The name her parents gave her couldn't have fit better. They christened the future showgirl of Brazilian basketball Hortencia, after the Portuguese word for the hydrangea plant, and Hortencia Maria de Fatima Marcari not only flowered, but did so perennially. Indeed, few ballplayers of any nationality or gender played the game in such eye-catching fashion over so many years.

Basketball hoops didn't hang in the backyards of Hortencia's hometown of Portirendaba, where she grew up as the child of subsistence farmers. A young girl either played formally with a club team or not at all. Thus Hortencia nearly quit shortly after taking up the game at age 13, because she couldn't afford the bus fare to practice. But through an "adopt-an-athlete" program set up by the local municipal government, a bicycle factory underwrote the cost of her training. Within two years, at 15, she had won a place on the national team and begun carrying on to the court with her what would become the signature burden of her career, the hopes and dreams of others. Two years after that, Tennessee coach Pat Summitt offered her a scholarship to come to Knoxville, but she chose instead to sign to play professionally, and soon began banking $5,000 a month. She was still a teenager when, as a member of the Brazilian nationals, she won her first South American championship.

So began a run of two decades as the most celebrated and accomplished female athlete in South America's most populous country. (Like most Brazilian sports heroes Hortencia has always gone by a single moniker.) Neither particularly tall (5'8") or strong (for most of her career she weighed slightly more than 130 pounds), she nonetheless moved relentlessly without the ball and had a scorer's sixth sense for the basket. In 1987 she actually scored 124 points in a game. Always up on the balls of her feet, her ponytail flapping behind, she searched out gaps in the defense and angles to the hoop with the industry of John Havlicek or Bill Bradley in his prime.

In 1991 Hortencia led the Brazilian women to their greatest international title to that point, the gold medal at the Pan-American Games in Havana. (It came at the expense of the U.S., and afterward she received a peck on the cheek from Fidel Castro.) Three years later in Australia she averaged 27.6 points a game while leading Brazil to a world championship, her country's first. (Again the Americans played the foil, getting singed by Brazil's 65% shooting in the final.) That victory took place only a couple of months before the Brazilian men would win soccer's World Cup, and the selfless style of the Samba Sisters foreshadowed how the male footballers would bag their own crown-by subjugating everyone's individual freedom for the betterment of the team.

By now 35 years old and hard-pressed to imagine how she could top that accomplishment, Hortencia announced her retirement. But in the spring of 1996, before the Atlanta Games, she realized that one last gemstone of international basketball, an Olympic gold medal, lay within her reach. She decided to make a comeback, even though she had given birth to a son only four months earlier. So there she was, at national team practice in the first week of May, joining her teammates for some light wagering on three-point shots. She was one of only two players to send her first attempt cleanly through the net. In an ensuing shoot-off Hortencia bottomed out another shot, thereby winning the competition. It was nothing but a bit of horsing around at practice, but a country desperate to see her extend her career spun the moment into something much more. Brazilian television reported the feat that night, and the next morning newspapers around the country bannered the news: THE QUEEN HAS RETURNED.

"I couldn't go to a gas station without the attendant asking me to return to the game," she said of her time away from basketball. "It was very hard to resist the pressure. And then there is the spirit of the Olympics. I dedicated many years of my life to Brazilian basketball and managed to go to only one Olympics [in 1992]. I think I deserve to participate-not as a savior, but as an athlete who can help the team."

The role of nonsavior was wholly new and, as it turned out, Brazil proved to be no match for the U.S. in Atlanta that year. A Dream Team of homestanding Americans, wanting nothing more than to avenge that loss at the Worlds two years earlier, had trained together for 14 months, the same length of time that Hortencia had just spent away from the game. The result seemed to be foreordained when the two teams met, and Hortencia and Co. wound up having to settle for the bronze. But she had long ago secured her legacy. Upon Hortencia's permanent retirement, the woman who coached her to that 1991 Pan American Games gold medal, Maria Helena Cardoso, said, "If I could, I would put her in a refrigerator to preserve her forever."

Like Brazilian basketball players of both sexes, Hortencia wasn't known for her defense. She let her guard down even for the Brazilian edition of Playboy, in 1988; that appearance, as well as royalties from a Hortencia doll and other perquisites of fame, helped her to earn six figures annually, a generous chunk of which she would donate to an orphanage. "I feel sorry for any man who falls in love with me," she had said in the mid-Eighties. "I'm not ready for long relationships." But in 1989 she married Jose Victor Oliva, a Sao Paulo restaurateur and club owner known locally as The King of the Night. (She couldn't quite match the celebrity of soccer star Pele, but Pele was best man at her wedding.) During the Atlanta Games, while mom stayed in the Olympic Village, Jose and their son, Joao Victor, bunked down with a nanny at a nearby hotel, with Hortencia sneaking away when she could to discharge her maternal duties.

Upon returning home from Atlanta, Hortencia stepped up to the front office of a club in a Sao Paulo suburb, serving by turns as general manager and coach. Economic hardships tend to leave the fate of every season of the Brazilian women's league hanging in the balance, but through her determination, many contacts and reservoir of charisma she was able to see her team through from year to year. In an improvised style typical of Brazil, she prevailed on the southern state of Parana to underwrite her team by agreeing to lead an initiative that taught the game's fundamentals to 3,000 boys and girls. "If the only sponsor she could find was in the Amazon," a Brazilian sportswriter said of her, "she'd move her team to the Amazon."

Sometimes it takes a transcendent rivalry between two individual athletes for fans to see the full extent of a sport's possibilities. This has been particularly true in women's sports, which the general public has tended to regard as stepchildren until, for instance, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova could bring to a new prominence a sport like women's tennis. Hortencia's rivalry with Brazilian national teammate and playmaking conjurer Maria Paula Goncalves da Silva, a.k.a. Paula, had every bit that Chrissie-Martina quality. The two seemed to embody, respectively, the basketball characteristics of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. Remorseless rivals every winter in the national league, the two learned each summer to become glorious collaborators for their country.

Over the years Hortencia has occasionally bemoaned what her countrymen call "the laughing blood," a blithe national spirit that seems to prevent any one loss from mattering too terribly much (men's soccer, of course, excepted). What elevated Hortencia above the common crowd in her country, and merits her induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame this weekend, is what she added to that indigenous sensibility: a determination to play, each time she set foot on the floor, with a steeliness as sharp-edged as her cheekbones. As a result of her career, Brazilian parents today may still give a soccer ball to their son, but they might just hand a basketball to their daughter.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Alexander Wolff is author of Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure