Holly Andersen was a 5-11 freshman center on the JV team, but she had been practicing with us on Saturdays. Holly was in the same class as and friends with Bridget’s younger sister Michelle, so Bridget knew enough about Holly to know she was gullible and decided to have some fun.
“Come on, Holly,” Bridget urged. “It’ll be so funny.”
It didn’t take much urging. Holly accepted a dare like it was a Baby Ruth bar. She put on the Hawk head and raced out into the gym before pregame warm-ups, slapping hands with whomever crossed her path. She figured she was safe since the giant head obscured her own. She forgot one small detail.
Holly’s mom had found her shoes on sale that year. So, while the rest of us wore red, white, or some combination of both, Holly was perhaps the only kid in the school—and perhaps the state—who wore green gym shoes. Mrs. Mulder hardly had to be Detective Columbo to identify her, and she unraveled the mystery in about two seconds.
There’s no telling if it made Maine South want to beat us even more than it usually did, but we were tight at the outset, as off-kilter a start to a game as we had had in two years. And the Hawks—towering over us with their triple-post offense featuring three starters at 5-10, 5-11, and 5-11—were conversely as hot as they had ever been. They seized the opportunity, not missing a shot for most of the first quarter, and ran out to a 17–0 lead before we knew what had hit us.
We called a timeout and looked at each other with ashen faces. Bridget couldn’t make eye contact with anyone. But like reaching for a favorite old stuffed animal, we turned to our full-court press for reassurance, and it was there as always as we reeled off eight straight points following the timeout to pull to 19–8 at the end of the first quarter.
The game was fast-paced the rest of the way as we regained our equilibrium. Trailing 38–27, we were calm at the beginning of the third quarter, methodically chipping away at Maine South’s lead and using our speed to offset their overwhelming size advantage. Connie was all over the court forcing steals with Barb, and she and Diana all but took over the offense, scoring 16 and 14 points, respectively, in the second half to lead us to a 68–64 victory. Connie finished with 24 points and Diana with 20 as our record improved to 10–0.
Fate was smiling on us, we decided, press or no press.
Well, fate and our pregame rituals, which had suddenly become superstitions and were the topic of discussion after the game. The way we opened our lockers and folded our socks and ate our pregame meals all took on immense importance. And after the Maine South win, someone pointed out that Bridget was wearing the same hideous underwear she wore when we won the Glenbrook North game in dramatic style.
Our center, whose taste in lingerie leaned toward the lacy bikini variety, was now stuck wearing her ugliest, least feminine pair, which came up not far below her armpits and made her feel as if she were about 60. Pleading that she only wore them when she was running low, she no longer had a choice. We could not take any chances.
CHAPTER 11
Having It All
OUR FAN BASE WAS GROWING.
It wasn’t overwhelming or sudden, but one day we looked around the gym and noticed there were people no one really knew, just townspeople, neighbors of all of ours who came because they were curious and came back because they liked what they saw.
Among those strange faces was that of a skinny, blonde eighth grader named Becky Schnell, who had been attending our games with her father, a gym teacher and coach at Old Orchard Junior High School in Skokie. Coming to our basketball games was a refuge for Becky from life at home with an alcoholic mother.
Becky remembered well the day six years earlier when Title IX passed. She remembered because her father was well aware of the limitations placed on girls, and without a son, he had high hopes for Becky. “You’re going to be able to play high school basketball now,” he excitedly told Becky and her older sister, Pam. Becky was only a third grader at the time, but she was already showing unmistakable signs of athletic prowess. And the first time she glimpsed our new red-and-white warmups, she was in love.
She watched Connie and me especially closely because we were guards like she was, studying exactly what we did and how we moved and marveling at Connie’s overall ability. She had attended our supersectional against Hinsdale South the year before with her dad and had cried when we lost.
As an excruciatingly shy 13-year-old at tiny St. Paul Lutheran School, Becky never told anyone about a homelife that was quickly becoming intolerable because she thought she was the only kid going through such a mess. Just like DD. Just like Peggy. While her mom was able to hold a job and keep it together during the week, Becky grew to fear Saturdays and Sundays. And she knew by nine in the morning if it was going to be a good day—or not, as was more often the case.
I’ve got to get out of the house, she thought.
Alone by then with her sister a five-hour drive away at college, Becky called Pam when things were especially bad. “Here we go again,” was all she needed to say. “I don’t think I can handle this.”
It was her husband’s fault, in her mother’s mind, that her daughters weren’t feminine enough, that they didn’t have boyfriends, and that they didn’t get invited to dances. “I never got to raise daughters,” she said to her family when the liquor was talking and she wasn’t telling her girls they would never amount to anything.
What seemed to bother Becky’s mother most was the age-old frustration of failing to keep up with the neighbors. Or anyone who seemingly had more than they did, people who could go on regular vacations and buy whatever they wanted. And she made no secret of her opinion that her husband and his teacher’s salary were to blame for this as well.
“People don’t really have all the stuff you think they do,” her daughters and husband would tell her. But she scowled and simply got angrier.
Peggy could have related to the feeling of isolation.
Though life had settled down for Peggy in high school and she was quickly making her presence felt on our team, being with her family always reminded her of how close she was to the other side. Though she did not fully understand it yet, her father was an alcoholic, as were a good number of her cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Alcohol was so ingrained in all of their lives that Peggy simply knew no other way, though as a 16-year-old, she had not yet touched a drop of liquor herself. It wasn’t so much that she was afraid of becoming an alcoholic, though genetics being what they are, she should have been. It simply did not appeal to her in high school, and besides, she had more important things to do—like work on her jump shot.
But alcohol infused her very existence. The relative who was perhaps closest to Peg was her grandmother Margaret, whom Peggy adored for her blunt, brash sense of humor and no-nonsense attitude. She always had her hair done and her nails polished, the picture of the prim and proper widow—except for the can of beer next to her. “Honey, go get me some more,” her grandmother would cajole, and so on any given day, Peggy could be seen trudging down busy Dempster Street, lugging a case of beer and reasoning that it sort of counted as a workout.
One time when Peggy was 10, she asked her grandma if one of her uncles who had died was an alcoholic. “No,” her grandma replied, “he was the finest drunk around. He drank nothing but the finest whiskeys and wore the finest suits.”
Adults all made an impression on Peggy, one way or another, and Mrs. Mulder was in the process of unwittingly making one of the biggest. At our team banquet the previous spring, she had given each one of us a copy of The Prophet, the classic book of poetry by Kahlil Gibran, and written personal inscriptions of inspiration to each of us. Unlike most of us, Peggy actually read hers and treasured the book of aphorisms on such topics as love and giving, joy and sorrow, work and pleasure, marriage and children, teaching, friendship, pain, and beauty.
It didn’t do anything for her jump shot and she was still awkward on the court, all elbows and knees. But she was improving as we began our second half of league play with a
raging flu that swept through the team and left us with six players for our game at Maine West. It hardly mattered, as we still won by 50. In one week’s span, we had defeated Glenbrook South 77–21, Maine East 74–49, and Maine West 76–26, the last two games on the road.
Even weak opponents did not seem to drag down our game, as often happens. In one sequence against Maine West, the game in which we had just one player on the bench because of the flu epidemic, Bridget hit a short jumper in the second quarter and picked up a foul. She missed the free throw, but Connie darted into the lane for the rebound and shoveled it to Peggy, who then dumped it to Karen for an easy lay-in and a four-point play to make the score 28–7.
Still in the first half, Connie scored on three consecutive steals off our press followed by full-court driving layups. Then, as the trailer on yet another steal and fast break, she followed her own miss to give us a 44–9 lead at the half. We scored in bunches the scoreboard operator could hardly keep up with, and it demoralized our opponents.
We were so sure of ourselves that we even seemed to intimidate the refs, like the time when the ball bounced off one of our players and out of bounds. Everyone in the building could see it had touched our player last. But bold as could be, Shirley reached toward the female official and snatched the ball before anyone had a chance to think about it. Shirley was so confident that even our opponents failed to argue as we quickly scored off the inbounds play.
It seemed we could do no wrong.
Arlene Mulder, meanwhile, felt like she could do nothing right.
Almost every game, her husband, Al, would show up with their two daughters, Michelle and Alison, now 10 and 6. Alison, wearing her little homemade Niles West cheerleader outfit, would crawl between her mother’s knees as she sat on the bench, Mrs. Mulder oblivious to this as she coached but eventually sending her back up to Al in the stands. Al was clearly carrying the load at home these days, and though he did so willingly, it weighed on Mrs. Mulder.
“Daddy only combs the top of our heads in the morning,” Michelle told her mother one day.
It was adorable and funny and might have made her laugh had the circumstances been different, but instead it made her cry, which she always did out of sight from her family and from us, sometimes in her car on her early morning drives to school or coming home, also in the dark.
At first, it had just been a few months of coaching tennis. Then later in the winter, there were a few months of basketball season. But now basketball started earlier and lasted longer, and in her first trimester, she was wearing down. Sometimes she would be so exhausted, Al would tell her not to drive home at all, and she would simply plop down on the trainers’ table in our locker room. She didn’t need much sleep, but she could doze off anywhere at a moment’s notice. During her long commutes to school, she had a recurring conversation with herself: I’m a lousy mother, a lousy wife, and I’m probably not doing a good job teaching or coaching. I’m trying to do too much and not doing a good job of any of it. Am I really doing this for the right reasons?
The truth was that she loved almost every minute of coaching, and she felt selfish for it. At least this pregnancy would eventually give her some time to think. At the pace we were going, there was precious little time for that either.
We were not particularly worried about the Waukegan East game on February 9 as we took the school’s first trip there since ’75, but suddenly, the adults were all talking about our safety. It was the first time we had ever played the predominantly black school at their gym, and despite our earlier 75–38 victory, we had heard from opponents that their gym was a “tough place to play.” It was also the most unusual place we had ever played, with the first row of bleachers raised about 15 feet above the floor and a railing all around, giving us the feeling that we were foreign invaders battling before a hungry crowd.
That attitude, the fear, and the reputation we’d heard about were steeped in racial prejudice. If you’d asked any of us if we feared or distrusted black people or if we flat-out did not like them, most of us would have unequivocally said no. And in our hearts, we would’ve believed it. But there was no question that we looked at our Waukegan East game differently from the rest. While it was not the only predominantly black team we played, the school’s reputation—at least from what we heard and perceived—was that they were rougher, maybe even played dirty, and that going there was somehow dangerous.
Indeed, it was easily the most physical game we had ever played. We won, 67–53, but shot horribly and came out of it angry at what we thought was a lack of control by the officials, as two Waukegan East players had actually challenged Connie and me to a fight after the game.
The home crowd was dissatisfied as well, appalled in part, we assumed, by the apparent ease with which a team that was smaller, slower, and apparently in possession of fewer skills than their players had won. They were also furious at the disparity in free throws, as we converted 21-of-34 from the foul line, while the Bulldogs were 3-of-12.
We dressed quickly and quietly afterward, and then Mrs. Mulder came into the locker room and told us we would have a police escort to our bus. A school official had asked if we’d like one and she figured if they were offering, she’d accept.
“Are they kidding?” Connie asked no one in particular. And we all laughed nervously.
But when we emerged from the locker room and walked outside, a seemingly angry group of Waukegan East fans had gathered, and we huddled together and hustled onto the bus before the driver peeled out, leaving the crowd behind.
Was it a case of fervent basketball fans getting emotional over a tough loss to a conference rival they thought they should beat? Or were they frustrated and angry that we felt we required police protection? Most likely, they were just basketball parents waiting for their kids like our parents did, and we had let our imaginations run wild. Whatever it was, Mrs. Mulder preferred to downplay any racial angle as we muttered among ourselves that we were the victims.
Whomever we played by this point, it was safe to say they were especially motivated to knock us off. Glenbrook North was next, and though the game was in our gym, Mrs. Mulder cautioned us that we would be facing another angry team out to avenge an earlier defeat. And unlike Waukegan East, Glenbrook North really should have beaten us the last time we played, considering they had led the entire game and were up by 10 points with less than two minutes left when we suddenly snatched an unlikely victory.
The Spartans were 5–1 and in second place in the Central Suburban League South behind Niles West, now 7–0 in conference play. But they were missing their top scorer, and we poured it on, outscoring them 20–4 in the third quarter to expand an 18-point halftime lead to 34. Shirley, Connie, and Bridget each had 14 points, and Shirley was all over the boards with 13 rebounds. Peggy scored 10 points off the bench and we won in a rout, 65–28.
After another easy victory over Maine West, 77–23, we were 15–0 overall going into our second tournament of the season, the Libertyville Invitational. We were psyched up for another tournament, greedy to collect another trophy en route to the big one at the end of the season. But our sophomore guard, Barb Atsaves, had other things on her mind.
Barb had sprained her ankle during the Maine West game, and besides worrying about whether she could play in Libertyville, she wondered how she was going to try out for the cheerleading squad the next day while wearing a big ACE bandage on her leg. The spring tryouts determined who would be cheerleaders for the next school year, and Barb, despite the ACE bandage, made the squad as expected. But it was clear to her now that she had to make a decision. Cheerleading and basketball practices were going to conflict, and she was already well aware of how Mrs. Mulder felt about other commitments.
In the end, Barb chose basketball over cheerleading, but it was not without significant anxiety and some not-so-subtle peer pressure by her fellow cheerleaders, who wondered aloud why in the world she would want to be a jock instead of a cheerleader. Barb’s ankle and psyche recovered
in time for the Libertyville tournament, which promised to bring as much stiff competition as Evanston had, with some of the top teams from our surrounding conferences competing.
That said, we still coasted through our first two contests with a 71–35 victory over Zion and a 55–33 win over Maine North. Looming in the bottom half of the bracket were Libertyville, Hersey, and Maine South. Hersey, 13–9 and fourth in the Mid-Suburban League North, eventually knocked off both Maine South and Libertyville to get in the title game against us.
Again, Mrs. Mulder warned us not to take our opponent lightly. Despite their record, Hersey had defeated two former conference champs that season in Crystal Lake and Buffalo Grove. We listened and tried to heed her warning. But unlike the Evanston tournament, when we had actually enjoyed sitting around the locker room all day waiting for the title game, our game against Maine North started at 10 a.m., and we were cold, stiff, and tired by game time that night.
It showed immediately with a poor shooting start as Hersey took a 24–21 lead at the half. We came back to life in the third quarter, as Shirley had nine points to help us outscore Hersey, 17–6, and take an eight-point lead into the final quarter. But that’s when Hersey’s 5-6 junior, Debbie Barnd, took over. In a shooting slump to that point, Barnd suddenly led her team on a 10–2 spurt, including 7-of-7 free throws, which tied the score at 40. Barnd then fed a teammate for a layup and iced the victory with a final three-point play.
At 45–44, we still had a chance when Judy went to the foul line with 18 seconds left. But she missed the front half of the one-and-one and failed on a last-second shot attempt.
Afterward, Judy was inconsolable, though not in the way a lot of kids would be inconsolable. There were no tears, just a stubborn, surly silence. We pleaded with her to stop punishing herself, tried to assure her that it was our crummy shooting the entire night and not her free throw that lost the game for us. But she remained mute. Instead, she took off her shoes and in the now-empty gym, picked up a basketball, walked to the foul line in her stocking feet, and took aim.
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