All the hours sitting for those kids, the onions she had chopped, the papers she sold those cold mornings, the endless drills at Dave Cowens’s camp, all were an investment that had paid off in the one moment of that shot. The best part of basketball was that it was filled with forgiveness; one minute you’re losing, and a few seconds later you’ve not only won, you’ve conquered.
The slaps on her back and on Jan’s, those clunky good-natured swings from her teammates, were pure caress.
“Thanks, Rita, and thanks, Jan, for pumping us up,” said the older girls as they poured on the floor. They didn’t know it at the time, but Coach Moyer and junior varsity coach Trish Lea had already decided who would be moved up for the postseason: Jan, of course; Jessi Denis, a dark-haired girl who loved all sports (including wrestling, which she had watched on TV as a kid); her best friend, Carrie Tharp, the shortest Hurricane (“Five feet three inches with my shoes on”), whose ambition was to own her own health club and who remembered being the only girl willing to play tackle football at recess during grade school; and the player who had pleasantly surprised both her coaches this season, Rita Powell.
The air still pulsed with cheers and excitement as the two varsity teams squared off against each other in the opening tip-off.
The epithets against the Hurricanes evaporated seconds into the game when one of the Northampton players lined up to take a three-point shot from the wing, and Jen Pariseau, sensing the momentum that that shot might give Hamp, went airborne and blocked the ball, six rows deep into the stands, directly at the Hamp boys who had been taunting them. Whack! “Ah!’’ said one fan, in a regional Yankee accent. “Now that showed moxie.”
And then came the infamous spatula pick.
Why spatula?
Easy: You don’t avoid it, you’re a pancake.
Hamp went into a full-court press, hoping to rattle either of the two Js bringing the ball up the court. Coach Moyer’s solution was to run one of the forwards, Gumby, from the front court back into the back court and to stand like a statue on the left-hand side. Jamila would angle sharply, aiming at her teammate’s hip. The idea was to create enough space so the defender had to duck around the pick, creating a window for Jamila to bring the ball up the court. On this occasion, none of Hamp’s players called out a warning to the girl trying to guard Jamila. Eyes focused on Jamila, unaware of Gumby’s rocklike presence. The Hamp player crashed into Gumby and fell to the floor, dazed. The game was halted for fifteen minutes to allow rescue personnel to come, put her in a neck brace, and take her to nearby Cooley Dickinson Hospital. If there had been any fire in Hamp beforehand, Gumby had extinguished it with one solid shoulder. Even Coach Moyer, speaking later, said he hadn’t seen a pick like that since his days on his college team. Fortunately, the player suffered only a mild headache and no major injury.
As the game progressed, the connectedness between Jen and Jamila, the unspoken but constant contact, their radar, was as electrifying as their play.
At one point Kim Warner missed an open shot, releasing a flaccid looper that had as much hope of making the basket as asparagus shooting up in January. She ran to the back court with her head hanging down.
There was a synchronization to Jen and Jamila’s perception of that moment; they seemed to signal each other in some extrasensory way. “Kim,” they shouted, “you can’t do that.”
The two captains arrived at the same sudden conviction:
Enough is enough!
Kim had to do better, had to think better of herself.
They came at her, two ponytails with a cause, Jen from one side and Jamila from the other in a V formation so perfect as to invite the envy of a flock of Canadian geese; as they moved toward her, they shouted: “Keep your head up!”
She looked at them, stunned. She had just missed yet another shot, and she had automatically lowered her head, thinking, I’m not helping.
Jen and Jamila, talking to her this way?
They were her pals. They didn’t yell.
They raised the volume, rivaling the roar of the fans.
They shouted.
“We said keep your head up!”
Never before had they addressed her that way, never that loudly, never with such force. As they all raced back with the rebound, Jamila passed the ball to Jen who passed it back to Jamila who passed it to Kim who, in the paint, stopped, stared at the rim, thought fleetingly of all those summer nights at Crocker Farm and the aging hoop where she had practiced by herself, took the round weight, and tossed it up:
Two points.
There would be 8 points in all that night for Kim, and in her memory that moment when her two friends, her two captains, double-teamed her and told her what they actually expected of her remained the emblematic high of the season. Bob Pariseau turned to his wife and said, “These kids are confident. They’re taking no prisoners. They’re not looking back.”
The score was 72–53.
The word was out in Western Massachusetts. The Hurricanes had arrived at a new style of play. They showed no hesitancy. They were bulldozers. Area fans were urged by Marty Dobrow of the Gazette to “Skip dinner, blow off the date, cancel the vacation, drop everything.’’ Catch those Canes!
Coach Moyer thought of it as simply the best game his team had ever played.
The Hurricanes wasted no time leaving Feiker, aware that their win could stir the fistfights that sometimes occur after the boys from Amherst and Hamp play each other.
Coach Moyer savored a couple of moments. The first was when Jamila brought the ball up against Hamp pressure, stared at Kathleen, stared at Kristin, started to move toward Gumby, and then suddenly, after looking at everyone else, threw the ball like a laser straight through a mass of players to Jen for an easy layup. Then, seconds later, she threw a blind pass to Kathleen, who caught the ball in stride and laid it up. This series of gestures encapsulated Jamila’s style: They were, he thought, graceful, extraordinary, unselfish, and unique. Basketball at its best.
The flip side of what Jamila did on offense was what Jen did on defense. It always bothered him slightly that people didn’t recognize the feats that Jen performed against the other teams. She was creative, she was dogged, she was always a step or two ahead.
Amherst played a man-to-man, but in each game Coach Moyer would select what he called a “designated shooter,” which was the opponent’s weakest offensive player. This would be Jen’s person. This was one of his favorite bits of coaching strategy. Jen was known as the best defender, so it would have been usual for her to match up against the other team’s strongest player. Instead she played the weakest, which is to say, she really didn’t play her at all. “Cover,” he would tell Jen, “but don’t cover.”
In his mind, Jen then acted like a football free safety. Her job was to diagnose the play, and find the right spot to disrupt it. She could, at any moment, be almost anywhere on the defense. In particular, she roamed the passing lanes. Other teams would look up, expecting to be able to make the pass they made at practices a thousand times in their own gym, only to find Jen Pariseau in the way, all elbows, arms, incredible leaping skills, and riverboat gambler’s hands. If Jamila was the captain on offense, this responsibility shifted to Jen in the defensive zone. That was what made the Hamp-at-home game so remarkable, when Jen took over both ends while Jamila went to the bench, and what made them on this night so, well, so breathtaking.
Coach Moyer boarded the bus last.
“Okay,” he asked, “who’s missing?”
At least three Hurricanes raised their hands. “I am.”
He’d better watch it: Their humor was getting as bad as his.
“Captains, have you done a head count?”
“Everyone’s here, Mr. Moyer,” said Jen and Jamila.
Coach Moyer stood, crouching slightly, as the bus, swaying in the snow-packed parking lot, made its way out onto Route 9, past Smith, o
ver the Coolidge Bridge, toward Amherst.
“I have,” he said, “just one thing to say.”
Raising a fist, looking as demonic as Skippy at her worst, he shouted:
“Yes!”
The bus ride home was, if not the best ever, close to it.
They had jumped on the bus, grinning and laughing, breaking into a joyous cacophony of song and slogan. “We are the champions,” sang Patri, quoting Queen’s famous anthem. They sang Muppets songs from Sesame Street, they sang the Brady Bunch theme song. They sang “Every Day People” and “Revolution,” changed to “Revolucia,” both by Arrested Development. They sang a selection from Naughty by Nature to which they swayed as they crooned: “Hey . . . ho . . . hey . . . ho.” They sang Patti’s favorite tune:
This is the song that never ends
It just goes on and on, my friends.
Some people started singing it
Not knowing what it was.
And they kept on singing it
Forever just because . . .
The Hurricanes slapped the ceiling of the bus, and as they pulled through the center of town, with the Common on their right, they opened the windows and they shouted:
Who rocks the house?
The Hurricanes rock the house.
And when the Hurricanes rock the house,
They rock it all the way down.
Obliging knots of college students, not actually certain of what they were cheering, cheered nonetheless.
As the bus pulled into the parking lot, they gave their ritual cheer: “Give me an A.”
‘‘A.”
“Give me an M.”
“M.”
“Give me an H.”
“H.”
“Give me an E.”
“E.”
“Give me an R.”
“R.”
“Give me an S.”
“S.”
“Give me a T.”
“T.”
“What have we got?”
“Amherst!”
And then they went to Friendly’s on Route 9 to, as Kristin put it, “dork out”—which Kathleen kindly translated, “That means act giggly and stupid”—where they ate huge mouthfuls of ice cream and built a bridge of interconnecting straws from one booth to another.
Basketball was invented by James Naismith in 1891 only a few miles away in the city of Springfield, the site of the Basketball Hall of Fame, where for a small admission price you can see, among other artifacts, Bob Lanier’s size twenty-two shoes. In many other parts of the country—Iowa and Tennessee and California and Philadelphia—particularly in the Catholic schools, there has been a long rich tradition of girls playing basketball. The history of the game as it involves women is just over one hundred years old, the same as men. Yet the game as it has been played by men has gotten billing as the real game. And even though the game was appealing to women from the start, there were efforts to restrict their participation. Girls were often not allowed to play at night because it would be “too stressful.” At the turn of the century, girls were not allowed to play during the first three days of their periods, and female coaches were hired especially as the enforcers of this policy.
The girls on the Hurricanes did not discuss their periods with Ron Moyer, but in the locker room they often made teasing references to what they called “Teatime,” the punch line of a menstruation joke that Kathleen Poe said was too vulgar to relate, but that Skippy was only too eager to tell: “See, there’s this guy and he goes into a bar . . .”
“That was our way of being boisterous,” said Jen.
“But not the only way,” Kristin quickly amended.
Periods were sometimes referred to in that age-old girl code as visits from Aunt So-and-so or “My cousin is here from Connecticut.” One opinion was shared by all: the hope that no one would have hers on the day of a big game. And one fact was universally acknowledged: Someone always did.
A few nights after the win against Hamp, Bernadette Jones decided to cross the river from Amherst into Northampton to attend a lecture and slide presentation entitled “The Ladies of the Club” at Smith College by Stevada Chepko, a professor at Springfield College. The school was celebrating “women’s basketball, the first one hundred years.”
Bernadette Jones was the oldest in a family of eleven children, and she had devoted herself to rearing her own, by comparison, modest four offspring, three daughters and one son. Her husband, as the most prominent local pediatrician, occasionally played the role of team physician.
Bernadette Jones was soft-spoken and always mindful. Amherst is an area known for dressing down; the more worn-out and holey or patched a garment, the more it is prized in frugal New England, yet she really dressed down in jeans and sweats. She worried about the environment and was known to insist on only a certain level of bath water. After composting, her family barely produced a bag of garbage a week. Her oldest daughter became a farmer after graduating from Yale, and her organic mix of obscure and gathered greens, called mesclun, with its beet tops and chard and radicchio, was featured in the summer at Bread & Circus. The family traditionally consumed the final offering from their backyard garden, sweet crunchy carrots, at Thanksgiving. At least once a month she prepared a lunch for a soup kitchen in Holyoke, several huge trays of a set recipe of meat and potatoes and vegetables. “Hunger really gets to me. I don’t know. The thought of that.” With her black hair laced with gray and unremitting blue eyes, Bernadette Jones surprised the other mothers with her occasional ferocity. She was the one who always fought for lower-priced tickets to the sports banquets at the end of every season, saying that anything above five dollars a person was a hardship for most people.
It’s hard on winter nights to leave the house, to extract oneself from the web of warmth and need and artificial light. She tried to get Emily to go with her, but her daughter had too much homework, and so Bernadette headed out by herself in the old Chevy wagon. She left her family with their usual fare, a pot of soup, lentil tonight, which they could eat plain or gussy up with slivers of cheese or slices of meat. She passed the banks of filthy snow that lined both sides of Route 9, reminiscent of a Robert Frost poem in which he compares a dirt-splashed drift with an old scrap of newspaper:
It is speckled with grime as if
Small print overspread it,
The news of a day I’ve forgotten—
If I ever read it.
She herself had saved several old clips from her days as Bernadette Baecher of Saint Mary’s High School, girls’ division, in Manhasset, New York, the news of days she’d almost forgotten.
From the Magnificat, her school newspaper, 1962:
ST. MARY’S POSTS EASY VICTORY
Bernadette Baecher scored twenty points to spark St. Mary’s of Manhasset to a 44–23 victory over Our Lady of Wisdom of Ozone Park last night in a Catholic Girls High School Basketball game at St. Mary’s.
BERNADETTE BAECHER NETS 22 IN VICTORY
Bernadette Baecher scored 22 points—six fewer than the entire Carle Place team—as St. Mary’s of Manhasset came from behind to win 37 to 28.
She could see herself, young again, in those annoying thick glasses, before the era of contacts, in that knee-length uniform with its sharp angles and stiff material, making the sign of the cross before every foul shot. She could even picture the old nun who was the team’s “monitor”; at Catholic schools every group had a monitor. What was her name?
She thought about how the girls from Saint Mary’s used to practice once a week; there had been none of this everyday thing back then. There were six players on the team, three forwards and three guards, and you weren’t allowed to leave your side of the court. After a while, they changed the rules and allowed one forward to shoot. You could dribble only three times.
She recalled the long arguments she’
d had with her brothers. They told her she was playing a Mickey Mouse game.
As she sat in the library at Smith, waiting for the lecture to begin, she went over her own history: Her brothers had been right; you didn’t need the stamina. It had been a much less physical game. But her brothers had also been wrong. Under the old rules, you had to think: Strategy became extremely important. Her favorite thing had been to fake. You could be sly and sneaky, and it was okay.
The lecturer flicked the switch on a slide machine. Her soft Southern voice was a perfect fit with the low-key quietude of Neilson Library.
“Tonight we have gathered to celebrate the ‘Ladies of the Club.’ Membership to this social club is rather exclusive, rules are very stringent, and a strict code of conduct must be adhered to at all times. You can’t buy a membership to this club or even bargain your way in with fast talk or a smooth line. No, you must be born into this club called women. Often we compare and contrast membership of this club with that of another club called men, but we don’t often celebrate the unique experiences of the members of this club. Tonight I hope you will join me in celebration. A celebration of one hundred years of women’s participation in basketball.
“We won’t be celebrating with a slam dunk, but we will be playing with a real ball.”
Professor Chepko lamented the introduction of the smaller-sized ball in 1984. She believed that “our hands have always been smaller. We played the game for ninety years with these hands. Changes like that one, based on our differences, are used to discredit us.”
Her research into the games at Smith in the latter part of the nineteenth century and early part of this one revealed that basketball competitions were second in excitement only to graduation. The only men likely to attend were college officials and relatives. A newspaper at the time called them the “favored few Adams in Eden.” She found that many accounts emphasized the “hysteria” of the event, “a key term.” Sometimes, said Professor Chepko, boys weren’t even allowed in the gym in order to preserve the genteel nature of the gathering.
She showed a slide of the two teams enjoying a postgame social hour:
In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle Page 19