When Hammon graduated, the W.N.B.A. was in its third season. It was not the first women’s professional basketball league, but it was the starriest, with N.C.A.A. and Olympic legends like Lisa Leslie, Rebecca Lobo, and Sheryl Swoopes, and it had the full backing of the N.B.A. On the W.N.B.A.’s draft day, Hammon was in Fort Collins, waiting for her agent to call; the phone didn’t ring. There had been an influx of established players as a rival league folded, but the real problem was that Hammon was considered too small to compete. Though she wasn’t drafted, the New York Liberty offered her a spot at its training camp, where not every player would make the team. She survived the cuts and signed a contract for twenty-five thousand dollars.

The Liberty had some of the best players in the league, like Teresa Weatherspoon, an energetic ball handler, and Vickie Johnson, a silky-smooth scorer. Hammon challenged herself to match up against them in practice. Before long, she had made herself indispensable as a substitute player, coming off the bench to score and to guide the team. In 2003, she became the starting point guard. “Her size never mattered,” the Liberty’s head coach, Richie Adubato, said. “When she drove to the basket, it didn’t matter who was in there. She had one shot blocked, I think, in four years.”

In 2007, the San Antonio Silver Stars traded for her. Dan Hughes, the coach, would watch her take on multiple opponents and think, She’s in trouble—we’re in trouble. Then he came to appreciate how “she’d hang in the air longer, create spin, and hit the corner on the backboard,” and he began looking forward to seeing how she got out of such situations. “I became a fan,” he said.

Hammon became one of the most popular players in the W.N.B.A., but the league struggled financially. Since its promising first years, many teams have lost money; several have been moved or shuttered. In the W.N.B.A., players’ annual salaries max out at just over a hundred thousand dollars; in the N.B.A., the minimum is more than five hundred thousand, and stars make tens of millions, never mind endorsement money. W.N.B.A. players routinely spend about half the year overseas, where private patrons or wealthy corporations back teams as vanity projects. In 2007, Hammon was making about ninety-five thousand dollars a year, then the W.N.B.A.’s maximum salary, when C.S.K.A., a Russian team, offered her a four-year deal worth around two million dollars. As part of the deal, Hammon would become a Russian citizen; the rules of the Russian Premier League prevent teams from fielding more than two American players.

While Hammon was negotiating her contract with C.S.K.A., she learned that the U.S. Olympic team had not invited her to its first round of tryouts. The exclusion reinforced the idea she had about herself. “I’ve always been on the outside looking in,” she said. “The kid not picked.” The Russian national team asked her to play for them, and she accepted the offer. She wanted to play in the Olympics, and Washington’s political relations with Moscow were not nearly as fraught as they are now. “This is basketball, it isn’t the Cold War,” she said at the time.

She moved to Moscow for the C.S.K.A. season in 2007, and began training with the national team in 2008. She spent seven months a year abroad for the next six years, until she started working with the Spurs. “I was an outsider,” Hammon told me. “They looked at me with one eyebrow”—she cocked hers. Anna Petrakova, who played with Hammon on C.S.K.A. and the national team, told me, “When people come to Russia, they always seem a little standoffish. They don’t always integrate in the culture.” Hammon was different. “She just came with an open heart.” Hammon learned a little Russian, and at games she enthusiastically fumbled her way through the national anthem.

Many people thought that Hammon was naïve, or worse. Some American players called her disloyal. Far more painful for Hammon was the reaction at home, in South Dakota. “I come from a red state, where it’s God, country, family,” she told me. “I got my mom calling me on the phone saying, ‘You don’t understand people of my generation,’ ” and crying every time they spoke. Before that, she’d been the spirited point guard, the All-Star everyone loved. Now everyone was questioning her. “I took a beating,” she said.

At the Summer Games in Beijing, in August, 2008, the U.S. beat Russia in the semifinals. After the game, Lisa Leslie, one of the most decorated Olympic basketball players, refused to shake Hammon’s hand. The U.S. went on to win the finals. At the medal ceremony, Hammon stood on the lowest step of the podium, in her Russian uniform, a bronze medal around her neck. When the American national anthem played, she placed her hand on her heart. Still, she was proud of the Russian national team, and of her ability to integrate with the players. Hammon told me, “I’m Russian to them, and it has nothing to do with the passport I’m holding.

“I think that journey helped prepare me to do things that people hadn’t done,” she said. “It helped me take a lot of crap. It helped build something inside me.”

When Hammon began observing Spurs practices, she assumed that it would help her get a job with a college team or in the W.N.B.A. “Coaching women, that’s where my mind-set was the whole time,” she said. Then, one night at dinner, Tony Parker, the Spurs’ point guard, who is a close friend of Hammon—“She’s sort of like my big sister,” he told me—said that he thought Popovich might hire her. “Really?” she replied.

“It was almost like a perfect match, because Pop likes to try stuff,” Parker recalled. “I thought it would be perfect for those two to get together—great basketball minds.” He had no doubt that she would be accepted by the other players. “She had the support of the point guard, so she’s good,” he added with a smile.

Popovich and Buford, the Spurs’ general manager, watched how she behaved in meetings and interacted with players on the floor. Tim Duncan, one of the game’s greatest power forwards, is known to be exceptionally reticent. Parker once said that, during his first season, Duncan didn’t even speak to him. Hammon realized that she would have to break through with Duncan over time, and off the court. “Let’s be real,” she said, and laughed. “I was not sitting there trying to give Timmy extra tips.”

“With a new job, when you go, you shut up,” Popovich said. “You don’t try to prove to people how smart you are, or that you have better ideas. She was cognizant of that sort of managerial thing.” In August, 2014, the Spurs offered Hammon the job as an assistant coach.

The announcement was greeted with fanfare. President Obama tweeted his congratulations. The mainstream media ran complimentary coverage. “No one is going to come up and say, ‘I’m so pissed you got that job, I can’t believe it,’ ” Hammon said. “There’s certain noise that I know goes on, but no one ever says it, because it’s not the politically correct thing to say.” Players and opposing coaches were, for the most part, encouraging. Stars like LeBron James and Chris Paul told her that they were happy she was hired. Last week, James told reporters, “You guys know how fond I am of Coach Pop, so for him to bring Becky in there, to be able to be an assistant and give her input—I don’t quite know how much input she has, I’m not there on a day-to-day basis—but just having her face there, it means a lot.”