Farewell to a Legend: Sylvia Fowles Appreciation

The WNBA postseason is in full swing, but it is missing one key figure that helped construct what the league has become today.

In the final game of the 2022 season, Sylvia Fowles and the Minnesota Lynx fell just short of a postseason spot after falling to the Connecticut Sun on the road. The loss marked the conclusion of one of the most storied and memorable basketball careers of arguably the greatest center to play in the WNBA.

Fowles was viewed as a leader, a humble individual who possessed the kindness that had the power to impact the city of Minnesota, and a league desperate for notoriety.

As she said before her career came to a close, "My life is not basketball. It's just something I do." Fowles leaves the game to become a mortician. It, without a doubt, is one of the strangest choices by a future Hall of Famer post-playing career, but she seems to feel the same sort of joy being around corpses as she does snatching the ball out of the air and igniting the fast-break.

Since she was young, Fowles always aspired to work on the human body and with funerals. While she takes on a completely different job in her next endeavor, she has left a permanent legacy on her previous one.

Beginning in 2015, Fowles has been searching for a funeral service degree. As women's basketball continues to grow due to what Fowles gave to the game, she finally gets to live the dream she has been working towards for quite some time.

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Before Folwes played the final game of her career, Lynx guard Rachel Banham spoke about why she thinks Folwes will make a phenomenal mortician, stating, "You have to be such a specific kind of person to be able to be in those situations... I'd be crying all the time. But Syl has this natural ability to make people feel loved. And when you're going through loss, you need that."

She was a two-time WNBA champion, Finals MVP, eight-time All-Star, four-time Defensive Player of the Year, and the WNBA's all-time leader in rebounds with an astounding 4007 boards in her 14-year professional career in the United States.

Her career reached a new level when she got to Minnesota and teamed up with Maya Moore, Seimone Augustus, and Lindsay Whalen. Despite being around all those stars, Fowles thrived doing all the dirty work down low for a team that would win the WNBA title in her first season with the team.

Loyalty is so rare in today's NBA, but Fowles was with Minnesota for nearly eight years. She ended her career as the WNBA's ninth all-time scorer. The world continued to marvel at Fowles as she showed no signs of slowing down as she leaned toward retirement.

In her final two seasons with the Lynx, she averaged 16 and 14.4 points per game which were top-two in Minnesota in each season. She also managed to lead the league in field-goal percentage and rebounds per game in her farewell season. In 2018, Fowles finished with the highest average amount of rebounds per game in a single season in WNBA history with an astounding 11.9 boards.

Following the end of a storybook career, Fowles' head coach since she joined the Lynx, Cheryl Reeve, expressed her thoughts on what Fowles will be remembered for, stating, "There will never be another Sylvia Fowles... It's the way she did it, the love that she has for not just people, that's her state, but the love that she has for the organization, and the love for me. Life without Sylvia Fowles is going to suck. Big time. She'll be in my life, no doubt about it, but we'll never get to share the battles, the side-eye that she gives me."

In reality, the former LSU product could have played a few more years as a professional as the WNBA continued to grow. Still, Fowles wanted to see what she could be without the game of basketball.

She was known for giving some of the best advice to her teammates and opponents throughout her career, passing on her knowledge to future generations of WNBA stars. Fowles was the definition of consistency, always giving her best for her team no matter the position of her team in the standings.

There will never be another center that is as dominant as Fowles. When you combine the fact that reportedly nobody has said a bad word towards her throughout her career, she was truly a special individual on and off the court. The stories are endless when it comes to the legend of Fowles.

From her getting injured in the WNBA bubble and still staying with the entire team despite not being able to contribute on the floor to not missing a single contest in her first five seasons with Minnesota, Fowles never let the success get to her head. Instead, she was a true down-to-earth human, which is so rare to find in a world-class athlete today.

Even in the USA camps, Fowles was freely giving up information to her international teammates, despite knowing they would be in a different jersey in the WNBA in just a few months.

Fowles was always in a giving mood, no matter the circumstances. So as she leaves the game, the hope is that players will carry the attitude and mentality of Fowles with them each day in the gym or the locker room.

She never wanted the spotlight on her. And while the franchise put it on her during her final home game at Target Center, her humble personality continued to shine through.

C/O: Getty Images

With Sue Bird and Fowles leaving the game this season, the WNBA is turning over into a new era of the league, led by A'ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart. The style that Fowles played during her career may never be duplicated in the WNBA in the future.

Fowles has taken one three-pointer in her entire career, back in 2010. All her damage has been done inside the arc with her elite footwork and up-and-under move that was almost impossible to defend given her relentlessness in front of the basket.

Reeve sums Fowles up pretty well in one sentence, stating, "The consistency and the genuine nature of who she is so much bigger than basketball."

From her memorable dunk in the 2022 All-Star Game to her historic Game Five performance in the 2017 WNBA Finals with 17, and a jaw-dropping 20 rebounds, Fowles will be remembered for her greatness from the beginning to the end of her time in the league.

As many of her teammates and opponents have said, Fowles has a shining light of positivity and is an individual who always knows the right thing to say, whether it was advice to a fellow player or her leadership during a game.

The basketball game as a whole will miss Fowles more than it thinks at the moment. When it's all said and done, there will be no Mt. Rushmore of women's basketball players that does not include the player that possessed the most dominant paint pressure in the game's history.