There wasn’t much I could say, except, “I know, Coach. You’re right. I’m sorry.” It’s not like Kim was going to ban me from riding, especially during the off-season. She’s a demanding coach, but she didn’t try to micromanage our every move off the court. We had a parade in Waco after we got back from the Final Four, and I rode my longboard in it. Kim trusted me to use my judgment when it came to riding, and I usually did. I just got a little carried away that spring, probably because I didn’t have to worry about basketball. It was like I had a temporary free pass: I knew it wouldn’t last, so I was just trying to have fun and not worry about what might come next. I knew I was lucky when I found out I wouldn’t need surgery, just a cast for a month or so. Once I started rehab and worked through the stiffness, it didn’t take long to get my shooting touch back.
If anything, the worst part of rehab was being stuck on the sidelines during our basketball camps for kids. I couldn’t really do anything except show up and smile. And when it came time for the final send-off, well, that hurt a lot more than you might imagine. On the last day of each session, we always sign autographs. There’s a line of kids (along with their sisters and brothers and moms and dads) that snakes around the gym and out the door—hundreds and hundreds of people—and we sit there signing and taking pictures for hours. I usually love signing for kids, but trying to do it with a soft cast on, holding the marker in an awkward way, was challenging to say the least. When I think about breaking my wrist, one of the first things that comes to mind is how much it hurt to sign those autographs. Ha. I’m pretty sure that’s not what Kim was worried about when she reminded me I had to think about the big picture.
THE MOST IMPORTANT DECISION I faced after we won the championship was whether I wanted to play in the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. I had played for the U.S. national team the previous September, during a two-week training tour in Europe. I was the only college player on the squad, which was coached by Connecticut’s Geno Auriemma, so I had a chance to hoop with a bunch of WNBA stars, including Cappie Pondexter, Tina Charles, and Swin Cash. And in February of my junior season, just two months before we won the NCAA title, I was named a finalist for the Olympic team, which was an incredible honor. I felt a lot of pride wearing that USA jersey during the European tour. The U.S. women had won four straight gold medals in basketball, and playing in the Olympics is something I had dreamed about since high school.
But I was exhausted after the season. Going 40-0 is hard enough, and it feels even harder when you have people pounding on you, hanging on you, knocking you around every single game. I knew if I played in the Olympics—if Coach Auriemma and USA Basketball decided to pick me—that by the time I got back from London in mid-August, I would have to jump right back into preseason training with Baylor. I was deep down tired. I also had other concerns weighing on me, mainly that I didn’t want to be so far away from my mom. I had one year of college left, only a certain amount of time left in Texas, when I could see her mostly whenever I wanted. I knew that after I left Baylor and turned pro, I would see her a lot less, because it’s hard for her to travel; it just takes so much out of her. And I worry about her all the time. Just having her close by, knowing she was only three hours away, gave me peace of mind. School was also a consideration. It had never been my first priority, but that just meant I needed to take care of business during summer classes, so I could stay on track and keep out of Kim’s doghouse (where I would end up anyway at the beginning of my senior year).
One day in April, about a month before I broke my wrist, I was chilling with Julio and Nash, and I just put it out there: “Yo, guys, I don’t think I’m going to do the Olympics.” I had been thinking about it for a few days, and that was the first time I said it out loud. I told them I was tired, and Julio said, “Hell, yeah, you’re tired. You need to rest and get off your legs.” Then Nash said, “You’ll have other chances to play in the Olympics.” Those guys always give me honest feedback; they don’t just tell me what they think I want to hear. If they had said, “Girl, you’re crazy—this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” I would have considered that carefully. But once I got their feedback, once I knew I wasn’t being crazy, I talked to my parents about it, and they were cool with it, too. As always, my mom just wanted me to be happy. And I think my dad liked the idea of me being in Waco instead of London. He probably figured it would be easier to keep tabs on me.
When I told Kim I didn’t want to go, she kind of already knew. She had been telling me all along, for a couple of months, “This is going to be a hard decision, so think it over real good.” She never tried to sway me one way or the other; she was really cool about staying neutral. I think early on, when I was named a finalist, she wanted me to go. She always said it was one of the best things she ever did, playing for the United States and winning a gold medal at the 1984 Summer Olympics. But she knew I was tired at the end of the season, and that I keep going and going until my body crashes. She knows I have trouble saying no, so she told me a few times, in the days leading up to my decision, “I know you don’t want to let anybody down, but you need your rest, too. You had a long season.” I think she knew by then which way I was leaning, so she wanted to make sure I knew it was okay if I didn’t go, that she wouldn’t be disappointed.
I was kind of hoping, when I walked into Kim’s office to tell her, that she would break the news to the people at USA Basketball. I wanted to avoid that phone call. But Kim said, “You have to be a big girl about it and call them yourself.” And then she made me do it right then and there, because she knew if I went home I probably wouldn’t do it. (Sometimes I avoid saying no by not saying anything at all.) So I called Carol Callan, the women’s national team director for USA Basketball. By that point, there was only one roster spot still open, and the general assumption was that they were holding it for me. I told Carol I was taking my name out of the equation, and she was very understanding. One of the things a lot of people didn’t seem to realize—all those online trolls and people on message boards who would question my decision—was that I would have been the first college player since 1988 to make the U.S. team, which tells you something about how hard it is to play on that level. Some of the key players on the 2012 team were in their thirties: Diana Taurasi, Sue Bird, Tamika Catchings, Lindsay Whalen, Swin Cash. So it’s not like the fate of the U.S. squad was resting on my shoulders. If that had been the case, I would have been there in a heartbeat, doing everything I could to bring home another gold.
Instead, my decision to stay in Waco fueled all these crazy conspiracy theories about me—how I’m secretly a man, and I wanted to avoid genetic testing at the Olympics. It’s one thing to have people question my heart, although I don’t know how anyone could do that after the season I had. But when they question my very being, my gender, and accuse me of living a giant lie, I can’t even begin to understand that kind of ignorance and hate. And fear. It’s sad, really, that there are so many people who are threatened by anyone who seems different, anyone who stands out because of how they look or act. I think most of the crap that people say about me is just a way to devalue my accomplishments. But I also think there are some paranoid, twisted fools out there who actually believe the accusations they make.
I have every intention of playing for the United States at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil, if I’m selected for the team. And if some country wants to issue a challenge, bring it on. I don’t have anything to hide. I’ll do whatever I need to do, prove whatever point I need to prove, so I can play. And then maybe everyone will finally shut up.
But I doubt it. Some people will always find reasons to spout their nonsense. I’ve heard it my whole life, and it hasn’t stopped me from being me.
THE FACE OF THE PROGRAM
I can’t swim. I mean, I can swim a little, but it’s not pretty. The thing is, I love the water. I love standing in the ocean or kayaking on a river or lake. I just get nervous if somebody starts messing with me, like grabbing my arm or my shorts. If I ha
ve a life jacket on, we can play all day, because I know if someone pulls me under, I’m coming back up. I had an uncle who drowned before I was born—my father’s brother died when they were kids—so swimming wasn’t something I did when I was young. That’s probably why I’m like a big kid now when I’m in the water. I like it, but I’m also a little scared of it.
My senior season at Baylor started on the water, when we went to Hawaii for the Rainbow Wahine Classic. Although I didn’t know it at the time, that trip would set the tone for my entire senior year, because I ended up feeling like I was swimming through it all. My teammates and I thought we were setting out to win another national championship. We had our core group back for another year, and we were telling each other, “It’s going to be a great season. We’re going out with a bang.” We did some cool stuff during our trip to Honolulu, including a visit to Pearl Harbor, which I was really into because of my interest in military history. The last excursion that Kim planned for us was a snorkeling adventure the day before the opening game of the tournament. It was a lot of fun, even if there were a few times when I thought I might drown. But I’m sure Kim was regretting it afterward, because all that kicking took something out of us going into our game against Stanford.
Not that I’m making excuses. We lost that game for two reasons: (1) Odyssey Sims, our point guard, strained her hamstring in the first five minutes and missed the rest of the game, and (2) we were bigheaded, as if all we needed to do was show up and we’d win. During pregame warm-ups, we were down on our end of the court, cracking jokes. We were watching the Stanford players and making fun of them because they looked so serious. Somebody said, “They’re going to tire themselves out before the game even starts,” and we all laughed. But once the game actually did start, Stanford was on point. They were ready. And after O hurt her hamstring, we found ourselves in a big hole. It had been a long time since anybody had really challenged us. We’d won 42 games in a row, including two easy victories to open the season. Even when O left the Stanford game, we told ourselves, “It’s early. We’ll be okay.” We actually did rally—the game was back and forth down the stretch—but we lost by two points, which put a cloud over the whole trip. After working so hard the previous season and making history by going 40-0, we flew to Hawaii and failed our first big test of the new season.
We were a little shell-shocked in the locker room after the game. Kim came in and said, “We had all this fun, we took you to all these places, and you didn’t come out and play well.” It felt like maybe we had ruined it for the next Baylor team that would travel somewhere exotic. I pictured Kim keeping everyone locked in the hotel, watching game film. That night, a bunch of us snuck out of our rooms and took a walk along the beach, trying to process what had happened. We all kept saying we couldn’t believe we had lost that damn game. We told ourselves we couldn’t lose again; we had to get it together. But there was a strange energy around us for the rest of the trip, because we didn’t quite know how to act. Kim was clearly upset with us, and even though we steamrolled our next two opponents, they were so outmatched that beating them didn’t exactly redeem us after the Stanford loss.
In the weeks to come, we would put a mental asterisk next to that loss, because Odyssey had missed most of the game. We pumped ourselves back up, believing no other team could beat us if we had all our pieces in place. In some ways, this attitude served us well, because we developed a knack that season for rallying in the second half of games. No matter how sluggish we would play in the first half, we’d come out of the locker room for the second half and tell ourselves, “Okay, now it’s time to turn things around.” But in other ways, our greatest strength was also our worst weakness. We were a strong-willed bunch, and Coach Mulkey had tapped into that the season before, pushing us to reach our full potential. Now she was determined to crack down on us again, because we had a talented group of freshmen on the roster, and Kim said she didn’t want to make the same mistakes with them that she had made with us. She was nervous they would mimic our bad habits.
My classmates and I all marched to the beat of a different drummer. When we came together, we packed a powerful punch, but you could never quite predict when everyone would be on the same page. For example, during my first two seasons at Baylor, when we showed up at our shootaround on the morning of a game, we were all usually mismatched. Everyone was in Baylor gear, but some of us would be wearing our sweatpants, some of us our crinkly travel gear, some of us our practice jerseys—or a combination of everything. Starting my junior year, Kim made a bigger deal of it, and she would get mad if we didn’t match. She tried to argue that it was easier to come together if we started from the same place. “It’s the small things,” she’d say. After we won the national championship, those small things became even more important to her, and she tightened the reins. But you have to understand, we had been in Kim’s cross hairs since day one. I came to Baylor as part of the top-ranked recruiting class in the country, along with Jordan Madden, Kimetria Hayden, Mariah Chandler, and Shanay Washington. And during our freshman year, both Destiny Williams and Brooklyn Pope transferred in from other schools, so they were part of our core group too. (Shanay became a student assistant after her career was cut short by a string of ACL injuries.) Sometimes a coach can afford to bring young players along slowly, but Kim had high hopes for us right from the start, and those expectations only grew after we made the Final Four my freshman season.
I’m sure there were more than a few times in my career when our coaching staff would sit in a room together and talk about what a handful we were. Coaches are always trying to enforce the message that the sins of one player are the sins of the whole team. My freshman year, when we all shared a suite in the dorm, one of us was late to practice one day (it wasn’t me, honest), so Kim called us together and said the rest of us were responsible for our teammate’s mistake. We tried to explain that we had knocked on her door before we left for the gym, but she hadn’t answered, and the door was locked, so we assumed she wasn’t there. None of that mattered to Kim. “You left your teammate behind,” she told us, as if we’d abandoned a fallen soldier on the battlefield. That message—you’re only as strong as your weakest link—clicked for us during our perfect season. But by the time the next fall rolled around, it was pretty clear we were itching to get out from under Kim’s thumb, even as we talked about going out in style and winning another championship.
I spent much of my senior year struggling with the conflicting emotions of wanting my freedom from Baylor while also being scared to leave. I would get excited imagining my future as a pro, but then I’d get sad when I thought about saying good-bye to my friends in Waco. Everything I did, all the little everyday stuff, like heading home after practice to chill out or hang with the bros, took on more meaning. Of course, I kept those feelings to myself a lot, because I wanted to enjoy that time with my friends, not bring everybody down by getting all sentimental. I remember I was standing in the backyard of House 41 one day, tossing the football with Julio and Nash, and I must have had a faraway look in my eyes, because one of them stopped and asked me if I was doing okay. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m just going to miss y’all so much.”
In those moments, they would always promise to stick with me, tell me they’d visit me in Phoenix as much as they could. They insisted that our little family wasn’t going to fall apart, even though they both had another year at Baylor after I left. And I wanted so much to believe them. I was just having a hard time thinking about starting over somewhere else.
I HAVE A LOT OF respect for Kim Mulkey, a lot of fond memories. Even if we all liked to complain about some of her quirks as a coach, she treated us fairly for the most part and didn’t show favoritism. She cracked down on us when we slipped up, and she held everyone accountable for their mistakes, including the coaches. She also runs a very structured program, which was good for me. We had practice at the same time every afternoon, 1:30, for all four years I was there, so that was one less thing for us to wo
rry about when it came to planning our schedules. (It helps that Baylor has great basketball facilities.) Kim was in control, even if occasionally our group of seniors liked to think we were. What I appreciated more, though, was how Kim interacted with us away from the court. I know there are some coaches who keep a wall up all the time, but she would let us come over to her house on the weekends, to hang out in the game room, swim in her pool, or just chill in comfortable surroundings. She would joke around with us, too. I didn’t always get her jokes, but I liked that she tried to have a sense of humor around us. Most of all, she helped me out a lot when I was dealing with my parents, when I was frustrated with my dad or worried about my mom. It wasn’t even so much what she said; it was just nice to have a place to go where I could get away from it all without actually leaving town. Her son, Kramer, was in high school at the time, and I went to some of his baseball games. Kim the mom seemed pretty cool.
I wouldn’t say we had a falling-out. The friction between me and Kim was more of a gradual thing, just layer added upon layer. The more comfortable I became with myself, the more frustrated I was that we were still butting heads about the same stuff, because it felt like she always saw me a certain way. Kim liked to think she could read me; she swore she knew me inside and out. There were definitely plenty of times when I felt like she knew a good amount. But while she could read me on the surface, I’m not sure she ever truly comprehended how deep some of my struggles were. She would often call me into her office when she thought I was distracted by something, and as I lowered myself into the chair across from her, I’d think to myself, She’s fixing to get this right. She can tell I’m in a bad way. But she was always wrong with what she thought the issue was, because she always thought it was the same thing: “girlfriend problems,” as she put it.
In My Skin Page 13