MVP. Mama. Mortician. And More.

As Sylvia Fowles nears retirement, she and some of those closest to her look back on a legendary WNBA career on and off the court.

Sylvia Fowles knows for certain she doesn’t want to be buried.

“I’ve thought about it plenty of times, even before I started working at a funeral home. I would love to be cremated, if my kids wanted, and if they don’t I would like to donate my body to science.”

Beyond that, the WNBA star, who is retiring after this season having amassed one of the most decorated résumés in basketball history, hasn’t made too many plans for what comes next. Retirement is sometimes thought of as the death of an athlete, but Fowles, who has been working toward a funeral service degree since 2015, has a clear path for life after basketball—it just might happen to include death.

“Maybe I’d want to be turned into a coral reef, because I love the beach,” she adds. “I figure somebody can do some good with this body.”

On the court, the Lynx legend has certainly made the most of it, which, as her dunk during the 2022 All-Star Game displayed, has shown no signs of decaying. For 15 years, she has imposed her physicality in the paint, winning two WNBA titles, two Finals MVPs and four Olympic gold medals along the way. She is the league-record holder in total rebounds, field goal percentage and double doubles, and a member of the W’s 25th-anniversary team. As she’s done so, Fowles has become, in the words of reigning league MVP Jonquel Jones, “the player for the people.”

While stuffing stat sheets, Fowles has dished out plenty of advice to both teammates and opponents. She’s additionally forged close bonds with members of the cycling community and those interested in the mortuary sciences. The countless faces of Fowles show her diverse interests and her direct impact. Says her teammate, forward Napheesa Collier: “I’ve never heard a bad word spoken against Syl before.” Consider this a living eulogy from some of the people who know her best.

THE SUPERSTAR

It took until the second quarter of A’ja Wilson’s first career game against the Lynx for the future league MVP to find the score sheet. While Wilson had already appeared in more than a dozen WNBA games, she was still acclimating to life in the pros, and facing Minnesota’s front line, which in 2018 meant battling five-time WNBA champion Rebekkah Brunson and Fowles. “That was my Wow, I’m really here moment,” she says.

Five years later, the four-time All-Star is more accustomed to going up against Fowles. But Wilson’s experience facing off against the Minnesota center hasn’t gotten any easier. “There are moments when Syl will pin me on the inside, and I’ll be like, ‘I know exactly what she’s gonna do: two feet in the paint over me,’” the Aces star says. And then, Fowles scores doing just that.

Of all of Fowles’s accolades—and in addition to her WNBA ones she also made four consecutive Final Fours while at LSU—she says last year’s Defensive Player of the Year, her fourth, is the one she’s proudest of. Coming off a calf injury, which thwarted her 2020 season, Fowles had to rethink her training; she turned to pool workouts and band exercises, and went back to her childhood roots of running on a field. Lynx coach and general manager Cheryl Reeve also pushed her to improve her communication level on defense, and to up her steals, blocks and deflections totals. Fowles took the preseason feedback to heart, saying, “I really had challenged myself because I wasn’t the quickest. I wasn’t jumping the highest.”

A year removed from the honor, she still may not be the league leader in those categories, but in addition to remaining a high-level defensive player, in Year 15, Fowles leads the WNBA in rebounds and field goal percentage.

Sky forward Candace Parker, who has been open herself about possibly retiring at the end of this season, has been playing against Fowles since they were teens. Back then, Parker recalls, Fowles was the “same size and build” as she is now. But more than just her physical stature, Parker cites Fowles’s reliability when thinking about her success. Jones feels similarly.

“No one can throw her off of her game,” she says. “Steady and consistent for the entirety of her career.”

Says Reeve: “There’s no one in the class of Sylvia Fowles, in terms of dominating the center position as we’ve known the center position.”

THE MORTICIAN

Bobby Hicks has been in the funeral service industry for more than four decades; however, there’s only been one professional athlete he’s worked alongside. That, of course, is Fowles, who two offseasons ago started showing up around twice a week at Royal Funeral Service Inc. in her native Miami to help Hicks with the restoration and cosmetology of bodies that needed their features set for viewings.

Initially, Fowles shadowed Hicks. But it took her only about a week to exhibit an ability to perform highly technical tasks—like coordinating the hand and eye, making things look “normal and natural like when they were living,” Hicks explains in laypeople’s terms—on her own. “She has picked it up quite well,” he says. “We feel very fortunate to have someone of that magnitude being with us.”

Fowles has long demonstrated an interest in death. When she was 5, she attended the funeral of her grandmother Dorothy. While there, Fowles kissed Dorothy’s body, and soon afterward felt her face beginning to itch. Looking back, Fowles says, she thinks she had a reaction to the embalming fluid. Though she experienced discomfort that day, it sparked an interest in learning about mortuary sciences.

Since 2015, Fowles has been a student-athlete, of sorts. Away from the court, she enrolled in online courses at the American Academy McAllister Institute, a premier institute for those interested in the field. She says she recently finished all of her classwork, but that she still has to study for the national board exams before officially obtaining her degree. Of when she might take the test, she says: “I want to relax first. Take a vacation, then get back to it.”

Lynx guard Rachel Banham believes it’s “so fitting” for Fowles to be interested in mortuary sciences. “She just makes people feel calm and happy, and good and safe in times when you obviously don’t feel very good,” Banham says.

Adds Sari Lind, who played basketball with Banham at Minnesota and in 2017 hosted Fowles multiple times at the Lind Family Funeral Home: “She was just truly a natural with people. She’s just one of the kindest humans I’ve ever met.”

Multiple times during the 2017 season, Fowles traveled two hours outside Minneapolis to work at the Lind Family Funeral Home. But closer to home, Lind also brought the Lynx star to the Minnesota Funeral Directors Association convention in the Twin Cities, where Fowles sat in on classes related to the industry.

Lind recalls that other funeral directors in attendance who were basketball fans loved that Fowles showed up. She didn’t just appear, though. Fowles fully engaged with those around her. “They answered a lot of [my] questions,” she says. “Because I always have questions.”

Fowles would be interested in opening a funeral home in her postplaying life, though she also says she is most curious about being an embalmer. (“I’m not pretty good at holding my emotions,” she explains. “So I would rather just stay in the back and do the embalmment part.”)

She’ll have another opportunity to practice soon enough, as Hicks says he is planning to welcome her back at Royal Funeral Service Inc. for a third consecutive offseason. While there, he affectionately calls her “old lady,” a nod to the impending retiree’s soul. 

THE TEACHER

In her first five seasons with the Lynx, Fowles never missed a contest. But on Aug. 14, 2020, while in the league’s IMG Academy bubble, she was diagnosed with a severe calf injury that would end up derailing her year. That day, Reeve asked Fowles whether she wanted to stay in the bubble. The question was quickly shot down. “I want to be here for this team,” Fowles told her.

Thus began an unusual stretch of time for Fowles, who would go on to miss 15 of the team’s 22 regular-season games; instead of leading from the court, she was suddenly thrust onto a sideline role.

That summer was Banham’s first with the franchise. She recalls Fowles instructing her to more effectively use ball screens and read different defenses. Collier says that throughout her career, Fowles has driven home how to present one’s self on the court. “How to be a leader, or especially in the beginning, how to deal with Cheryl or the coaches,” she says.

In the bubble, one of the sport’s best on-court practitioners became an especially important off-court presence. “She was definitely Cheryl’s emotional support human, 100%,” Banham says. “It was hilarious. She would always be right by Cheryl trying to calm her down.” Often she’d use levity.

That lighthearted nature comes through when Fowles is asked whether there is one move she feels she’s passed down to younger bigs. “Half the time I don’t even know what I’m gonna do out there,” she says, without acknowledging she’s within the top 10 of all-time points scored.

Countless players over the years, though, have attached themselves to her in hopes of picking up grains of knowledge. Of course, she dispenses tips to WNBA teammates, but Reeve says that during USA Basketball camps, Fowles would freely provide information to all those present, not being overly consumed with passing out nuggets to future opponents.

Reeve thinks that Fowles would make for a great coach one day. She says her team’s star pupil has a “forgiving mindset” and a “short-term memory,” and that “[Fowles has] got the patience gene,” another key to the profession. Fowles, however, disagrees.

“Absolutely not,” Fowles says when asked whether she wants to patrol the sideline in her next life. “I don’t see myself being a coach. Mainly because I don’t think I have the patience. I’ve grown to have patience this year, but I still think I have a long way to go.”

Talk to teammates about that attribute, though, and they tend to side with their coach. Collier remembers on her very first day of training camp as a rookie how Fowles pulled her aside and said, “Baby, if you need anything you come to me, O.K.? Don’t hesitate to ask me any questions. I gotchu.” And she recalls one night on the road in Los Angeles during her third season when she was struggling, and Fowles took her out to dinner. That evening, Fowles helped Collier settle down and focus not on the way Reeve and her coaches were delivering feedback but on the literal messages being voiced.

The following night, Collier scored 27 points. Afterward, she made sure to thank her sensei.

THE CYCLIST

In late April, Fowles, smiling, walked into the gymnasium at Minneapolis’s Bryn Mawr Elementary School. In front of her sat 25 students, between the first and fifth grade, all of whom had been selected to go on a bike ride with the future basketball Hall of Famer.

Fowles told the group how she got into cycling: When she was around 4 or 5, her mother got Sylvia her first bike. It was purple and green and had training wheels attached to it. The training wheels, though, lasted just a week, because, Fowles says, she “didn’t think it was cool” and she wanted to be like her four older siblings. She hasn’t stopped riding since.

When Fowles was done talking, she tackled some hard-hitting questions: What was her favorite color? What were her favorite foods? When, and why, did she start playing basketball? And then the group went outside to ride. “The kids felt so comfortable,” remembers Reeve. “I felt like there was a real impact that she made on those kids.”

Those kids included Reeve’s son, Oliver, who is entering second grade. Reeve says he practiced for weeks for the ride. Fowles had given Oliver his first bike, one decked out in Spider-Man designs, when he was 3, but Reeve says he wasn’t confident in his skills before the event. “Now,” she says, “he wants to go out and ride his bike.”

While initially Fowles was in the front of the pack, throughout the ride she varied her speed to talk with as many students as possible.

“She came down to their level,” says Terry Esau, the executive director of Free Bikes 4 Kidz, the nonprofit partner of the event. “She’s a big kid, you know. And she just wanted to make sure all these kids were having fun.”

The Lynx and Fowles have referred to her last season as “Syl’s Final Ride.” As part of the campaign, they hosted events like the one in April, which saw Fowles conduct rides with members of the local community, and discuss why cycling has become so important to her.

“Mentally, it’s my way of debriefing,” Fowles says. “It’s another form of therapy. I get to ride and relax. I get to reflect on my day, reflect on the conversations that I’ve had throughout my day and certain situations I didn’t handle well.”

During the year, Fowles says she gets out on her custom-made Specialized bike twice a week, never riding more than 30 miles in one trek. But during the offseason, she’ll ride every day.

Following the trip around the Bryn Mawr school district, Fowles and the group returned to the gym. She spent one-on-one time with every student, posing for pictures and answering any questions that might have lingered.

“Those kids will never forget that,” says Anita Chavez, the school’s physical education teacher.

“MAMA SYL”

This spring Collier was eight months pregnant when she received an unsuspecting package from a likely source. Fowles had crafted a newborn baby basket for her teammate, filling it with dresses, beanies, burp towels and a cozy throw blanket, which the future Hall of Famer knitted herself.

Fowles, 36, has been knitting for as long as she can remember. She picked it up from her great-grandmother, being taught to do so, she says, “to keep me on task because I was a very active kid.” She has remained an active adult, but the recently woven blanket was less a way to occupy her attention and more so a way to express her affection.

“Mama Syl, being as thoughtful as she is, already had stuff in there that I hadn’t even gotten yet,” Collier says. “She’s just such a caring, nurturing person, and when you think of her you just think of warmth because she makes you and everyone around her feel so good.”

After being selected as the No. 2 pick in the 2008 WNBA draft, Fowles spent the first seven years of her professional career with the Sky, emerging as a force on the court and nurturing presence off it. In ’11, when All-Star guard Courtney Vandersloot was a rookie with Chicago, she would often reassure her mother that she was doing fine in her transition to life as a professional. “Sylvia is making sure I’m O.K.,” Vandersloot would tell her. Mama Syl quickly became mom-approved.

“Every time since that moment, every time she sees her, Sylvia gives her a big hug,” Vandersloot says. “Her hugs are like famous.”

Jewell Loyd, an All-Star guard for the Storm, remembers first receiving one of those beloved hugs when she was a sophomore in high school. Back then, Loyd, a Chicago-area native, was a practice player with the franchise. On her first day on the job, Fowles asked her how she was doing, much to Loyd’s surprise. Then, she put her arms around Loyd. “For someone who’s super shy at the time, like myself, it’s like, What’s going on?” Loyd remembers.

Every morning, since 2015, Reeve has also received an embrace from Fowles. Regardless of what happened during a practice or game the day before, Fowles will “pound” (Reeve’s word) on the door of the meeting room where she and her staff are gathered, and give out a morning greeting. Then, hours later, no matter what ensued in workouts, Fowles will break the last huddle in practice by giving Reeve a handshake and a hug.

“The consistency and the genuine nature of who she is so much bigger than basketball,” Reeve says.

Fowles says that her caring nature stems from her childhood, when, despite being the youngest of five children, her mother, Arrittio, always treated her like she was the oldest. From an early age, Sylvia was granted independence but also tasked with responsibilities around the house, like making sure clothes had been washed for the week, chores were taken care of and that food was around if Arrittio didn’t have time to cook.

Decades later, Mama Syl, who doesn’t have kids of her own yet, still frequently takes teammates out to meals, something she does for Banham, among others, whenever the team is on road trips. Such generosity has led Banham to reciprocate with a gesture of her own. In airports, while Fowles buys lunch for them, Banham finds a market to pick up water and the Lynx center’s favorite candy, fruit-flavored Mentos.

“She’s always willing to give,” Banham says.

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