When her parents' marriage broke up, 11-year-old Chamique moved into her grandmother's warm, stable home. Around the projects in Queens's Astoria neighborhood, Chamique was known as "Flat Out" because she would flat-out drop anything to play basketball. "Big boys, small boys, whoever, I was always ready to take them on," she says. "I wasn't scared of anybody's game." Her grandmother, who had played basketball as a girl in Alabama, tolerated her court obsession, except on Sundays when it conflicted with church. "Sometimes she had to put her foot down, but that was the only trouble she had out of me," says Holdsclaw.
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