimed himself the greatest.

The first time she heard Muhammad Ali, Lieberman ran home to tell her mother that she'd found her calling.

"I'm going to be the greatest basketball player ever!"

A point guard on the '76 Olympic team, she was the youngest player ever to win a gold medal, at 18. A two-time national player of the year at Old Dominion, she also played for the Diamonds and in a men's league and for the Washington Generals, straight men for the Harlem Globetrotters.

The year after she was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, she played for the Phoenix Mercury of the new WNBA. She was 38.

If she's not the greatest female basketball player ever, she's in the argument. Not that it matters.

"My legacy will never be about shooting a basketball," she said. "I hope it's what I've done for people."

Her camps in Dallas, and now Detroit and Phoenix, have afforded the opportunity for more than 10,000 kids to attend on scholarship. More than 60 have gone on to earn college scholarships, including Oklahoma State's Andrea Riley and Sheri Sam, who played in the WNBA.

Here's how enduring and successful her camps have been: She's coaching kids of her former campers.

"I've gotten calls at midnight from people wanting me to talk to their daughters," Lieberman said. "They'll say she's hanging out with the wrong crowd, or they've found drugs in her room."

Unless they've seen her on TV, kids aren't likely to know that LeBron James asks for pictures with her, or that she spent a day last fall at the home of her idol, Ali, at his invitation.

"Some know who you are and some don't," she said. "They just want to be taught, they want to be respected, they want to be hugged."

That it comes from a Hall of Famer is just a bonus.

For information about Nancy Lieberman's basketball camps at Collin County Community College and UT-Dallas, call 972-473-2121 or visit www.nancylieberman.com.

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