In June 2020, a year before she passed away at age 59, Medina Dixon created a YouTube channel and posted a series of short videos about her life.
Dixon explained that she was fighting terminal pancreatic cancer. She sat on her couch and spoke slowly and quietly, visibly fatigued from her condition. But as Dixon recounted the highlights of her basketball career — from high school superstardom in Cambridge, Mass., to the Old Dominion national championship and on to Team USA — her inner spark returned. She smiled and laughed to herself at points, revealing the same beaming grin that everyone, from siblings to classmates to college rivals, remembers.
"She felt Boston never gave her the love she deserved. So she wanted the world to know. She wanted the world not to forget about her," said Dixon's younger brother, Herb.
Dixon's titles and All-American nominations and cool "Ice" nickname speak for themselves. She was also at the center of one of the largest scandals in Massachusetts high school sports history. Dixon dominated in hostile gyms during Boston's racism-fueled 1970s, went toe-to-toe against college basketball legends in the 1980s and won an Olympic bronze medal in the 1990s. In 2022, after her passing, she became the first woman in Boston to have an outdoor basketball court dedicated in her name.
"I think Medina, hands down, is one of the great, great missing pieces of women's basketball," Cheryl Miller told New England Basketball Journal.
So we embark on this story with a central question: How could Boston forget about Medina Dixon?
THE CITY'S DECLINE: What's going wrong with girls basketball in Boston?
——————
When a sophomore Dixon won the 1979 MIAA state championship with Cambridge Rindge & Latin — a trophy that would soon be taken away — she was radiating confidence. Her Boston Globe All-Scholastic bio led with an emphatic quote: “No girl in this world can stop me when I'm hot.”
Dixon was one of 13 kids. Her father, Herb Sr., was a military veteran who worked at a printing shop and as a nurse, and her mom, Claudia, was a courthouse secretary. A Muslim family, they named Medina after the holy city in Saudi Arabia.
Dixon's eleven brothers challenged her to keep up. Zachary Dixon would run 500-yard sprints in boots on the Dorchester beaches, foreshadowing his six-year NFL career. Rob Dixon became a fifth-round pick to the NBA's Washington Bullets and played professionally overseas. Several of Dixon's siblings reached college basketball; even her cousin, Al McClain, starred at UNH before being selected in the fifth round by the Houston Rockets. Herb Sr. and Claudia worked hard enough to put food on the table and raise their kids with love and discipline. If you weren't home on time for dinner, you weren't eating.
"(Work ethic) was a learned behavior," Rob said. "It was not learned at the basketball court; it was learned at home."
So it's no surprise that Dixon would shoot hundreds of jumpers in the rain and entrench herself in pickup games on the local courts that are now named after her. She caught fire quickly, first being noticed by Alfreda Harris, who ran Boston's only girls club team and had her eye on every talented player in the city. But Dixon mostly grew up competing against boys.
MORE HOOP QUEENS: How Cindy Blodgett became Maine's first basketball celebrity
Rob and younger brother Herb still laugh at the tales from the Joseph Lee K-8 School. The Dixons would dominate pickup as a unit, and boys would often walk in and ask for the Medina Dixon matchup, thinking they could take advantage of the girl on the floor. Within 30 minutes, Dixon's dominance would force them to leave, embarrassed and heckled. According to Herb, all-Dixon family lineups got banned from the gym in high school.
"They didn't want to let one of my other brothers play, but they said, 'Yeah, you can bring Medina on,'" Herb said. "She took that personal, and that sums up Medina right there. So every game, the last three to five buckets, she just said, 'Give me the ball and move out of the way.'"
Dixon played her freshman year at West Roxbury High and then transferred to Cambridge Rindge & Latin. She averaged 19 points and 15 rebounds as a sophomore point-center for the MIAA Division 1 state champs. Her Boston Blazers club team, back then the only one in New England, was stacked and finished fifth nationally that year – which included a win over Cheryl Miller's squad.
"We competed against them with Newton North my sophomore year — we played at Cambridge Rindge, and we were totally intimidated," said Sherry Levin, Dixon's club teammate who would go on to become Holy Cross' all-time scoring leader. "We lost, and I believe I had my lowest point total of my career, in part because Medina was such a force in the middle. … Very rarely did you come across someone of her athleticism and her ability."
There's so little film of Dixon available that we have to rely on old newspaper descriptions and the memories of those around her. They paint her as a do-it-all forward ahead of her time. Dixon could dunk, she was a shot-swatting monster, and she could handle the ball with ease at 6-foot-3.
Before her transcendent career at USC, Miller got to know Dixon when they teamed up on a loaded 1981 Youth Olympics roster that went to Yugoslavia. She described Dixon as "unabashedly authentic," a playful trash-talker whose spontaneity kept the girls in good spirits while many traveled abroad for the first time. When Dixon broke out in an impromptu silly rap during stretching, that was just "Dina being Dina."
But Dixon was also two years older and stronger than Miller, and both played similar styles as versatile forwards. Miller believed that if she could hold her own against Dixon, she could compete against anyone.
"A great teammate and a great role model for me, because she was an open book," Miller said. "If you asked her a question, she'd let you know. 'Hey, why do I keep getting beat here?' 'Well,' she goes, 'you're opening up too much. You know her first step; just cushion her first step, and then you know where she wants to go. She can only go right, Cheryl.' ... She was a great teacher, too."
The stars aligned in unprecedented fashion at Cambridge: Dixon, the No. 1 girls recruit in the country, shared a court and a classroom with No. 1 boys prospect Patrick Ewing. The future Knicks Hall of Famer was god-like in Cambridge, but so was Dixon, even while women's basketball was still in an early stage.
"They had similar personalities in the sense of, they got along with everybody," said Karl Hobbs, Dixon's former Cambridge classmate who is now an assistant coach at Georgia Tech. "They treated everyone well, whether you were the (close) teammate, or you were the player that didn't play at all."
MORE HOOP QUEENS: Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir stayed true to herself as Massachusetts' all-time scoring leader
Locals packed the gym to watch Dixon, and she was part of the first women's game ever at the old Boston Garden, against Levin and Newton North. Also crowding those sidelines were college coaches; Dixon had more than 200 scholarship offers.
"Pat Summitt — she came to the crib. Everyone came to my mom's house," Herb said. "They didn't call. They came to the crib in a tough neighborhood. They wanted to talk to my mother personally, that's how bad they wanted her. ... She was a rock star in Cambridge, even in Boston. Anywhere she went in Boston, (it was), 'Yo, what up Medina?'"
But Boston was also in a raw place around 1980, only a few years removed from the darkest parts of race riots and turmoil from inner-city busing. When Dixon played outside the city, racial slurs and taunts were common. Herb recalls a particular game against Walpole when his whole family attended and the crowd hurled the N-word at Dixon repeatedly. He also remembers her stat line: 45 points, 15 rebounds, eight or nine assists and at least seven blocks.
"We would come home emotional and upset, and she didn't understand at first, but (then) she got it firsthand, so she saw it. And the more talent you displayed, the more resentful people became," Rob said. "That was really frustrating for her in terms of people not just recognizing her based on her skin color, but her ability. That was very confusing. And so there were times when she would tell me in confidence, 'These people don't like me. They don't want me to be doing my best. They don't want me to have success.’"
Dixon was not given media coverage like Ewing or other women's stars to come. Instead, the front-page story on Dixon was when the MIAA stripped Cambridge of that 1979 state championship.
Dixon was already in a bad situation her junior year; according to a 1980 story in the Boston Globe, she was ineligible to play for Cambridge "because of problems cutting classes and absenteeism." Then it came out that court documents had falsely labeled Claudia Dixon as deceased (she was very much alive) and transferred legal guardianship of Dixon to Hilda Taggart, the sister-in-law of Cambridge boys coach Mike Jarvis — even though stories from the time say Taggart did not know she had guardianship. Effectively, that allowed Dixon to be a Cambridge resident (though Claudia Dixon later said Medina returned home and commuted from Boston).
That's the short version of a saga that played out in the news for months. The MIAA was already cracking down on Cambridge — they had ruled Hobbs ineligible, claiming he was recruited from Burke in Boston by Jarvis, but then reinstated him. It came to a head on Jan. 31, 1980, when the MIAA revoked Cambridge's state championship. After months of messy back-and-forth, the boys team essentially suffered no penalties, while Dixon played all of one game as a junior, spent the rest of the winter in local Dorchester leagues and lost her only state title.
"Someone took my mom's name off a paper and pretended she was dead, just so I could win a state title for Cambridge," Dixon told the Globe in 1983. "Those coaches were in it with me from the word jump, and as soon as things got sticky, all I got from them was 'talk to my lawyer.'"
Dixon committed to South Carolina, and according to Rob, it was an easy decision to get out of New England.
"She had no interest at all in staying local. None. She connected the basketball programs to the cultural climate,'" he said. "She said, 'I gotta get away from here. People don't respect this. People don't appreciate it.' And she honestly felt like they were too small. They didn't compete on the level that she wanted to get to."
MORE HOOP QUEENS: Nadine Domond rose from Bridgeport's blacktops as the nation's top point guard
Dixon played one year at South Carolina before transferring to powerhouse Old Dominion. Immediately she turned heads for both her play and shameless confidence. In that same 1983 story, Dixon told the Globe that reigning national player of the year Anne Donovan was allowed to skip some practices — and that Dixon was protesting it.
"I know she's player of the year and all that, but if she didn't have to go to practice, then neither did I," Dixon said at the time. "Hey, I'm not All-American yet, but I will be."
Dixon promptly scored 1,968 career points (1,725 at ODU) and corralling 979 rebounds. She earned first-team All-American status and was a Naismith Player of the Year finalist in 1985. As one half of a New England star duo with New Haven, Conn., native Tracy Claxton, Dixon helped Old Dominion win the national championship that year.
Though women's basketball didn't receive nearly the same TV coverage, McClain and the Dixon extended family kept up with her via magazines. Dixon made regular appearances in Sports Illustrated whenever she went head-to-head with the likes of Miller and Kim Mulkey.
"There is less than a handful of people who I played against that I could never afford to take a play off, and she was one of them," Miller said. "I'm talking about dialed in, as soon as I was finished taping, once I was on a court, warm-ups, focused. No plays off."
But Dixon never felt the love from her home state. Rob recalls picking Dixon up from the airport after she had won the national championship. She expected a warm welcome — maybe some reporters or a crowd of old Cambridge fans who had followed her to the next level. No one came to greet her.
"That hurt her so badly, and we had to drive home to Mattapan, and she was crushed," Rob said. "She could not believe that, while other girls who played on their national championship team had parades and they didn't even play that much. When she came back here, zip — nothing. I picked her up at the airport, and she was so emotional and so upset. She didn't understand it."
Dixon finished college 11 years before the WNBA began, so her best pro options were with the U.S. national team and overseas. She competed for the 1990 squad that won FIBA World Cup gold, then led the 1992 national team in scoring en route to an Olympic bronze medal. She went overseas and earned six-figure salaries, playing six years in Japan as the country's first Black pro, as well as in Russia, Italy and Israel.
"It's weird because the European countries seem to take their women’s sports more seriously than here in the United States, which is awful, but that was the reality," Rob said. "You would go into restaurants (overseas) and people would cheer. She was a legend."
MORE HOOP QUEENS: Jennifer Rizzotti’s lifelong legacy in Connecticut
During her pro career, Dixon faced several chapters of adversity. She was living comfortably in Virginia off of her salaries, but a relationship went sour and ended with a bad breakup and lost finances. Dixon returned to Boston in poor spirits, then suffered her first seizure in 1998 before being diagnosed with epilepsy. She learned to live with that diagnosis and largely retreated from public life, occasionally training young girls during the 2000s.
After Dixon’s cancer diagnosis in 2018, McClain realized time was running out to give his cousin the appreciation she deserved in life. In 2021, months before her passing, he brought several of Massachusetts' top girls prospects to New York's famous Rucker Park for an all-star game held in Dixon's honor. She saw the top girls basketball players in the state at the time wearing jerseys that prominently displayed her name.
"She just cried when she saw," McClain said. "She was like, wow — because she kind of knew that she wasn't going to be around that much longer."
Rob and Herb have their theories on why Boston never fully embraced its homegrown star. They believe racism, an apathy towards women's basketball at the time, and Dixon's departure from the local scene in college all contributed in some way. But that means missing out on the undisputed queen of Boston basketball. Even Miller did not know Dixon had passed or was even battling cancer until New England Basketball Journal reached out for an interview this summer.
"If there's one knock that I have with with women's basketball — I'll stay in my lane with women's basketball — boy, we are quick to sit up there and light up everybody's phone when something goes wrong or something salacious (happens)," Miller said. "But God forbid that somebody needs support, someone's ill, someone's struggling with cancer or someone was in a car accident — we don't get on a grapevine like that and support one another. And shame on us for not doing a better job of that, and myself included."
McClain has since made it his mission to restore Dixon's name to prominence. He holds multiple Medina Dixon All-Star tournaments every year, which often draw the best talent from around New England. He helped spearhead the court dedication in her native Mattapan neighborhood. For so long, Dixon was overlooked by her home community — now, after her death, it's up to those who knew her to spread the talent and unshakeable swagger that defined her in life.
"She was a superstar. That's what superstars do," Herb said. "She'd walk in and she'd light up the room."
