I sat in Kim’s office, and we talked about what had happened. She explained she had to take a tough stance, to make it clear she wouldn’t tolerate that kind of behavior, because what I had done was wrong, and now I had to go about making it right. But she also said she understood how frustrating it was to be me on the court. She saw how much abuse I absorbed without getting the same calls as players smaller than I am. “You just can’t retaliate,” she stressed. “The blame always falls on the player who retaliates.”
I knew she was right. But here’s the thing: you don’t always understand something right away just because someone explains it. Kim and the other coaches had said all along that I needed to keep my cool, that I would have to deal with a lot of crap on the court, players trying to knock me down to their size. I would nod my head—yup, yup, yup—then step onto the court and push all that advice out of my mind. It wasn’t until I punched Jordan Barncastle that the message really hit home for me. That game at Texas Tech would be the last one I played without constantly reminding myself I needed to stay level-headed.
We ended up reaching the Final Four that spring (we lost in the semifinals to Connecticut, the eventual national champion), and I finished the season averaging 18.4 points and 8.5 rebounds per game. I wanted so much to redeem myself, to put the punch behind me, while also trying to learn from it. The hardest part was that nobody really understood my history of fighting. I think Kim knew, just from us talking here and there, that I had some conflicts when I was younger—”altercations,” she called them. But nobody at Baylor, and certainly nobody in the media, had any idea how much I had struggled as a kid, trying to solve my problems and hide my insecurities by fighting. That was my response to feeling vulnerable when I was young: raising my fists.
TOWARD THE END OF middle school, and even into my freshman year of high school, before I fully dedicated myself to basketball, I wanted to be a real fighter, the kind who steps into a ring or a cage. I didn’t know how good I would become at hoops, but I knew I needed an outlet for my emotions, a way to release all my pent-up energy. So I talked to my dad about getting a punching bag and some gear, because I wanted to try boxing. I also raised the idea of MMA and ultimate fighting, but my mom absolutely refused to allow it. (See? She did put her foot down on occasion— and I can’t blame her for that.) She could barely understand why I wanted to box.
My dad put the speed bag, punching bag, dumbbells, and hand wraps in a section of our family room, and I would come home from school and work out. I’m an adrenaline junkie, a thrill seeker, so I really connected with the emotional intensity of boxing. Sometimes Dad would come in and hold the punching bag for me. It even got to the point where we talked about getting me some lessons. But Mom was scared; she didn’t want me to get hurt. She begged me, and my dad, not to pursue it beyond the family room. So my boxing career was short-lived, although I continued to hit the bag and use the weights throughout high school.
The punching bag was made of this rough material, and I had to wrap my knuckles before practicing. But one time I came home after school and went crazy on the bag, without wrapping my hands. I was steamed about something (I can’t remember what), and the next thing I knew, the punching bag was red and my mom was shrieking, “Oh my God, my baby’s hands!” I was like, “Mom, chill, it’s okay.” Another time I punched the bag so hard, the stand it was on swung backward and put a hole in the wall. I didn’t know I was that strong.
IN THE YEARS after “the punch,” the story line became that I had made this one mistake and it was totally out of character for me. She’s just a big teddy bear. A gentle giant. I was glad people were willing to forgive what I had done (well, except for the online trolls who still bring it up), but I also felt a little uncomfortable with how simplified everything was—all neat and tidy and fixed—when the reality was that I had worked hard to control my anger.
Kim wanted me to see the therapist every week for the rest of the school year. As I drove to his office for that first visit, I told myself that it was just another obligation, something I had to do to check the box and move on. I wasn’t planning to say much, because I’m stubborn like that: I thought therapists were for people who are weak, and I didn’t need to see a shrink. I was still learning that the weakest people are the ones who can’t ask for help. His office was off campus, unaffiliated with Baylor. There were two large windows in the corner, facing leafy green trees and shrubs. I sat in a leather chair with little pleats in it. (I spent a lot of time fiddling with those stitches.) The therapist sat on the couch, and the first thing he said to me was, “So how are you doing? How was your day?” I had been expecting him to ask me why I punched Jordan Barncastle and if I felt bad about it. I thought the whole thing would be weird and awkward. I remember feeling stiff, ready to shut down. And then he asked me that simple question, as if he really cared about how I was doing, and I felt myself relax into that leather chair. I also liked that he said, “If you want to cuss, go ahead and cuss. It doesn’t matter what you want to say, just say it. I’m here to listen. I want to listen. So tell me what you want to talk about.”
We just had a conversation. And it didn’t take him long, maybe it was the second or third session, to figure out that so much of who I am, of how I act and how I respond and how much anger I feel sometimes, is a direct result of my relationship with my dad. That first session, the therapist asked me about my family, and he noticed how I kind of changed—my body language, the emotion in my voice—when I started talking about my father. So we stayed on that topic longer, and when we circled back around to it, the same thing happened.
Starting therapy is like pointing a spotlight into your past and into your heart. Although I initially went because of what happened at Texas Tech, it became an important part of my life away from basketball. I stayed in Waco for school that summer, and I stayed in therapy, too. I kept going back throughout my sophomore year, then on and off for the rest of college. At first Kim would check in with me to make sure I was going on a regular basis, but she quickly backed off once she realized I was taking it seriously. As time passed, I would go depending on how I felt each week. If I was stressed about something, I would schedule a session. If things were going smoothly, I’d still try to make time for it every couple of weeks.
It didn’t bother me if people knew I was seeing a therapist. A few of my teammates had to see him, too, and they hated it. I would try to tell them, “Just talk to the man! He’s not trying to make you do anything. He just wants to hear how things are going.” My therapist provided me with a certain peace of mind. When I became angry about something that happened with basketball, or school, or my dad, I would go talk to him and calm down. Whatever the situation, he helped me look at it in a better way, and he encouraged me to move past the anger I held on to. That has always been my Achilles’ heel: letting wrongs and slights fester inside me instead of discussing them right away. I’ll tell everyone that everything is fine, until things are so far past fine that I’m about to burst with anger or sadness.
Finding a great therapist was the silver lining that came from the Jordan Barncastle incident. I don’t know how I would have made it through my sophomore year, and the swirl of depression I found myself in, without having that support.
TO THE MOON AND BACK
The summer after my freshman year, I was hanging out in my dorm room one afternoon when I saw that my mom was calling my cell phone. It wasn’t unusual for her to call—we talked a few times a week—because she liked to check in and see how things were going. But the moment I picked up the phone and said, “Hey, Mom,” I could tell by the energy on the other end that something wasn’t right. I immediately stood up, because I wanted to feel taller and more in control. I could hear she was crying. And then I found out why: she told me she had gone to the doctor and they had found something. She’d been diagnosed with lupus, which I later learned is an autoimmune disease. My mom’s immune system was “hyperactive” and attacking her healthy cells. The diagnosis exp
lained a lot, because her health was always an issue, but hearing she had a disease was really scary. It made her struggles seem so much more real, to know exactly what was going on inside her body and what she would have to deal with going forward.
I walked out of my dorm room. I needed to keep moving; it helped me process what she was saying. I was trying to be really strong for her, and I told her, my voice steady, “Okay, Mom, you’ll be okay. Do you hear me? Everything is going to be okay. You can fight this.” I walked into the parking garage, pacing around the same area where I had said a teary good-bye to my parents the previous fall, and then I headed over to the little grassy area outside the dorm. I listened as she cried and talked about her worries, and I kept trying to reassure her that everything would be okay.
As soon as we said good-bye, as soon as we hung up, I broke down. There was a seating area under the trees outside the dorm, and I made my way over to one of the chairs and lowered myself into it. I buried my face in my hands and just sobbed, feeling totally helpless. But there was something else, too, another emotion mixed in with my fear and sadness: it was guilt. I started thinking about all the trouble I had given my mother when I was a kid, constantly mouthing off and disobeying her, just to see how far I could push her. I had never made things easy on her. And now I wanted nothing more than to ease her pain, to provide comfort and support. Why had I taken her for granted?
I looked down at my phone. I needed to tell someone, talk it through, and I didn’t even hesitate when I hit the number. The line rang a couple of times, and then I heard Kim’s voice in my ear. “Hey, Big Girl,” she said with her southern twang. I broke down again, crying, telling Kim everything my mom had told me. She listened and tried to provide some support, playing the role for me that I had just played for my mom. She told me to come over to her house if I needed a place to chill. “Everything is going to be fine,” Kim said. “You need to be strong for your mom.”
We stayed on the phone for a couple of minutes as I pulled myself together. “All right,” I told Kim. “I will. I can do that.”
A few days later, I went to see my therapist, and talking through it with him helped me a lot. I told him I was worried about my mom and also distracted by the guilt I felt for the way I had treated her when I was younger. He encouraged me to put it all out there: if something was weighing on my heart, I should talk to her about it. I had been checking in with her every day or two, just to say hi and see how she was feeling. But after seeing my therapist, I knew I needed to say more.
ONE AFTERNOON, about a week after my mom had called to tell me about the lupus, I was lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, working up the nerve to call her, thinking about all the things I wanted to say to her. I knew it would be an emotional conversation, but I also knew it was something I needed to do. My mom was always battling some kind of physical ailment when I was a kid. She had a couple of back surgeries for a bulging disk, which left her with nerve damage, and she had a lot of problems with her left knee. She was in constant pain, which made it hard for her to get out much. On top of everything else, she also just seemed to have bad luck. I remember when I was little, she had a mishap while lighting the grill, and she ended up in the hospital with burns on her face. She is the sweetest person in the world, but it’s like she has a black cloud following her around. And dealing with me all those years probably zapped a lot of her energy.
We talked for about ninety minutes that day, and I apologized for every stupid thing I had done as a kid, for being such a troublemaker, for being just plain mean to her. It was an epic heart-to-heart conversation. I was crying; she was crying. She likes to call me “Baby Girl” and “Ladybug,” and when she started dropping those on me, I was just a puddle. I was sitting there going through my laundry list of bad behavior, and she was saying things like “Everything is good, Baby Girl,” her voice all soft and warm. We shared our favorite memories, and I told her how I was learning—in fits and starts—to deal with my emotions better. And when we had both said everything we needed to say, we ended the call with this line we always say to each other: “I love you to the stars and back, to the moon and back.”
My mom and I are different in a lot of ways, but ever since that phone call, she has become one of my best friends. Sometimes when we’re talking, I’ll think back to those times when she was sitting in the recliner chair, watching the Food Network, with me sprawled across her lap—and I’m reminded all over again that I’m still her Ladybug.
KEEP IT BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
My sophomore year at Baylor sucked. There’s really no better way to say it. Everything felt like a struggle. The tone was set over the summer, when I found out from my mom that she had lupus, and I just could never quite pull myself out of the quicksand. I clashed with Kim, I clashed with my dad, I clashed with the girl I was dating, I clashed with Baylor.
Most of all, I clashed with myself.
Basketball was the easy part, although I found plenty of ways to make it harder. My teammates and I—specifically, the other sophomores—were a handful. Coming out of high school, we were ranked as the top recruiting class in the country, and when we arrived in Waco, we acted like we were above the law. Kim’s law, that is. Freshman year, I was late to everything—classes, tutoring sessions, study hall. And if I wasn’t late, I was showing up at the last minute. (When you play college basketball, “on time” usually means fifteen minutes early.) There were a few of us in Kim’s doghouse, which meant we spent the summer on permanent workout probation. Every morning, we had to be in the weight room, dressed and ready to go, at 6 A.M., under the supervision of our strength and conditioning coach. Technically, these sessions were considered punishment, an extra hour of sweat in addition to our regular team workout later in the day. But I didn’t look at it that way. As much as I hated getting up at the crack of dawn, I also saw these sessions as a chance to get stronger. At least that’s what I told myself while we were being tortured.
I’m not one of those people who can always remember specific drills I’ve been forced to do; usually I just go all out and forget about what happened the moment it ends. But there was one particular lifting drill we did during those early-morning sessions that is burned into my muscle memory. I’m sure once I describe it, people will think it doesn’t sound all that hard. Trust me, it was. (Go ahead and try it.) We held a small weight in each hand—like maybe five pounds—and we had to keep our elbows locked as we raised our arms until they met at the top. Picture the arm motion of a jumping jack, except we had to do it slowly and in rhythm with everyone else. The goal was to complete 100 repetitions. But here’s the catch: if anyone bent her elbows, even just a smidge, we had to start all over again. And of course that is what happened. We’d get so close, like 95 reps, and somebody would screw up. We did three sets, and I would guess that by the time we finished the last one, we had actually done about 500 arm raises.
THE BASKETBALL COURT has always been the one place I feel free, not weighed down by outside worries. Some people can’t turn off their minds when they’re playing; they’re still stressed about everything happening off the court. I’m not like that. In fact, I couldn’t wait to get on the court and play sophomore year, because I was really struggling away from the game. Sometimes I would even go to the gym late at night, when I couldn’t sleep, just to shoot and be in that space. (I’d also sit in the locker room and play video games.) There were so many things swirling around me that year, clouding my brain. My dad was still being himself, hovering over me even from Houston. He started harping on one thing in particular: he said I needed a bodyguard. After the final home game of my freshman year, Kim had allowed the fans onto the court, so we could show our appreciation for all their support throughout the season. I was serving my two-game suspension for punching Jordan Barncastle, so I sat in the student section near the Baylor bench. But after the game, I mingled with the crowd on the court. We were swarmed, and I didn’t mind it one bit. I had fun signing autographs and posing for pictures;
it took some of the sting out of watching my team lose to Texas. But my dad was livid afterward, saying Kim shouldn’t have let that happen. “Anyone could have just come up and done you harm,” he said. He believed, and still believes to this day, that somebody might run up and stab me on the court. So as I was going into my sophomore season, he would call me and complain about how Baylor did things, telling me I should transfer and that I needed a security detail. (He also thought I wasn’t getting enough touches on the court, which is ridiculous. If anything, Kim would get mad at me for passing too much.)
I already had enough internal angst that I processed on a daily basis; I didn’t have the capacity to absorb so much of his. Plus, there was my mom’s health, which I thought about multiple times a day. I was scared I might lose her. The thought of my mom in pain, sad, struggling, weighed on me, especially since I didn’t go home as much as I wanted to, because being in the same house as my dad was too stressful. I would call and check on her all the time. I’d ask how she was feeling, then listen carefully to what she said. She would almost always give the same answer—“Okay”—but I could tell when she was lying because her voice would be softer. When it sounded more like a whisper, I knew she was having a bad day. No matter how much I tried to pry the truth out of her, she would still say everything was fine.
Sometimes I would call my sister Pier and ask her what was really going on, why Mom wouldn’t tell me the truth. Pier would say, “She doesn’t want you to worry, Baby Girl!” But I did worry. In the absence of real information, I would picture the worst possible scenarios, especially because the information my dad passed along often made it seem as if my mom was dying and I should get in the car immediately and drive home. I remember one time he called and said that Mom had fallen down the stairs in the house and was in bad shape. I hung up and called Pier, and she said Mom had slipped the last step or two and was fine. Sometimes it felt like my father was trying to lay a guilt trip on me, another way he could control my actions and emotions. But I’m sure he had his own fears about losing my mother. We just didn’t talk about it.
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