After we got home, I sent him to bed to rest, and went back to what I’d been doing. But I could hear the different groans he was making, and they didn’t sound right. As a mother you can tell when your child is really hurt. You’ve heard him cry from anger, frustration, or pain enough times to know the difference. This sounded like agony.
When I took D.J. to the doctor, sure enough, he had broken his humerus bone, the one between the elbow and shoulder. The doctor said it was one of the hardest bones to break. I felt like I’d dropped the parenting ball yet again.
Now I was supposed to leave for Sydney and the 2000 Olympic Women’s Basketball Games. Dick Ebersol had hired me to do the color. But Drew was only seven and Darren was ten. After what had happened with D.J., I didn’t want to leave them for three weeks while I travelled halfway around the world. So I pooled my airline miles and was able to bring them. Mom, my brother David, and my sister, Cathy also came, and it turned out to be the most amazing trip for everyone.
Darren, my brother, David, and D.J. stayed in one hotel room, while Mom, Cathy, Drew and I stayed in another. Things were different since FIBA had changed the rules in 1989 that allowed professionals to compete in the Olympic Games. The catalyst may have been when the US Men’s team finished with only a Bronze at the ’88 Olympics. The ’92 Olympics had ushered in the first Dream Team. Since then, no other country stood a chance. (Women’s ‘Dream Team’ came in 2000.)
These were also the first Olympics in which WNBA players would compete. There was a fierce rivalry between Australian basketball player, Lauren Jackson and our own Lisa Leslie. The Games were played at the Sydney Superdome, and both the U.S. Men’s and Women’s teams took the Gold.
When we returned to the States, I continued to do the NCAA Final Four for ESPN, and when I wasn’t broadcasting, I worked various basketball camps and did some motivational speaking. Offers kept coming to coach or work in the front office with various WNBA franchises, just as they had when the league first started up, but I still said no. I wanted to wait until the kids were off to college.
Sometimes I wondered if my youngest would ever make it. By now, in addition to breaking her femur and arm, she seemed like she was always hurting herself whether it was splitting her chin jumping backward into the pool or breaking her wrist while competing with a boy to see who could jump highest. She was nine and reminding me more of myself when I was young. Nowadays, I didn’t run and jump the way I had then. Now, I had to make time to exercise along with every other broadcaster who hoped to keep their backsides from turning to mush from sitting in the booth too long.
By 2004, I realized I’d been broadcasting for twenty-five years. That spring, after attending a Baseball Hall of Fame luncheon at the White House as Sandy Koufax’s guest, I flew into New Orleans to do color for the NCAA Women’s Final Four with Mike Patrick who was now calling the play-by-play. It was there that I received a phone call requesting that I fly to Los Angeles to attend the Cy Young Awards. I was asked to represent Don. All of the other Dodger Cy Young Award winners were invited to be there when Eric Gagne was presented with his award. I wanted to go and I knew my children would be there, and I wanted to be with them, but arranging for a flight back and forth in time would be difficult.
That same week the L.A. Times ran a piece, “Meyers At Home in Final Four.” I’d been featured in the Los Angeles Times a lot over the years, but what made this article so special were the nice things my colleague, Mike Patrick, said about me. “I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t rave about her. You never hear an unkind word spoken about her from anyone.”
For the most part, I got along well with all of my broadcasting colleagues. They’d been so nice to me over the years, and Patrick, especially so. “Not since Ann Meyers had anything so great come to TV,” he was once quoted saying when asked about the advent of HD Television, and I’m still so flattered that he would say something so nice.
But now, when I was feeling like I couldn’t be at the right place at the right time, like maybe I was letting too many people down, it was especially great to read something like that. It was beyond gratifying to learn that colleagues considered me to be a decent individual in a business that was often driven by ambition and greed. I’d always taken pride in my work, always wanted to deliver and be the best without being cut-throat about it. To know now that I was respected and liked by my peers felt good.
That July, I left the children to travel to Athens to cover the 2004 Olympics, again for NBC. Just as it had been in 1984, it was still an incredible honor to be broadcasting the Olympic women’s basketball games, for which I, once again, had Dick Ebersol to thank. This time, though, we were warned not to bring our families. It was still so soon after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The fear was that the 2004 Olympics would be a dangerous place, especially for Americans.
Without the kids there, I was better able to focus on my work. A lot of the players from other countries had tricky names. I was working with one of the best play-by-play announcers out there, Mike Breen, with whom I’d worked covering WNBA games for NBC. Together we studied the pronunciation of each player’s name so we could avoid stumbling during the broadcast. While I was working color for the women’s games, Doug Collins was working color for the men’s, and Mike was doing double duty calling both the men’s and women’s. Afterward the whole crew would go to dinner at the same beautiful open air restaurant with its gentle sea breezes. We’d be there until one or two in the morning and the place would remain packed. It seemed Greece came alive at night. The basketball banter would go back and forth, and we’d remember past Olympic games, and it always made the food taste better
We all had a great time and as it turned out, it couldn’t have been safer. The staff in charge of security was hyper-vigilant, and I regretted not bringing the kids. Then again, hindsight is a lovely thing. How many times I have wished for a crystal ball, so I’d never make a wrong step. Most of all, you always want to be there. But later that year, I learned that even being there was no guarantee that the worst wouldn’t happen.
In late November, Dick and Susan Ebersol’s fourteen-year-old son, Teddy, died. The family had boarded a small, private jet in Colorado that crashed moments after take-off in icy conditions and poor visibility. Dick suffered serious injuries, as did the rest of the family, but Teddy had been ejected from the plane, dying instantly. He had been the youngest of five, an altar boy, who had spoken at his 8th grade graduation the previous year by saying, “The finish line is only the beginning of a whole new race.” My Darren and Teddy were only a year apart.
Those of us who knew Dick and his wife, actress Susan Saint James, could not imagine the heartbreak they were going through. There were no words to heal their pain. Dick had been instrumental in the careers of so many. His protégés were scattered throughout the broadcasting world, most of them flourishing, many of them owing their livelihoods to him. He was pivotal in launching my Olympic broadcasting career for NBC, and he’d given me the honor of being the first female to broadcast a nationally televised NBA game, in addition to hiring me to work the WNBA games. Now I and so many others could do little more in return than pay our respects and offer up our prayers at his son’s funeral.
It was appearing more and more that the peaks of life were impossible without its valleys. When I got back home, I’m sure I hugged the kids much harder and longer than I normally do when returning from a trip. Then I called Mom. As parents, we are programmed to protect our kids, not to bury them, and this was something she understood all too well. After we talked I reminded D.J., Darren, and Drew that however difficult things were for us without their dad, there was still so much to be grateful for.
During this same period, I tried to spend as much time as possible visiting Papa. He was always on my radar and I’d often call him whether I was on the road or at home. He was in his nineties, but still managed to get to plenty of the UCLA games at Pauley Pavilion when he was feeling well. He always sat in section 103B in a seat behind
the home bench. And he always managed to give out autographs. Even as frail as he had become, his signature was as pure and clear as it had been forty years earlier, just like the heart and soul of the man himself. He had never sought the limelight or all the attention. He’d been a teacher in his early career, and that’s always how he thought of himself, a teacher first and foremost. When he started coaching back in the 30s and 40s, and then at UCLA in the 50s, he was one of the few coaches out there who would play black athletes. In 1947 he’d refused an invitation to the Final Four Tournament in Kansas City because of the NAIB’s policy banning African American players.
This was well before they began calling him the Wizard of Westwood, a moniker he didn’t appreciate because he’d tried so hard to teach his players that success could only be achieved through commitment and hard work. The press was making it sound as though it were as easy as magic for him. We, who knew him, never used that term. And if he’d have let the press know how much he disliked it, they would have stopped using it, too. That’s how strong a sway he held over people. Even in the twilight of his life, his influence was such that when he appeared on Charlie Rose with Bill Walton and Bill Russell, Russell admitted later that the only reason he went on the show was to be near Papa. We all wanted to be near him whenever we could.
And I wanted to tell him my news; and get his advice.
Robert Sarver had called me from Arizona asking me to act as General Manager for the Mercury. The Phoenix Mercury was the one WNBA team that called year in and year out. They had been relentless. I’d just received the Ronald Reagan Media Award a few months earlier, placing me in the company of Howard Cosell, Bob Costas, Keith Jackson, Frank Deford, and Rupert Murdoch. It was a personal victory for me because I was such an introvert unless I was performing as an athlete, and I considered it a triumph over nature to think that I had been given an award in the name of one of the greatest American communicators of the 20th Century. Whether or not I would consider Sarver’s proposal depended on a couple things. I wanted to know that I could take the job and continue to broadcast and, more importantly, whether my children thought it was okay. I wasn’t about to uproot them again.
Sarver had just purchased both the NBA and WNBA Phoenix franchises a couple of years earlier from Jerry Colangelo, who was instrumental in supporting the WNBA league in 1997. A self-made man at twenty-three, Sarver had been the youngest to found a national bank. Now, nearly twenty years later, he hoped to make both the Suns and the Mercury as profitable as all of his other endeavors. Not long after he stepped in, the Phoenix Suns tied a record for the NBA-Best 62 wins. In September of 2006, Robert hoped that by bringing me onboard he could do the same thing for the women’s team.
I needed to talk to someone who understood the rigors of being a GM, so I turned to Don’s good friend, Buzzie Bavasi. The Hall of Fame GM with the Brooklyn/LA Dodgers, California Angels, and San Diego Padres, was a wealth of information. Of course, I also spoke to Papa, and my family. Before presenting it to the kids, I wanted to make sure I understood all the ramifications myself.
By this time, D.J. was nineteen and a senior at Cushing Prep Academy in Massachusetts, Darren was seventeen and in high school, and Drew was thirteen, in junior high. They were getting older, but I still wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do. They were the first ones I asked. I had to know how they felt. A few months earlier we’d all been invited by the Dodgers to see the premier of the movie, Bobby, the fictionalized account of the hours leading up to the assassination of Robert Kennedy on June 5th 1968—the same day Donnie had achieved his sixth straight shutout. It was filled with newsreels from the day, and though much of the dialogue revolved around Donnie’s shutout, they never did show footage of him.
“Gosh, Mom, the whole way through I kept thinking they were going to show Dad,” Darren said.
Darren was just three when Don died, an age where memories of his father were only just beginning to form. Now Darren was trying hard to recall what he could. It reminded me of when he was younger and how frustrated he would get when he couldn’t remember the same things about his dad that his older brother, D.J., could. I would wonder when all the little scars from Donnie’s death would finally disappear, leaving us with only beautiful memories.
Now we had watched a movie that had taken us back in time to a day that was so terrible for the nation, and yet historic for their dad. It was one of Don’s greatest achievements.
“As proud as he was of that day, I know he’d be twice as proud of you two now,” I told Darren and Drew after the movie, and I believed it with all my heart.
Though they didn’t show Don, the comments from the other characters in the movie had been enough to give the kids a good idea of what their Dad was like as a younger man. There were so many things even I learned about Don from that film. When I think about it now, in some ways it was probably good that D.J. was at prep school instead of being with us that night. If Darren had faint memories of his father, and Drew had none, their older brother was living with a ghost.
D.J. carried his father’s name, his eyes, and so much of Don’s personality. When he’d been younger, many adults would come up to him and say, “Are you going to grow up to become a baseball player like your dad?” They’d ask both the boys, and I know it bothered them, just like it bothered Drew when someone would ask if she wanted to become a basketball player like her mom.
But everything seemed to resonate just a little bit more with D.J., and I think it’s because he remembered his father and how much it had hurt those first several years after his death.
Afterward, Izzy and some of the other Dodgers told the kids stories about Don back in the day. The movie had brought us a little closer to the man we all loved. But for children, a movie reel is a lousy stand-in for the real thing. I thought back on that night now and worried about whether or not my taking the GM position for the Mercury would be the right thing.
We had a family discussion, and they thought it was a good idea. They told me they were aware of how many opportunities I’d turned down up to that point. We all decided that Darren and Drew would stay in Huntington Beach rather than come with me to Phoenix. This would allow them to finish school with the same friends and teachers and be near the ocean.
Drew was playing soccer and running track, and Darren was playing soccer and running track as well. Their lives were in Huntington Beach. I had the help of Mom, Patty, and Frannie, and other family members who took turns staying at the house while I was away. And Phoenix was just a short plane ride away. My sister, Cathy, was already living there, so I knew I’d have family nearby. I looked at each of my kids head on, trying to read their faces, hoping that they really meant what they were saying, wondering if it might finally be all right.
23
The Road to the Boardroom Is Through the Locker Room
“If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman.”
~ Margaret Thatcher
“This is Ann Meyers, the new GM of the Mercury.” Robert introduced me to everyone in the front office. We shook hands, exchanged pleasantries, and then Robert cleared his throat. “Oh, yeah, and she’s also going to be Vice President of the Suns.” When I heard that I gasped right along with everybody else. We had never discussed the VP position or my responsibilities. I couldn’t have predicted in a million years that he was going to spring such a totally thrilling, surprising prospect on me. The title alone would open up doors.
The next thing I knew, I was out scouting for the Suns, and I loved it. I also scouted for the Mercury. The Suns continued to dominate, and the Mercury finally started to heat up.
They’d always had the talent, the nucleus of a winning team. Diana Taurasi, Cappi Pondexter, and Penny Taylor were three phenomenal players. They were missing the fourth leg. I knew their coach, Paul Westhead, because I’d broadcast some of his games when he was coaching at Loyola, and he’d also been head coach for the Lakers during the 1980 Championship with Magic and
Kareem, and I knew the assistant coach, Corey Gains, because he’d played for Coach Westhead.
But it was in the front office that Jay Parry, COO/President, and Amber Cox, the Marketing Director, and I clicked. The three of us had an instant chemistry, which made each of us better.
Through a bizarre bit of luck, when Jay and I went back to New York for the WNBA meetings, they also had the lottery for the #1 pick. We could hear the ping pong balls popping inside the machine. The Mercury had the worst odds, so everyone was stunned when the ball popped up and we got the first pick overall.
When it was time for the draft, I made a tough decision, but one I felt was necessary. After discussing it with Coach Westhead, we traded the first pick to Minnesota for Tangela Smith. No one had ever traded away the number one overall pick before, not in the NBA. And there were a lot of people who believed I’d made a big mistake, including Jay and Amber. But I felt that going with a seasoned pro like Tangela was a smart move. She was the missing piece of the puzzle. I had broadcast Tangela’s games when she was in college, and then in Sacramento, and Charlotte when she went pro. I knew she could play, and more than that, Coach and I knew she’d fit into the system he ran. The chemistry among the teammates could now work to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Papa used to say, “It’s amazing what you can accomplish when nobody cares who gets the credit.” When you think of competitive athletes, altruism seldom comes to mind. But I knew that to have a winning team, they had to play for the team, not themselves.
All for one and one for all had been my motto as a team member, but I had refrained from saying “we” as a broadcaster. In part, it was an attempt to remain impartial. Even when broadcasting the UCLA games, I tried not to say “we.” But now, as a representative of the Suns and the Mercury “we” was all I said. “Group think” would also be accompanied by a lot more orange and purple clothing in my closet. It was such a great organization with so many wonderful people, and they made it easy. Jerry Colangelo had built it from scratch and Sarver had come in with so much passion. Mike D’Antoni, Rick Welts, Alvin Gentry, and Steve Kerr on the NBA side were behind me a hundred percent.
You Let Some Girl Beat You? Page 22