Mulder’s advantage was that she had Schnurr as a respected ally, who could also be a conduit to the other male coaches if necessary. And she had Sloan as a trusted confidant to lean on. All we knew was that no one was kicking us out of the Boys’ Gym, which had gradually become known only as the Contest Gym, a small sign of progress, but it was something.
Though our official practices had begun, we continued our unsupervised morning sessions. We also continued running our stair circuits, adding two-pound ankle weights to increase the pain, if not the actual benefits. And Mrs. Mulder added jumping rope to our regimen.
Connie and I finally had the ballhandling routine worked out. We decided that the team would take the court at a dead sprint, form a circle, and then perform the between-the-legs, around-the-back thing of beauty. But teaching the others, particularly the taller girls, was another matter entirely, and neither of us was a particularly patient type. “Twice through your legs, Bridget,” I said between obviously clenched teeth, giving little thought to the fact that she had to bend about a foot lower than I did to perform the maneuver. But Bridget and the others were good sports, bought in, and worked diligently to master it in the spirit of the team. DD, of course, got it on the first try and then generally disrupted everyone else.
To the rest of us, this all still seemed like a gym class she was trying to avoid. Regularly DD would come to practice late, and when she didn’t, she’d slide around the gym floor in her socks, taking crazy half-court shots until Mrs. Mulder showed up. It exasperated us, and Connie and Shirley would chide her, but she was so damn happy-go-lucky, it was as hard to stay mad at her as it was to get through to her.
In practice, Mr. Schnurr continued to help us, enlisting another group of boys who were mostly football players and wrestlers with good attitudes to scrimmage with us. Only this season there was a notable difference. “Look, guys, I don’t want you to think of them as girls,” Schnurr told the boys. “Obviously, keep it clean, but I want you to give them your best. That means block their shots—and no one gets a free path to the bucket.”
Occasionally, there would be a bloody nose, and Bridget routinely got hammered under the basket, once getting sandwiched by two boys going for a rebound. She got up gingerly and in obvious pain but was struck by the same thing all of us were when one of us went down—get up quickly and shake it off or they’re not going to let us keep playing with the boys.
Mrs. Mulder remained wary about these scrimmages, watching us literally bump heads with the boys and looking as if she were ready to step in at any moment. But with each incident, we would glance over at our coach, then at our injured teammate, silently and sometimes not so silently willing them to get up and keep playing.
One day, however, that just wasn’t possible. Karen Wikstrom was defending one of the boys during our unsupervised morning session, and as he jumped to make a pass over her, he inadvertently elbowed her directly in the forehead. “You’re fine, Karen,” we all but screamed at her before she even hit the floor. “Get up! Get up!”
As always, we immediately looked around to make sure there weren’t any teachers or coaches in the vicinity, then checked on Karen, who quickly struggled back to her feet. But after staggering into the locker room and to the first mirror she could find, she saw an egg-shaped lump growing on her forehead, promptly panicked, and began hyperventilating. At that point, we could hardly keep Mrs. Mulder away. She got wind of there being an injury, rushed into the locker room, saw a kid going into shock, and promptly called an ambulance.
Karen was a very good volleyball player who was still miscast as a power forward. She was a little too graceful to fight for rebounds as she was expected to do, and a little too nice to have the killer instinct Mr. Schnurr and Mrs. Mulder thought she should have. But, like Bridget, she surprised everyone by shaking off her injury and practicing the very next day.
It was funny, though. As concerned as Mrs. Mulder was about not getting us roughed up physically, there were certain things she did not feel uncomfortable expressing. She had no problem, for example, telling Judy that if she lost a little weight, she’d be quicker defensively. And Judy had no problem hearing it. Nor was Judy’s mom at all hesitant to follow through with the coach’s advice and help her daughter maintain a better diet at home.
Weight just wasn’t a touchy subject when it came to basketball. We’d hop on and off the scale in the locker room with no one giving it much thought. Height was actually more important. I insisted I was 5-3, even though I barely cleared 5-2, and that I be listed as such in the game programs. Bridget was every bit of 5-11 but would rather be listed at 5-9.
Peggy was 5-10 and loved it.
Since Peggy was new to varsity, I didn’t know her that well yet. But I knew I liked her, mostly because she thought I was the funniest kid she had ever met in her life. We shared a fairly strange affection for older male actors—I was in love with Robert Redford and Peg was obsessed with Clint Eastwood. We also discovered in each other a dual appreciation for gossip—both giving and getting it.
We quickly came up with a common philosophy. We didn’t care if others talked behind our backs as long as we didn’t know about it. Thus, we reasoned, no one should care if we gossiped behind theirs. One day I showed Peggy a Peanuts cartoon I had cut out that had Charlie Brown telling Lucy a secret in one frame and Lucy promising, “I swear, cross my heart and hope to die, I will not tell.” The next frame had Lucy announcing the embarrassing revelation over the school PA system. Peggy laughed so hard she fell down the bleachers.
Soon, we had our own weird lingo. Instead of laughing, we’d simply yell, “Auuuuugggghhh!” as if the joke were too funny to waste a simple laugh on. And any particularly good piece of gossip or pointed zinger from one of us would be met with the other screaming, “Shut up!” If something was too nasty, even to us, “Not to be mean, but … ” would basically absolve us of any responsibility. And the response to anything we found stupid, unpleasant, or otherwise unfortunate was always, “That’s great.” Basically, everyone thought we were nuts. We thought we were hysterical.
Peg, who welcomed her first full season on varsity with a new short haircut, was more interested in boys than I was, but neither of us knew how to use whatever femininity we possessed any more than we knew how to speak Mandarin. At school, the running gag for girls with flat chests was that we had charter membership in the IBTC—the itty-bitty-titty committee. It was not something we were proud of, but neither were we embarrassed. It was just the way it was. Peg possessed a few more curves than I did, but at 5-10 she weighed a slight but sturdy 145 pounds and looked more boyish than vampish. But then both of us longed much more for the perfect jump shot than we did for a C cup.
We also longed to have our uniforms fit us properly, which was an impossible proposition on most days, worse on some than others. Our mothers often wondered what took us so long to emerge from the locker room before each game, our pregame preparation lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour and a half, with conventional primping taking up only about 10 percent of it.
Sure, there was hair brushing and, in the case of Bridget, makeup applying, but for most of us, two things kept us trapped in the locker room and both involved our, uh, equipment. In order to not merely play basketball comfortably but to walk upright and move our arms, we had to make certain adjustments. No matter how short or how skinny you happened to be or what uniform size you were able to pilfer, wearing those Niles West uniforms was like trying to fit into your little sister’s clothes after your mother accidentally shrunk them. This was heavy-duty polyester, guaranteed not to shrink, fade, or breathe. You could not pass a knife through it, but not because we didn’t try.
And so there we were, as if competing in a giant red taffy pull before each game, two teammates yanking on each tourniquetlike ribbed sleeve, our own hands down our shorts trying to stretch the waistband while simultaneously doing deep knee bends. Then we would go to work on the bustline, even if we didn’t happen to have one
. Those who did have one at least had the advantage of having the material provide some added support since the advent of the sports bra was still years away.
The shorts always presented their own problems, magnified several times over at certain times of the month, which for any given game affected at least one of us. During our first game of the 1977–78 season, it was me. There were no such things as ultra-thin maxi pads or super-plus tampons. There were tampons and there were sanitary pads, which were roughly the width and thickness of your average hand towel and which did not fit inconspicuously in our purses much less in our teeny-tiny uniform shorts. And so there we were, trying to make it work so that (A) we were afforded the amount of protection required for a basketball game and (B) we did not look like we had male genitalia.
“It looks like I’m wearing a diaper,” I told anyone who would listen as I tried to navigate two side-by-side pads into place.
“No,” whispered Peggy, “it looks like you have a penis.”
“That’s great, much better,” I said, giving her a dirty look. We were about to go up against New Trier West, and my biggest concern was whether someone might think I was really born a boy and just trying to pass myself off as a girl.
Connie, meanwhile, was busy looking for sugar pills. Always on alert for anything that would give us an advantage, be it something the boys’ teams might be doing or something that was remotely cool in any way, Connie had already begun wearing kneepads, wristbands, and ankle tape, and now came into the locker room with an economy-size container of dextrose pills.
We acted as if they were amphetamines, “greenies” like I had recently read about in Jim Bouton’s book Ball Four, which revealed, among other things, the hidden drug abuse among Major League Baseball players. In truth, these dextrose tablets were giant horse pills that, when chewed, closely resembled a piece of chalk, both in texture and taste, though that part could certainly have been explained by the fact that they had probably exceeded their expiration date by a decade or more. They were supposed to give us energy, or so Connie had heard. She had found them in a back cabinet of the tiny training room, remembered her brothers taking similar tablets in football—actually salt tablets, but whatever—and decided it had to give us an advantage.
We crowded around her and without any hesitation popped these stale hunks of chalk into our mouths and then, almost in unison, choked at the bitter taste and crumbly texture.
Now we were ready for anything.
Once again, we delivered a rose and a poem to Mrs. Mulder before the game. And once again, I was the designated poet. We could only hope I had improved from last season.
Here we are in ’77, ready to play our game,
We’ll meet our goals, stay intense, and keep our respected name,
The only way to achieve this, we know, is to always concentrate,
Now all that’s ahead is putting it together, only we can determine our fate.
We led New Trier West 19–8 at the end of the first quarter, shut them out with our smothering full-court press in the second quarter to surge ahead 27–8 at the half, and cruised to a 60–28 victory.
Our next game was eight days away, but it was against Forest View, a team that we knew little about, except that they were tall. Mrs. Mulder had just started having our games filmed, and together, the day after the New Trier West game, we huddled in a cramped, low-ceilinged, glorified storage closet in the corner of the hallway outside the gym and watched the flickering images of a dusty projector.
The film quality was not great. I squinted at the black-and-white picture on the screen, trying to make out which team was us—and what sport we were playing.
“Do you see how Karen is moving to box out No. 14?” said Mrs. Mulder, pointing to two unidentifiable blurs on the screen. We all nodded diligently. It was cool to be sitting there, all huddled together. “Now Karen is in the perfect position to grab the rebound.”
We had to continue to work on fundamentals, our coach told us, on boxing out and rebounding, or we would lose for sure. She knew we were a good team and she knew that we were aware of that as well, and she was concerned we would become overconfident. And so, every opponent was another behemoth, and we were sure to get crushed if we didn’t play our very best. We got the message she was sending, but we were also aware of the psychological game she was playing.
We knew her too well. Or at least it must have seemed that way to Mrs. Mulder when she opened the card and started to read the poem before the Forest View game, and had to catch her breath for a moment.
The survival of the seed we’ve planted depends on our desire,
It relies on our will to learn and push and jump just that much higher,
The seed’s development has now just begun, though an uphill fight it may seem,
That’s our goal, that’s what we want, it will take patience to fulfill our dream.
That week, she had found out she was pregnant with her third child but had not told anyone outside of her closest friends on the staff. The seed’s development has now just begun? If only they knew, she thought.
CHAPTER 10
Addition by Subtraction
FOR ALL OF THE WORK ETHIC, goal setting, and general humility drummed into us by our coach, the opportunity to show off our development as a team and, let’s be clear, strut our stuff was in no way beneath us.
Among the staples of boys’ basketball, the regular-season tournaments, especially the ones held over the holidays, were among the coolest. Though there was no more significance to a regular-season tournament win than any other, playing and, more specifically, winning a tournament in which you’d have to play three games in two days demonstrated a certain toughness and dominance and elevated the games to a greater importance than they actually had.
In other words, sign us up.
The second annual Evanston High School Invitational was scheduled for December 28–29, and it was considered among the most prestigious in the state. Our first opponent was defending tournament champion Buffalo Grove, one of the perennial top teams. Also at Evanston, in addition to the host team, were Fremd, Forest View, Maine South, Resurrection, and St. Scholastica.
It was exciting for us to be playing games while school was not in session, and because it was the start of a long holiday weekend, most of our parents, including mine, could come to all the games. After our opening game Wednesday night, a 57–44 victory over Buffalo Grove in which we outscored the Bisons 18–8 in the fourth quarter, we stuck around late to watch the Forest View–Fremd game, which Fremd won, then spent the entire next day at Evanston High School.
We remembered Fremd, of course. It was the school Mrs. Mulder had scheduled the year before as our season opener, a barometer, she reasoned, for where our program stood compared with the best teams in the state. Fremd was one of those teams and had pasted us that day at home, going on to finish third in the first-ever Illinois girls’ state tournament. In Thursday’s 1 p.m. game in the second round of the Evanston Invitational, we avenged that defeat with a sound 59–43 victory over a team with much the same personnel as the year before.
The day was a blast. We trounced Fremd, showered, dressed, went out for lunch, then came back to the school, got into clean uniforms, and then, to kill time before the game that night, played cards, read the paper, and took naps on the scummy, disgusting floor of the boys’ locker room, which had been cleared out for us. So this was what being an athlete was all about.
“St. Scholastica won,” Connie informed us. “And they look pretty good.”
While some of us were killing time debating the relative cuteness of the oldest brother on Eight Is Enough, Connie and Shirley had been keeping a close eye on St. Scholastica’s game against Evanston, and they were keeping us focused.
It wasn’t that difficult. Knowing that many of the other teams and their fans were sticking around to watch our game that night fed our egos like nothing before. We were the special ones who got to hang out all day in the locker room bec
ause we were playing in the championship game. We were being watched. We were special.
We were also ready.
We told ourselves that every good team in the state was paying attention, and we were excited to show that we had officially arrived. Per Connie and my persistent harping, we sprinted onto the court for our pregame warm-up like it was the state championship, performing our ballhandling routine crisply and without any flubs. And it carried over to the game as everything seemed to click—our defense, strong as ever with Connie, Barb, DD, and me flicking away passes in our press and converting them into easy layups, and our offense, led by Shirley, firing on all cylinders.
St. Scholastica’s JoAnn Feiereisel, who had given us all we could handle in the regional finals the previous spring, scored 29 points before fouling out. But Shirley played the game of her life, leading us in scoring with 19 points, while Connie and Diana also finished in double figures to spur us to a 62–58 victory.
In the Chicago Tribune the next day, we were shocked to discover a huge photo spread devoted to our Evanston triumph. In addition to a couple of action shots, one photo had us on each other’s shoulders cutting down the nets. There were also two photos of Bridget, including one of her dad twirling her in a giant celebratory hug at midcourt.
We were 5–0 and suddenly a team that even Mrs. Mulder could not make into underdogs any longer. In the Suburban Trib, Susan Sternberg, the only woman sportswriter I had ever heard of, led her article with this:
Arlene Mulder would like to be a contestant on I’ve Got a Secret.
However, it wouldn’t take a John Q. Daly or a Garry Moore to figure out that the Niles West girls’ basketball coach wouldn’t have a chance to stump the show’s panel—if it were made up of her north suburban coaching peers. But you just can’t blame Mulder for wanting to try.
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