Connie stole the inbounds pass, but Barb missed a layup. She made up for it, though, with another steal leading to a breakaway basket to trim Dundee’s lead to 71–68 with 45 seconds left as the Cardinals’ attempt at a four-corner stall appeared to be backfiring on them.
We caught a break when Dundee’s center popped wide open for a shot and missed from short range. But a medium-range jumper by Diana rimmed out and Morency clawed away the rebound, drawing the foul with six seconds showing on the clock and all but crushing our chances.
As Morency strode to the foul line, in order to remove even the remotest possibility of fouling us, we could only surmise, Judson ordered his other four players to sit down on the court in front of their bench. We looked over in disbelief. This was the same guy who had been holding up giant posters with numbered plays written on them throughout the game, a weird tactic to be sure. But this was much weirder. And this showed us up.
We glared at him with eyes red and wet from fatigue and frustration as Morency calmly sunk both foul shots. On the bench now sat our entire starting lineup, all of us fouled out, angry and helpless, while on the court, Peggy scored one last lonely layup for a 73–70 defeat as we tried not to cry.
We had edged out the Cardinals in field goals scored, and our press forced a whopping 35 Dundee turnovers. But the difference in fouls—29 for us, compared with 13 for Dundee—was just as astounding and enough to offset their sloppiness.
At the buzzer, Dundee’s half of the 1,800 fans crammed into the Barrington gym surged onto the floor, enveloping the players and their coach. Twenty-six years earlier, Paul Judson had teamed up with his twin brother, Phil, to give tiny Hebron High, with an enrollment of 99 students, the 1952 state championship over much larger Quincy in what was called the greatest Cinderella story in the history of Illinois high school basketball. Paul Judson went on to become an all-American at the University of Illinois. But he called this night “the most satisfying thing in my athletic career and just about the biggest thrill in my life,” and you almost had to admire the guy for putting it into its proper perspective.
We moved like zombies toward the locker room, my gaze rising briefly from the floor and bouncing off Shirley’s No. 45, a back so strong but now, I noticed, hunched ever so slightly. We sat in the locker room in silence. A half hour after the game ended, not a single Niles West player had showered, taken off her shoes, or peeled off her ankle tape.
Our warm-up suits would normally be picked up quickly, hung on hangers, and put in our special vinyl bags. But even they sat in a sad, neglected heap.
Shirley stayed in her uniform long after the rest of us, knowing it would be the last time she would ever wear the Niles West colors or, she knew deep down, any athletic uniform. The University of Illinois awaited, the hopes of a basketball scholarship long since passed.
But this was not about a natural end to another stage of life. The love of basketball had sneaked up and enveloped Shirley as it had captured all of us. This was not our birthright. We did not have basketballs dropped into our cribs. We did not love the game the way you do a sibling, with no real conscious thought of how it all started.
Our relationship with the sport was one that we coveted and pursued, then allowed to grow and deepen over time. Basketball was, in many ways, one of our best friends, dependable and fulfilling and intoxicating in its unpredictability. It gave us a feeling of belonging and security and confidence we so desperately needed during the angst of adolescence. Unlike the average high school social group or clique, we had a common goal that would not shake us, withstood petty bickering, and deterred all the usual grounds for rejection like the wrong hair or clothes or body type.
We had come to love and understand and appreciate the game the way boys did. And now for sure, we knew their heartbreak as well.
So did Mrs. Mulder.
But if she was thinking at all about having just coached us for the last time, she didn’t show it. Instead, she had that look that had become all too familiar to us—the flared nostrils, the pursed lips—and she conducted an hour of postgame interviews without breaking form.
“I’m not saying that the officials were biased,” Mrs. Mulder said, “just that these 10 girls deserved a better chance.”
On the bus ride home, there was more anger than tears. But sitting in the second row, Shirley could not hold it back and broke down.
Mrs. Mulder slid in next to her, and they spoke in hushed tones.
“Why?” Shirley asked her, not expecting an answer. “It’s just so unfair.”
“But don’t you see, Shirley?” Mrs. Mulder told her. “This is life. It’s filled with these moments, things we can’t explain, things that are unfair. And it’s how we respond to them that’s the important thing. You will get over this, I promise. It was never just about winning.”
CHAPTER 14
Saturday Night Fever and a Champaign Hangover
THE NEXT DAY, Mrs. Mulder told us the school would pay for hotel rooms in Champaign if we wanted to go watch the team that broke our hearts further crush our spirits. And with all the enthusiasm of a group of kids about to take their ACTs, we once again made the pilgrimage to the state tournament.
There wasn’t a thing we could say to the seniors, and we were a little surprised they even wanted to go. Shirley was still in shock, but she was going. It was almost as if she had to, like pulling that last bit of athletic tape off an ankle that had not been adequately shaved.
Once we got there we decided to inflict a little more pain on ourselves by going to take a look at Assembly Hall, the arena where we were supposed to be playing. It was so huge, it looked closer than it actually was, and we parked way too far away and a few parking lots removed from the main ones, as if that was our punishment and we were lucky just to be allowed into the place at all. Picking our way through a patch of tall grass and weeds, it felt a little like the scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and her buddies try to get to the Emerald City through the poppy fields. We half expected it to start snowing and for all of us to lie down and fall asleep.
Of course, when we finally got there, the arena was closed. Not that it was going to stop us. Eventually, we found an open door that was surely not meant for us, and over Mrs. Mulder’s mild objections that “maybe we shouldn’t,” we let ourselves in.
The place was cavernous, even bigger than we had thought, and if possible, we were even more depressed. If last year’s failure to make it to the Elite Eight at Illinois State in Normal was disappointing, this was misery. And as we made our way to the court, Mrs. Mulder nervously casing the joint for security guards, we could see ourselves there, in uniform, playing before our fans. If we could have gotten away with it, we might have tried to slip into the tournament and hope no one noticed.
Instead, we slinked out just as quickly as we had slinked in and checked in to our hotel. At that point, we had to find something to cheer ourselves up, and with time to kill, we talked Mrs. Mulder into going to see the movie Saturday Night Fever. Bridget, thrilled to be on the trip after not making it the previous year, told Mrs. Mulder she had a stomachache and was going to stay in her room.
In truth, her boyfriend, Scott, had just shocked her by showing up at our hotel with his roommate from Southern Illinois University, where they were freshmen. They had hitchhiked from Carbondale, roughly two hours away, to come see her.
Bridget was mortified.
It wasn’t that she was not thrilled to see Scott. But any excitement she felt when she saw him standing there outside her room was instantly vanquished by her fear that Mrs. Mulder would see him and kill them both. Getting out of the movie bought her enough time to have a quick dinner and send the boys on their way, which she did long before we returned.
Most of us had already seen Saturday Night Fever, as it had been in theaters a while, but we wanted to go again, maybe even a little more so knowing that it came over the objections of our coach, who had not seen it and had not planned to. This was not her type of mov
ie, to say the least, and if she wasn’t already positive of this, it was hammered home in the first scene of the movie, when Tony, played by John Travolta, asked his boss at the paint store for an advance on his paycheck. He argued that most businesses paid their employees on Friday, rather than Monday, but his boss shut him down.
“This way you’ve got money all week,” the boss said. “You can save for the future.”
“Fuck the future,” Tony replied.
“No, Tony, you can’t fuck the future,” the boss told him. “The future catches up with you, and it fucks you if you haven’t planned for it.”
Mrs. Mulder visibly cringed as we tried not to make her discomfort too obvious by staring at her.
From there, the movie only got worse and long before it was over, she told us she would wait for us in the lobby. We giggled to ourselves that our coach would be so naive as to be offended by a movie. But later in her hotel room, we weren’t laughing.
We apologized for dragging her to the theater when we knew she probably wouldn’t like the movie, but she waved us away. It wasn’t about the movie, she said as she sat on the edge of her bed and we fanned out on the floor.
“I worry so much about my girls,” she blurted out. “Michelle has become a latchkey kid, Alison is in daycare. Most days, they’re asleep when I leave in the morning and again by the time I get home at night.” She continued near tears over her guilt and fear. How could she be sure, she asked us, that her daughters would grow up morally and emotionally healthy in a world where movies showed young men engaged in a “gang bang” with an apparently willing young woman, except she left out the words gang and bang? How was she going to make sure that they did?
She was opening up to us in a way she never had before, speaking to us like adults, and we stared awkwardly at her for a moment, not quite knowing what to say. “You’re a great mother,” Shirley said, finally breaking the silence, “just like you’re a great coach.”
“Your kids are so lucky to have you,” Connie added. “They know how much you love them.”
I nodded along, not knowing quite what to say. It felt funny to be talking to her that way, but it also felt good and right, and we bonded as our coach sat on her bed, baring her soul.
The next morning, we went to watch the first state quarterfinal game between Dundee and Mattoon, and we had barely settled into our seats when the Cardinals ran onto the court and Connie spoke her first words of the day.
“I feel like I’m going to throw up,” she moaned.
We all were a little queasy as we watched two teams that were not us warm up and their fans—not ours—launch into their school songs and cheers. Seeing Dundee’s names on the scoreboard was almost physically painful.
“They’re not even that good,” I whispered to Peggy, and of course, she agreed.
“I hope they get crushed,” she muttered back.
At halftime, we were summoned courtside to do an interview with Floyd Brown of WGN-TV. It perked us up and we felt very important as Brown talked about how so many people had expected us to still be playing.
Barb was thrust in front of the camera first.
“And what’s your name?” Brown asked in his typical singsong delivery.
“Sophomore,” replied Barb, at which point we nearly fell down laughing.
Shirley saved the school’s dignity by being as naturally bubbly as ever, and Brown called her “Miss Congeniality,” which further lightened our moods as we made our way back up to our seats. Then Mattoon beat Dundee, which made us feel even better.
On the way back home, after watching Joliet West take the second Illinois girls’ state basketball title, I sat in the front seat of Mrs. Mulder’s car with Shirley and resumed our conversation from the night before. It was late, pitch darkness all around us as we drove through the cornfields of downstate Illinois while our coach told us how it was to be a girl growing up on a farm in the 1950s.
She played the old-fashioned six-to-a-side girls’ basketball, she told us, a version still being played in Iowa, and girls like her did not wear makeup or date at 13 or watch racy movies. There were nice girls and there were not-nice girls. “The way I was brought up,” she said, “if a girl so much as used a tampon, she was no longer considered a virgin.”
OK, maybe that we did not need to know, and I jabbed Shirley in the ribs as we tried once again to be mature and not laugh.
On Monday, I was back on the Niles West softball field with Barb and Judy, while Connie and Peggy retreated to the gym to play basketball with whomever they could find. In addition to her all-conference, Suburban Trib all-star, and all–Chicago area honors, Connie was also named to the all-state third team and was invited to try out for the USA Junior Women’s Basketball Team in St. Louis in the summer.
For Shirley, her sense of humor and ours would come in handy. Pretty soon, Connie and I were drawing pictures in her yearbook of stick figures clutching their necks in the universal symbol for choking. And we all told her how much we would miss her.
We also thanked Shirley in our inscriptions: Connie, for teaching her how to drive the lane; Barb, for giving her the confidence to shoot; me, for keeping us all in line, for sharing laughs and tears. “Basketball was really everything, wasn’t it?” I wrote.
We told her to never stop dreaming and promised her that next year, we would win a state title in her honor and would bring her along as our water girl.
“Treasure your relationships and experiences always,” Mrs. Mulder wrote to Shirley, “as I still hold that winning isn’t everything. I’m sorry your dream wasn’t realized, but I hope you felt that all the work (punishment) was worth it …”
Quietly, Arlene Mulder taught the last few classes of her career. She also took notice of an article in a local paper headlined FEMALE COACHES COMPLAIN: MEN MUSCLE INTO GIRLS’ SPORTS and clipped it out. In the piece, female high school coaches in the area expressed concern that men would soon be pushing them aside.
“I’d rather coach three or four sports than to give one of the sports to a man,” said Crystal Lake girls’ basketball coach Linda Brady, who had led her basketball team to the Elite Eight. “Once the men come, the women will be out,” Brady added. “They said once there was more money, better coverage and bigger tournaments, the men would take over. And that’s what they are starting to do.”
Brady contended that many men were starting to coach girls’ teams strictly for the money. Also, the seasons were shorter and it was easier coaching girls, who were generally more coachable than boys.
Although Mrs. Mulder didn’t know it, Bud Trapp had informally asked Billy Schnurr if he would be up for taking the Niles West girls’ basketball coaching job, but he declined, not wanting the stress and strain of full-time coaching again. Trapp saw what happened with Paul Judson and had secretly hoped Schnurr would sit on our bench during the game. When Mr. Schnurr said he wasn’t interested in replacing Mrs. Mulder, Trapp was sure that Gene Earl would be the man for the job.
Trapp already knew that Earl, as a lower-level coach, was one of his better teachers, and he liked his good ol’ boy, southern Illinois charm. More importantly, Earl was not going to let anyone intimidate him, and Trapp, like many others, thought that was the difference between our going downstate and being denied once again.
Mrs. Mulder did not disagree with that notion, and she beat herself up over her unwillingness, almost inability, to draw a technical, stand up to Judson, and maybe give us the edge we needed to get past Dundee. But she was not about to be shy now.
After the Dundee loss, she spoke to Dr. Mannos and told him she’d like to have some input on the new hire. “They’re losing three players, but they still have an excellent nucleus and some good underclassmen coming up,” she told him, the “they” in reference to her team sticking in her throat.
“I agree, Arlene,” Dr. Mannos told her. “We could have gone all the way this year. That Dundee game was stolen from us, and these girls need to be given every opportunity to achieve
their potential. I’d like another woman to replace you, but she has to be qualified.”
Mrs. Mulder was hoping for a woman as well. When she found out she was pregnant, one of her first calls was to Ann Penstone, the girls’ basketball coach at Buffalo Grove High, asking if she would consider coming to Niles West. But Penstone, who had played basketball in the early ’70s for the University of Illinois, where she and her teammates paid for their own uniforms and slept in dorm lounges on the road, said she wouldn’t feel comfortable interviewing, and that was as far as it went.
Initially, Trapp was looking for someone who could teach dance and coach basketball because he had only one hire and two positions to fill, but he quickly realized those two skills were probably mutually exclusive in a male candidate. The problem was that there were not many woman candidates around school, and Mulder agreed that they should not give the job to a woman just because of her gender.
More and more, Mrs. Mulder was becoming resigned to the fact that Gene Earl would likely be our next coach, and though she didn’t have anything personal against him, she wasn’t overwhelmingly in favor of the choice either. She just didn’t know Earl well enough.
“What do you think of him, Billy?” she asked Mr. Schnurr.
“He’s a good man, Arlene,” he told her, knowing that’s what she needed to hear most. “He did a fine job at the sophomore level. It wasn’t his fault they lost. If he had any talented players, I’d always take them away from him and move them up to varsity.”
She nodded. “I’m sure he’ll do a good job,” she said quietly.
At that point, it hardly mattered what she said.
We also heard Earl’s name bandied about, and one rainy spring afternoon, a bunch of us sat in the cafeteria lamenting a potential future with a man we knew nothing about except for the fact that he taught driver’s ed, coached bad boys’ teams, and was one of the teachers who yelled at us to stop goofing around as we boarded our buses after school.
“I mean, what are they thinking?” I demanded of Connie, who simply shrugged.
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