PRAISE FOR STATE
“The book is special because Isaacson captures the special bond that formed among the female athletes. Not only were they teammates, they were pioneers of a sort…. A wonderful book that is both eye-opening history and a moving and deeply personal memoir.”
—Booklist, starred review
“An intimate, at times inspiring account.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“In State, Melissa Isaacson perfectly captures the birth of Title IX and a time when high school girls were starting to gain equality in sports and in the classroom, showing us how opportunities on the court can light a path for girls to become their authentic selves in all aspects of their lives.”
—Billie Jean King, founder of the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative
“Melissa Isaacson has written a beautiful book about a time and place that is almost unfathomable to us now: when girls’ and women’s sports were not yet popular, widespread, or vital to our culture. And yet the pages of State come alive with the riveting story of a team of high school basketball players whose dreams took them to the place all athletes hope to go: a championship that lives with them to this day. This is their inspiring story. This is Title IX come to life.”
—Christine Brennan, USA Today columnist, CNN and ABC commentator, and author of Best Seat in the House and the bestseller Inside Edge
“Missy Isaacson takes us on a beautiful first-person journey we all should travel, showing us how a group of young women in the 70s changed the perception of women playing sports. And equally important, how they discovered the value of chasing a dream together. From fighting to play in the ‘boys’ gym’ to bonding together to winning a state basketball title, this was a story I couldn’t put down. I literally cheered out loud for these women as I read it.”
—Julie Foudy, Olympic medalist, FIFA Women’s World Cup champion, and founder of the Julie Foudy Sports Leadership Academy
“The best sports stories aren’t actually sports stories—they’re stories about life, highs, lows, bonds, exceptionalism, tragedy. That’s what makes Melissa Isaacson’s State such a tremendous piece of work. You think you’re reading about a girls’ basketball team, only to discover you’ve been lifted to new emotional heights. What a terrific read.”
—Jeff Pearlman, author of Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton and Football for a Buck
“State is storytelling at its finest. Melissa Isaacson will captivate readers with this long overdue memoir of heartache and triumph. Many will relate to the experiences Isaacson recaptures, and those who don’t will gain a greater respect for trailblazers in women’s sports. It is full of heart and history—a wonderful combination!”
—Marjorie Herrera Lewis, author of When the Men Were Gone
“l loved reading State by Melissa Isaacson. Melissa covered the Bulls for the Chicago Tribune when I played in the NBA, and we had many discussions about our love of basketball. The topic of her high school state title–winning team came up now and then, and I knew she was proud of it. But not until now, after reading her fantastic book, did I realize HOW much basketball meant to her. This is a beautiful story of basketball and life.”
—Steve Kerr, head coach of the Golden State Warriors
“I do not believe I overstate when I say this book belongs in, among all the other places, the Smithsonian, for its evocative, edifying tour of the female mind during the first crucial wave of cultural appreciation for the female athlete.”
—Chuck Culpepper, sports reporter for the Washington Post and author of Bloody Confused!
“State delivers a lesson on masterful storytelling. It is part memoir, part oral history, seen through the prism of sports. She deftly develops her characters, and perhaps the best indicator of the power of her narrative is that even though you know the outcome, it is still gripping to read about the adventures and accomplishments of the 1979 Niles West championship team.”
—Andrea Kremer, Emmy-winning sports journalist and member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame
“A wonderful tale from a wonderful storyteller. Isaacson paints real people so richly, so authentically, you almost forget it’s about basketball and realize it’s about life, tragedy, yearning, and hope. I’ve known Missy for thirty-five years and I always knew she had a story like this in her. I’m so glad to finally see it in perfectly crafted prose.”
—Bob Wojnowski, sports columnist for the Detroit News
“Anyone picking up this book will be inspired and encouraged to also find their inner strength and, with the help of others, believe in themselves.”
—Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Olympic medalist and founder of the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation
STATE
STATE
A TEAM, A TRIUMPH, A TRANSFORMATION
MELISSA ISAACSON
CHICAGO
Copyright © 2019 by Melissa Isaacson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express written permission from the publisher.
First edition published August 2019
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Isaacson, Melissa, author.
Title: State : a team, a triumph, a transformation / Melissa Isaacson.
Description: First edition. | Chicago : Midway, An Agate Imprint, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019003382 (print) | LCCN 2019017257 (ebook) | ISBN 9781572848252 (ebook) | ISBN 1572848251 (ebook) | ISBN 9781572842663 (hardcover) | ISBN 1572842660 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Isaacson, Melissa. | Niles West High School (Skokie, Ill.)--Basketball--History--20th century. | Basketball for girls--Illinois--Skokie--History--20th century. | Sex discrimination in sports--Illinois--History--20th century. | United States. Education Amendments of 1972. Title IX | Women basketball players--Illinois--Biography.
Classification: LCC GV886 (ebook) | LCC GV886 .I73 2019 (print) | DDC 796.323/62097731--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019003382
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Midway Books is an imprint of Agate Publishing. Agate books are available in bulk at discount prices. Learn more at agatepublishing.com.
For Shirley and Peggy, the strongest women I know …
And for Arlene Mulder, who led the way
In loving memory of Courtney Brown, Deb Durso,
and Michael Altenhoff
CONTENTS
Prologue
CHAPTER 1
Our Coach
CHAPTER 2
“Well, I guess I’ll go try sports”
CHAPTER 3
Grovers and Wooders and Billy Schnurr
CHAPTER 4
Inappropriate Cheering and the Half-Court Shot
CHAPTER 5
“Son, son, get up!”
CHAPTER 6
New Beginnings, New Rituals
CHAPTER 7
Shirley’s Arm, Bridget’s Face, and Mighty Hinsdale South
CHAPTER 8
Dark Secrets
CHAPTER 9
Shirley’s Gremlin and Those Weird Lumps
CHAPTER 10
Addition by Subtraction
CHAPTER 11
Having It All
CHAPTER 12
The Mighty Susies and Other Technicalities
CHAPTER 13
The Ultimate Slap
CHAPTER 14
Saturday Night Fever and a Champaign Hangover
CHAPTER 15
Big Whip
CHAPTER 16
Safe Haven
CHAPTER 17
&
nbsp; Earl’s Girls
CHAPTER 18
Dreidl, Dreidl, Dreidl
CHAPTER 19
Let It Snow
CHAPTER 20
Perfect Shmerfect
CHAPTER 21
Joy Is …
CHAPTER 22
Why Not Us?
CHAPTER 23
April Fools
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
“YOU NEED TO TALK TO HIM,” the hospice nurse was saying. “You need to give him permission to die.”
It wasn’t the first time she had told me this over the last couple of days, but I wasn’t exactly itching to do whatever it was she was suggesting.
“Sometimes, for reasons that are unclear, people in their last days hold on to life against all reason,” she explained. “You need to tell him it’s OK to go.”
For 10 days my father had lingered, refusing all food or liquid, the very final stages for many Alzheimer’s patients who simply forget how to chew, how to swallow, how to live any longer.
My mother sat not more than 10 feet away from him, trapped, amazingly, by the same hideous disease, thoroughly unaware she was soon to be widowed. Neither of them acknowledged each other anymore, but a couple of weeks earlier, my father had suddenly called out, “Where’s Francine?”—perhaps a sign, the hospice people said, that in the deep recesses of his mind he was worried about leaving her.
And so he had to be told it was OK to die. And somehow, I was going to be the one to tell him.
The youngest of four children by seven years, I was the classic daddy’s girl, hopelessly spoiled by his affection, the one you could find on most nights cuddled up on the couch with him, styling his hair or giving him a foot rub.
“How do we even know he can hear us?” I asked.
Like my mother, he had been on a steady decline with Alzheimer’s for more than two decades. But for the last week or so, he had sat in a rented hospital recliner with his eyes half-open and his head buried in his chest, no obvious signs that anything at all was getting through.
“Even if it’s not in his head but in his soul, he will hear you,” the nurse promised. “We can leave the room if you want.”
I glanced around, looking for a possible escape route, but all I saw was our den, as we called it growing up. There was the same couch—though twice reupholstered from the gaudy orange vinyl some hippie decorator thought was a good idea in 1970—where my father let me run wet combs through his hair in rousing games of beauty shop. It was now where we situated my mom, a place she had probably never sat for more than two minutes my entire childhood. The TV was turned to some random station she never would have watched, and on top of the coffee table sat a hospice pamphlet, a box of Kleenex, and some latex gloves in a heap she never would have allowed.
I had no plan, nor any useful experience to fall back on before speaking such seemingly important words to my father. I rambled a bit and repeated myself. But as I sat on the arm of the recliner, my head leaning against his head, he ever-so-slightly turned a warm cheek toward mine, and somehow, I knew that he did hear me.
“I’m going to miss you, Dad,” I whispered in his ear. “I’m going to miss someone worrying about me the way you always have and loving me the way only you could. But I promise we’ll be OK. I promise we’ll never forget you. Every time I look into my children’s blue eyes, I will be reminded of you.
“We love you, Dad. And it’s OK. You did your job. You did a fantastic job. You can rest now. I promise we’ll take care of Mom for you.”
I got up shakily and looked over at my mother, suddenly realizing I had barely spoken to her over the past year. Sure, we visited, and I would hold her hand and tell her I loved her. Then I’d say goodbye.
Hello. I love you. Goodbye. Ever since she had stopped speaking, I had as well.
And so I talked to her, too. “I told Dad,” I said, holding her hand. “I don’t know if he heard me. You know he was never a great listener. But I told him we’ll all be OK.”
Alzheimer’s patients in the late stages seldom look people in the eye. My mother’s gaze had been at an off-angle for years. But as I spoke the next words, she looked directly at me, so much so that it stunned me for a second before I continued.
“I’m supposed to go to this 25th reunion at Niles West for our state championship team tonight,” I told her. “Can you believe it? I’m going to see Connie. And maybe even Peggy. You remember Peggy, Mom. And Barb and Tina and Holly, and Judy Becker and Karen Wikstrom. Remember, Mom? Remember how great it was? And Mr. Earl will be there, too.”
I looked closely to see if there was any kind of a flicker at the mention of our coach, Gene Earl. I thought maybe I saw one. “Yeah, well, I think it’s probably time to move on, don’t you?” I laughed softly, hoping I could keep her attention. But she went away as quickly as she had returned.
What the hell I was even thinking, running off to my old high school after an afternoon as wrenching as this one, I did not know. But after that night, I no longer wondered.
I had finished high school on the highest of highs after our team had captured the state basketball title, but personally, I was through. I was ready to move on, still somewhat bitter about my decreased playing time under a new coach and wanting very much to embrace college life, find a boyfriend, and leave behind my tomboy ways. And since then, frankly, I hadn’t been all that interested in—as my mom used to call it—taking a walk down nostalgia lane.
And then Connie called.
Connie Erickson was the star of our team, and though she was one of my closest friends in high school, we had drifted apart. Over the last 25 years, we had only occasionally spoken, but she phoned from her home in North Carolina that week to ask if I was going to the reunion.
“If you’re going, I’m getting a plane ticket right now and coming in,” she said.
She told me she had read a column of mine online, the one I had written about us for the Chicago Tribune, and she needed to reconnect with us. She needed to come home.
When I walked into the Niles West gym that night, I immediately locked eyes with parents so familiar to me during my teenage years that they may as well have been my own. They looked immediately beyond me, searching expectantly for my parents. I explained as delicately as I could why they weren’t there and was met with a shower of hugs and expressions of sadness and told that they would be my parents that night.
We were honored at halftime of the Niles West girls’ game, a big screen set up in front of one basket, where a highlight reel of our accomplishments was shown. And later, we ended up at the home of Barb Atsaves, a junior starter on the championship team. She played a video of the final game as husbands, children, parents, and significant others gathered to watch. I had wandered out of the family room, still absorbing the events of the day, when I heard a loud cheer go up and calls for me to come back in.
For a good 20 seconds or so, the camera scanned the crowd before settling on my parents. They were cheering madly, my mom’s bad arm thrust oddly but triumphantly above her head, both my parents so genuinely happy that I was both shocked by the sight of them that way and immediately transported back to that time.
The room grew a little quieter as I stared at the TV. And as we walked to our cars in the frigid Chicago cold a few hours later, Connie and I tried to grasp the enormity of what we had experienced, both that night and 25 years earlier.
“You have to tell our story,” she said finally, her arms wrapped tightly around her for warmth.
I nodded.
In 1979, Niles West High School won the third-ever Illinois girls’ state basketball championship. We beat future Olympic gold medalist Jackie Joyner’s East St. Louis team with a merciless full-court press and a punishing transition game.
But that’s not what Connie was talking about.
In my Tribune column, I had written about some of the things we hadn’t known at the time. Like how our first coach, Arlene Mulder, would
secretly huddle in the corner of the faculty lounge with the school’s legendary boys’ basketball coach, Billy Schnurr, and how he would teach her how to teach us. I had learned that our principal, Nicholas Mannos, like most high school principals back then, very stern and a little scary, was just as secretly our best friend, for years fighting the battle for girls to attain the same rights as boys in sports.
But, as it turned out, it was even more than that.
Six days after the reunion, my father finally stopped fighting. Coach Earl, who I had not seen in at least 15 years, attended the funeral. So did several of my former teammates, and the ones who didn’t attend called or wrote, as did their parents. Over the course of the next several months, I reconnected with them and with others who played with us over the years. I searched for Peggy, the only member of the team we couldn’t seem to locate and the one with whom I had ultimately bonded the most. And I invited Becky Schnell to lunch.
“Becky, you have to tell me,” I said as I began the reporting for this book. “Was I mean to you?”
She laughed. A freshman when I was a senior the year we won the title, Becky had supplanted me in the lineup, and I wasn’t thrilled. Adding to my frustration was the knowledge that Becky lived in the Niles East district, not West’s, and as far as I could figure, only played for our team because her father, a junior high physical education teacher in the area, must have pulled strings. It annoyed me at the time, and I wondered if Becky ever caught on.
“No, Missy. You were never mean to me,” she said. “Don’t you remember how much fun we had? Don’t you remember how much we laughed?”
I was relieved, but I couldn’t leave it there.
“But Becky, what was the deal with your going to Niles West?” I said.
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