Stephon is barely fourteen, has yet to begin his freshman year at Lincoln High, but is already considered the most gifted young New York City guard since Kenny Anderson came out of the Lefrak City projects in Queens two years ago on his way to becoming the star of the New Jersey Nets. Last summer, as an eighth-grader, Stephon snuck into a basketball camp for high-schoolers and would have been kicked out, except that he played with such consummate brilliance that his stunt was written up in the sports pages of the New York Daily News. Fourteen years old, and his college recruiting has already begun. Coaches send him letters (in violation of NCAA rules), requesting the pleasure of his company during his years of college eligibility; street agents, paid under the table by colleges to bring top players to their programs, are cultivating Stephon; and practically every high school coach in the city heaps him with free gear—sneakers, caps, bags—in an attempt to lure him to his school.
At first glance, Stephon doesn’t look like the future of anything. He’s diminutive, barely five feet nine, with the rounded forehead and delicate features of an infant. He sports a stylish razor cut and a newly pierced ear, and the huge gold stud seems to tilt his tiny bald head off its axis. Caught somewhere between puberty and superstardom, he walks around with his sneakers untied, the ends of his belt drooping suggestively from his pants, and half a Snickers bar extruding from his mouth. But what on earth is this? Dribbling by himself in a corner of the court, Stephon has raised a ball with one hand directly over his head and threaded it through his legs. From back to front. Without interrupting his dribble. Now he’s doing it with two balls!
With Stephon here, Corey hands me his Walkman and strolls onto the court. Russell, too, is persuaded to give up his solo regimen and puts his gold chain around my neck for safekeeping. In fact, every star from Lincoln High has come out tonight except the team’s center, Tchaka Shipp, but the game won’t be delayed on his account. Tchaka lives miles away in the more working-class environs of Jamaica, Queens; and although at six feet seven he towers above all his teammates, he has been leery of hanging around the Coney Island courts ever since he came here to play, spent the night at Corey’s apartment, and someone blew up a car right outside Corey’s window. Not long ago Tchaka ventured to the Garden, knowing he’d get the best run in all five boroughs here, but after he surveyed the mangy dogs and ragged street people lingering around the court’s edges, he concluded, “Too many low-life, rowdy-ass Brooklyn niggers. I’m heading back to Queens. Now.”
Tonight, however, darkness brings only a cool, vaporous sea breeze and nothing to distract the players from their game. Basketball, it is commonly said, is a sport of pure instinct, but the five-on-five contest that begins here is something else. Corey and Stephon are cousins, and Russell is as good as family—the three of them have played together since they were in grade school. They seem to move as if the spontaneous, magical geometry of the game has all been rehearsed in advance. Stephon, the smallest by far, is doing tricks with the ball as though it were dangling from his hand by a string, then gunning it to his older teammates with a series of virtuoso no-look passes: behind-the-back passes, sidearm passes, shovel passes. Corey is lulling defenders with his sleepy eyes, then exploding to the basket, where he casually tosses the ball through the hoop. Russell is sinking twenty-footers as if they were six-inch putts.
The game has just begun when a crowd starts to form: sidelined players, three deep, waiting their turn. A prostitute trolling for clients. A drunk yelling maniacally, “I played with Jordan, I played with Jabbar. They ain’t shit. And neither are you!” A buffed-out guy in a silk suit and alligator shoes arrives, swigging from a bottle of Courvoisier. An agent? A scout? The crowd gives him elbow room. A couple of teenage mothers with strollers come by. There are many of them in Coney Island; they get significantly less elbow room.
It’s past midnight now, and the ambient glow of Manhattan’s remote skyscrapers has turned the sky a metallic blue. Standing courtside, we can see only the darkened outlines of the projects, looming in every direction, and the shirtless players streaking back and forth, drenched in orange light. Now and then the ref steps out from the darkness onto center court and his official stripes glow incongruously beneath the court lights as the Doppler wail of police sirens drifts in from the nearby streets. Corey, sprinting downcourt, calls out, “Homeboy! Homeboy!” Standing under his own basket, Stephon lets fly with a long, improbable pass that Corey, running full speed, somehow manages to catch and dunk in one balletic leap. The game is called on account of total pandemonium: players and spectators are screaming and staggering around the court—knees buckling, heads held in astonishment. Even Mr. Courvoisier loses his cool. Stephon laughs and points to the rim, still shuddering from its run-in with Corey’s fists. “Yo, cuz!” he yells. “Make it bleed!” Then he raises his arms jubilantly and dances a little jig, rendered momentarily insane by the sheer, giddy pleasure of playing this game to perfection.
Gary Smith
By the late 1970s, more than a year before he graduated with an English degree from LaSalle, Gary Smith (b. 1953) was already working full-time at the Philadelphia Daily News. It was “a great place to hatch,” he said—a sports department where “creativity and unusual storytelling were prized.” Smith took that license and went on to essentially turn himself into a nonfiction short story writer, at Inside Sports from 1979 to ’82, and for thirty years after that at Sports Illustrated, winning an unprecedented four National Magazine Awards and ten finalist nominations along the way. Smith would call subjects back multiple times to press them on what they were thinking—reportorial grunt work that gave him the credibility to “get inside heads” on the page. When he turned to this 1998 piece about Tennessee women’s coach Pat Summitt, Smith had already profiled several demanding coaches, including college basketball’s John Chaney and pro football’s Dick Vermeil, and in a fit of restlessness tried a different tack: “I wanted to use more of a cinematographic eye, to see if where you set up ‘the camera’ on a long narrative story could affect its emotional impact.” He collected several anecdotes about Summitt’s relationship with her headstrong point guard, Michelle Marciniak, and later, in the Marciniak family living room, discovered that he was sitting on the very couch where a pregnant Summitt, determined to land her recruit, had once nearly given birth. “I realized the Michelle lens was the one I’d be keeping my eye pressed to until the finish line,” Smith said. “Which meant bouncing virtually everything vital about Pat’s story off Michelle, so it could all be strained through her.” The result is the kind of profile that the writer made his specialty—“the article that eloquently and dramatically inhabits the consciousness of its subject,” as editor and critic Ben Yagoda wrote of Smith’s storytelling, “and whose momentum takes us toward the kind of artistic and emotional payoff we expect from the best literary art.”
Eyes of the Storm
HERE COMES this lady into your life. You don’t know that she has been up all night peeing, racked with pain in her lower back. You don’t know how many people told her she was nuts to get on an airplane and fly to your hometown at a time like this. You don’t know that an hour ago, when her water broke, she was crouched in an eight-seat King Air blotting her legs with paper towels. Hell, you’re 16. You don’t know that she’s spitting Nature in the eye and kicking Time in the teeth.
She’s sitting on your sofa as you come through the door from school on a September day in 1990, and she grins and grinds her teeth against the contractions. How could you know that it’s already too late—that Pat Summitt’s got you, she’s got you forever?
Michelle Marciniak takes a seat and looks around her living room. She’s a senior at Allentown (Pennsylvania) Central Catholic High, an hour north of Philadelphia, a guard who in six months will become the Naismith and Gatorade player of the year. But that’s not enough for Michelle. In her dream she has both the acclaim that goes to the best player in the land and the championship that her high school team keeps falling short of. She w
ould love to put her dream in Pat’s hands, but in Pat’s hands already rests the other player of the year candidate, the other All-America who plays Michelle’s position.
Michelle knows something weird is going on the minute she walks in the door . . . but what is it? Her mom, Betsy, and her older brother, Steve, are wearing the same nervous, crooked little smile. Michelle’s cocker spaniel, Frosty, is yip-yapping laps around the premier coach in the history of women’s basketball. Pat’s bouncing from the sofa to the bathroom to the telephone and back. Her assistant coach, Mickie DeMoss, is whipping through Tennessee’s recruiting scrapbook as if she’s sitting on a mound of fire ants: Here’s the arena, here’s the library, here’s the ’89 national championship—O.K., Michelle, any questions? Michelle’s dad, Whitey, is sitting across the room jingling coins manically in his pocket. You try it. It’s not easy to jingle coins while you’re sitting down.
Suddenly Nature mounts a furious comeback, Time starts kicking Pat in the teeth. “Mickie,” she blurts, “we have to go. Now.” Suddenly they’re babbling to the teenage girl that Pat’s baby is coming, and Steve and Michelle are racing to his car to lead the Tennessee coaches to—to the hospital, right?—heck no, to the airport, because Patricia Head Summitt is going to have this baby when and where she wants it. Suddenly Steve and Michelle are swerving around curves, blowing through red lights and stop signs and DO NOT ENTER signs, swiveling their heads to look back at Mickie, who’s freaking out at the wheel of the rental car, and Pat, who has her feet on the dashboard and is groaning. They all screech to a halt near the airport’s private hangars. Mickie runs up the steps into an airplane. Wrong airplane. She pops back out. “I’ll call you!” Pat shouts to Michelle. She strides into the King Air, and off she roars into the sky.
There are a hundred ways to write a story about a hurricane. We could watch it gathering shape and strength from afar and chronicle its course. We could follow at its heels and document its wake, or attempt to speak to all who experienced it and make a mosaic of their impressions. But perhaps the most direct and true way is to see and smell and feel it through one person—one girl who ran both from it and straight at it; one girl sucked into its eye and then set down on its other side; one girl, now a woman, who has had time to sort out what it did to her life.
Those who are playing for Pat Summitt now at Tennessee—members of the 1997–98 team, which finished the regular season 30–0 and is favored to win an astonishing third consecutive national title, the sixth in 12 years—cannot see the hurricane clearly because they’re still inside it. They’re hugging a tree for dear life, waiting for the wind and water to recede. Someone else, on a dry, sunny day a few years from now, can ask them to describe what it was like to play for this woman whose five national championships are surpassed in NCAA basketball history only by John Wooden’s ten; whose .814 winning percentage in 23 seasons ranks fifth among all coaches in the history of men’s and women’s college basketball; whose number of trips to the Final Four, 14 and counting, will most likely never be matched, seeing how she’s only 45. This woman who never raised a placard or a peep for women’s rights, who never filed a suit or overturned a statute or gave a flying hoot about isms or movements, this unconscious revolutionary who’s tearing up the terrain of sexual stereotypes and seeding it with young women who have an altered vision of what a female can be.
So we’ll leave her for now, we who can’t grasp yet what women like her will mean to the rest of us. We’ll leave her doubled over in pain on an airplane, clenching every muscle she’s got, trying to recall everything her mother told her about birthing babies so she can do the opposite until she’s back on the ground in Tennessee. And we’ll return to the teenage girl by the phone, awaiting Pat’s call, trying to fathom what this strange day portends.
It’s so hard, when so much air has leaked out of your dream, to inflate it again. For the previous two years, whenever Michelle was frustrated or angry on the court, whenever her high school coach yanked her midway through the third quarter because he didn’t believe in stars or 40-point scoring nights, all she had to do was look up in the stands and see her mother forming that little T with her forefingers. It meant Tennessee, but it really meant Pat. It meant NCAA championships and All-America honors and Olympic gold medals, because that’s what girls got when they were handpicked by Pat.
Ever since that day in December ’87, during her freshman year, when Michelle persuaded her mom to take her on an unofficial visit to Knoxville and she watched this tall, handsome, crisply dressed woman coach a game and a practice, Michelle’s aim in life had been to play for Pat. That practice had blown her mind; never had Michelle met a woman—hell, a human being—so intense, so authoritative, so certain and yet so caring. Pat walked into a room, and everything about her—her ramrod posture, her confident smile, her piercing blue eyes and her direct manner of speaking—said, “I love what I’m doing and this is what I’m here to talk about, and you’ll pay attention while I’m talking or you’ll leave the room.” Michelle could picture her as president—no, not of the university but of the country! And imagine this: Coach Summitt told her girls to call her Pat!
For hours the teenager would thumb through her bible, a scrapbook full of photographs of Tennessee women’s basketball and of warm notes from Pat. To heck with rival recruiters who warned her that Pat would snuff out her flamboyance on the court—envy, pure poison envy. She was going to play for the lady, case closed . . . until that afternoon in the spring of 1990, the end of her junior year. It was the day after Michelle’s second unofficial visit to Knoxville, and on the way home she stopped in Hampton, Virginia, to play in an AAU tournament. She had decided it was time to announce her decision to the world when . . .
“Did you hear about Tiffany?” It was her AAU coach, Michael Flynn, addressing Michelle just before she took the court.
“No, what about her?” said Michelle.
“She committed to Tennessee.”
“That can’t be true! I was just there yesterday!”
“Well, it is. She committed today.”
Michelle felt as if she were choking, as if she might faint. Tiffany Woosley was the girl who would vie with Michelle for every player of the year award during their senior seasons. A Tennessee girl, for crying out loud, who played point guard, the same position as Michelle; no way there would be playing time for two freshman guards! Pat must have betrayed her! Pat must have tipped off Tiffany that Michelle was about to commit, and now Tiffany was the first one, the special one, the local hero with the inside track, and Michelle’s dream was up in smoke!
She cried her way up I-95 on the journey home. Bitterly she studied the list of 200 other universities offering her scholarships and searched for a team with no dictator, no system to submit to, somewhere she could play the splashy, spinning, behind-the-back-and-between-the-legs game she loved, light it up for 30 a night and stick it to that cruel lady who . . .
Who now, six months later, has just hopelessly muddled Michelle by nearly dropping a baby in her lap! “If she didn’t really want me, why did she go through all that, Mom?” Michelle asks as the two sit up past midnight, waiting for Pat to call. Michelle has always believed in omens, in signals from God. “Maybe this means I was meant to go with her,” she says. “I almost feel like I’m the godmother of this baby.”
At 1 a.m. the phone jangles. It’s Pat, calling a 16-year-old player a half hour after giving birth to a boy. It’s Pat, whose doctor has just told her that it was only because the baby’s head was turned sideways in the womb that she didn’t deliver him into the hands of an assistant coach at 20,000 feet.
“Congratulations!” cries Michelle. “I can’t believe this! Thanks so much for calling me! Good-bye! Congratulations, Pat!”
So Michelle signs with Pat and becomes an All-America guard at Tennessee, correct?
No. When Pat pictures Michelle, she sees so much of herself—the girl who would challenge boys to races and arm-wrestling matches and tackle football.
That’s why Pat can’t bear to disappoint Michelle, why she tells her that she wants her very much, but she can’t promise her playing time or stardom. So Michelle agonizes, Michelle flip-flops, Michelle visits Tennessee a third time, hugs Pat, kisses the new baby . . . and signs with Notre Dame. And waits all of two weeks into her freshman season to break NCAA rules by calling Pat to tell her she has made the biggest mistake of her life, and how unfulfilling it is to be the star of a confused and divided 1–5 team, and how she wants to transfer right this very minute.
Pat reports the violation, but Michelle, stubborn as fungus, calls her again, and . . . well, almost everything between this lady and this girl is going to be complicated and racked with labor pains, so let’s jump forward a year and a half, leap over Michelle’s transfer to Tennessee and the season that, in keeping with NCAA rules, she has to sit out as penance for the switch.
It’s the fall of 1993, and Michelle finally is living her dream, and here is how the dream begins: It begins with 4:30 a.m. wakeups, with relentless wind sprints through the dark on the Tennessee track. It begins with the frightening realization that there is no excuse, none, a fact that team manager Todd Dooley learns the morning he awakens crumpled by stomach cramps and forces himself out of bed to show up at 6:30 and tries to explain to Pat why he’s a half hour late, only to hear her shout, “You don’t ever be late! Next time you just bring that toilet with you!”
It begins with Michelle walking into the Lady Vols’ locker room complex and stopping to stare at all the framed photographs on the National Championship Wall and the White House Visits Wall and the Final Four Wall and the All-Americas and Olympians Wall. It begins with Pat reminding her, sometimes even testing her, about who it is up there on the walls, whom it is she owes excellence to. It begins with Michelle knowing that Pat kicked the 1989–90 Lady Vols out of their palatial locker room for five weeks and squeezed them into a tiny visitors’ dressing room. They hadn’t deserved the palace. They hadn’t worked hard enough.
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