Breanna Stewart Is Bridging the Gap in Women’s Basketball

Breanna Stewart adored her father-in-law, Josep Xargay, a basketball superfan who rooted for two players with everything he had. He hardly ever missed a game, not even during his daughter Marta’s stints with the Spanish national team as it traveled all over the world and won an Olympic silver medal. 

He flew to Bangkok and Arizona to watch Marta play, and to Seattle and New York City to cheer for her wife, known worldwide as Stewie, morphing his passport into a collage of love and basketball.

He did, at least, until the diagnosis. Lung cancer. Prognosis: grim.

Even when Josep couldn’t leave his hospital bed in Spain last fall, he wanted to tune in to Stewie’s games more than anything. When he could, he cheered so loudly that patients in adjacent rooms couldn’t help but follow the Liberty, Stewart’s new team after six remarkably successful seasons with the Storm. When he couldn’t, Josep dialed Marta afterward in anger—at his pain, mostly, and what it had begun to cost him.

Read more (via SI.com)