In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle

by Madeleine Blais

  “Afterwards there was a custom in which the two teams joined each other for milk and cookies. Back when I was in college, we still had that custom, and I can’t tell you how many cookies and glasses of milk I gagged on after a game.”

  Two more slides showed a young black boy and a young white one. “The first cheerleaders were little boys.”

  “Why,” she asked, “did women embrace the game of basketball?”

  The next slide showed some women in billowing outfits holding or attached to what appeared to be torture devices.

  “The alternative was pretty bleak. Women’s collegiate experience in physical training classes consisted of a strict regimen of Swedish exercise done en masse. Given the choice of exercise by the numbers with wands and clubs or a competitive game, women quickly chose the game. Not even an attractive, young instructor such as Berenson (seen here modeling the latest fashion in uniforms for instructors of physical training) could maintain any long-term enthusiasm for the repetitive and monotonous drills in the Swedish system. So she incorporated basketball into her classes as part of the training. Swedish drill and corrective exercise continued to be the major focus in class, but out of class, basketball became the students’ favorite activity.

  “Like most of her generation, Smith College Coach Senda Berenson believed with every fiber in her being that women were intrinsically different than men. These differences mandated a different sporting model. The interclass games may have not been Harvard-Yale, but they were important and valuable experiences for the women who participated in them. Senda Berenson knew that the women at Smith, the ladies in her club, were having the time of their lives playing basketball. It didn’t really matter that the decorations and mascots got more ink than the actual game. It wasn’t about just the game. It was about being in the company of educated women and sharing a joyful experience. A game needs only to be important to the people involved, Miss Berenson understood.”

  Those games back at her high school on Long Island had been important to Bernadette Baecher Jones. The shaft of light from the projector that illuminated the black-and-white slides also caught Emily’s mother from the side, the pure lines of her face made fierce. As she observed the pictures of the women of Smith College dressed in billowing bloomers while huge lines of girls waited in the snow for tickets to what often got twin billing as girls’ basketball and ribbon display, she compared her own experience of the game with that of her daughter, already a brilliant rebounder and scorer as a sophomore, and her young friends.

  Sometimes, she wished that she had had the same thing when she was young: “Not the status, I’m not sure I like that word, but the recognition.”

  The lecturer had shown her last slide. Speaking in that calm steady voice, she offered her closing remarks.

  “It seems only fitting tonight that I leave you with some advice that Senda Berenson gave to the young women at Smith. It seems to me to be appropriate for the time, the place, and the person. While lecturing on aesthetic, she offered her charges this advice:

  “‘It is the duty of each one of you to be as beautiful as possible.

  “‘It is not given to all of us to be born beautiful young girls—but it is our fault if we do not become beautiful old ladies.’

  “Tonight my hope for you is to become beautiful old ladies.”

  Over the years, Betsy Moyer had made herself something of an expert on Title IX, the federal legislation signed into law on June 23, 1977, by President Richard Nixon.

  “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

  Betsy Moyer chose to discuss this legislation, intended to grant women equal opportunity to excel in sports, when it came time to give her talk as a member of the Tuesday Club. This Amherst organization, started by the wives of Amherst College professors, met once a month on Tuesday afternoons to explore a variety of subjects of intellectual and social significance.

  She was nervous beforehand: “I hate public speaking. I leave that to Ron.” But the grateful attention of her audience and her own convictions quickly dispelled the quiver in her voice.

  “Although it applies to all areas of education, over time the law has come to be associated primarily with sports. It means that high schools, colleges, and universities must offer men and women equal access to sports. Gender equity is the ethical and moral ideal of Title IX. It is the intent of the law that if the male/female ratio of a school is 60/40, then there should be participation in athletics to match that ratio. It also means that the awarding of athletic scholarships should fit into that ratio as well. Another component is that women should have equitable practice times, uniforms, accommodations, transportation to away competition, money for meals, and money spent on recruitment.”

  She told the women, who ranged in age from late forties to over eighty years old, that at first the law was more confusing than it was effective.

  “Opponents of the legislation kept not getting it. They said that women would never be as good in sports as men, so why should they get equal financial support? This was also the era, the early seventies, when women sometimes resorted to grandstand tactics to bring attention to their plight as athletes whose gifts were often ignored or disparaged; this was when the culture delivered televised tennis matches between Billy Jean King, God bless her, and Bobby Riggs, and when the news was filled with stories about girls suing to play on Little League teams.

  “The law didn’t actually become effective until 1975, when the first federal regulations enforcing it occurred, and even then the schools were given until 1978 to comply. One of the greatest changes in girls’ basketball happened in 1976 as a result of Title IX. Victoria Ann Cape was a guard on her high school basketball team. Because of the girls’ rules at the time, she was never allowed to develop her shooting game. The guards had to stay in their own zone and never had a shot at the basket. She sued the High School Athletic Association of Tennessee and won. This suit led to boys’ rules (five on a team playing full court) in girls’ basketball. It took almost eighty years for girls to showcase their athleticism, and the game has become increasingly more enjoyable to watch ever since.

  “During the early eighties Title IX began impacting greatly on girls’ basketball. Coaches were given better salaries. Schedules became more competitive, equipment upgraded, practice time more equitable, and more college scholarships were made available. Women no longer had to travel in broken-down vans with no heat, sleep four to six to a room, and eat bag lunches while men’s teams travel on luxury buses, sleep two to a room, and eat vast training meals at fancy restaurants! In 1983 there was a major setback for women’s athletics. Title IX was temporarily disemboweled by the U.S. Supreme Court, whose decision in Grove City College v. Bell effectively ruled that the law’s provisions did not apply to athletics. For five years the Grove City decision had a chilling effect. Scores of complaints were suspended or dropped. No further progress was made; in fact the participation ratio disparity widened again. Then Congress, after being bombarded by lobbyists from many different groups, passed (over President Reagan’s veto) the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988, which made clear that Title IX did in fact apply to athletics. So in essence the law has only been enforced about half of its twenty-year life.

  “Since 1988 there have been hundreds, or more likely, thousands of law cases filed relative to gender equity in athletics. Now most court rulings reflect that Title IX is supremely reasonable, and they have ruled overwhelmingly in favor of gender equity. As a result intercollegiate and interscholastic basketball will continue to change and improve.

  “Overall great strides have been made in women’s basketball since the passage of Title IX. Despite the willingness of the schools to take Title IX seriously, the law has its limitations. It can’t addre
ss the issue of public interest or media coverage. Even though a school like Stanford has a model program and gets national TV coverage, the games are often aired in the middle of the night. Thank goodness for VCRs!

  “Through basketball women can learn what it is like to make a commitment to themselves as well as a team, they can experience pushing themselves to the limit physically as well as mentally. As women move on into professional life, they have had some experience being a team player, being comfortable playing a role, and they will know they can be a leader without being a star. Women who play basketball have more self-confidence and self-esteem, and they know there is more than just their physical appearance. But for the most part the media is not giving recognition to women’s accomplishments. Young women can’t read about their sports role models or learn what might be available for them. How can they aspire to something they have no information about?”

  Then she quoted from an article written in 1974, just after Title IX, in which a male reporter wrote about Marianne Crawford of Immaculata College in Pennsylvania:

  “Men, you’re not going to believe this, but Immaculata College’s Marianne Crawford, a girl, scooped up this loose ball, dribbled between her legs to get past one East Stroudsburg defender, then took off on a three-on-two fast break. She dribbled a while left-handed, then right-handed, a few stutter steps here and there, then looked left and threw right to the lovely Rene Muth for two points.”

  The word lovely, normally light and liquid, lodged on her tongue, sluggish and heavy: lllooovweeelllyyy.

  “In summary, I find it very interesting that most young women today do not know what Title IX is all about, including my own two daughters. They know they have opportunities to pursue the sport of their choice, they know that if they work hard to improve, there might be an athletic scholarship available. Girls today, especially in Amherst, are no longer just spectators of the games, and they no longer care about the milk and cookies.’’

  “That Mr. Moyer!” Kristin Marvin, never a wallflower with her feelings, was seething. “He can be such a jerk.”

  It was the beginning of the postseason, Amherst had just beaten Longmeadow for the third and final time this season, and the Hurricanes were in an uproar. This was the last time their team would ever play in the home gym, and Coach Moyer had deliberately, calculatedly, with full consciousness of his actions, let Patri sit the game out on the bench: Patri, who—as the last player out—customarily attracted the loudest and longest and most heartfelt chants:

  “Patri! Patri! Patri!”

  Her presence on the court was the signal that the game was under control, all the instruments had been played, and now they would just keep playing, only louder.

  How could he just let her sit there?

  At first Patri thought he must have simply forgotten: “It hadn’t clicked into me what was happening.” She kept looking at him as all her other teammates were being rotated back onto the floor and she remained on the bench.

  Afterward, Kathleen advised her, “Ask him. Ask him what happened.”

  Kathleen was glistening with sweat. The phalanx of bangs on Patri’s face were soft and fluffy as new snow.

  So she strode up to him, one of the shortest players on the team confronting the tallest person in the room.

  “Mr. Moyer, why didn’t you put me in?”

  “You were on the late list for school today, and it doesn’t set a good example.”

  “But I was there. I got to school at nine thirty-six, and you’re not counted as absent until nine-forty.”

  “The list I saw said you weren’t here even at nine-forty.”

  Patri did not appear satisfied with this explanation.

  That evening Patri had come to the game in a borrowed van with a huge contingent of family—her mother, her brothers, including Reggie (the baby, aged three), her cousins, and her step­father—a fact that inflamed her sense of indignation. Often, because of work schedules or faulty carburetors or a combination of the two, her family could not come to watch her. But tonight they were there.

  “Besides, I feel that you’ve been clowning around and not giving one hundred percent at practices.”

  Patri walked off the floor, where dazed and happy fans, thrilled at yet another victory, milled about, reluctant to leave.

  She stormed into the locker room. She ignored the consoling gestures of both Emilys. She pushed Kim away when she tried to give her a hug. She kicked a door, overturned a trash can, and said, “Forget it. I quit.”

  On the way home, in the crowded vehicle, Patri’s family, led by her mother, sang to Patri.

  Ilene Madison was not sure how to interpret what had happened, and at this moment she was more concerned that her daughter recover emotionally and go forward.

  It had been a long day, a long winter. The family did not like where they were living in the basement of a raised ranch house for which they were paying $750 a month in rent. The windows, such as they were, were situated up near the ceiling. The family awakened on a strict schedule in order to parcel out the bathroom time.

  Ilene Abad Madison had left her Cuban husband when Jose, now eleven, was still a baby: “Silently I planned my getting out. He would say in his culture, the slapping and the mistresses were permissible, and I told him I did not permit it in mine.” She always had the inclination to further her education, and she picked Amherst because “I wanted to study at the University of Massachusetts, but never in my life had I lived in a cold place.”

  She got her degree, remarried, and had Reggie.

  In the mornings she left the house at seven-thirty to drop her son at day care at eight to be in Springfield by eight forty-five for a job as a bilingual teacher in the first grade. She stood in front of her students all day, teaching them the names of objects in the room: door (puerta), clock (reloj), sink (fregadero), paper (papeles), books (libros), blackboard (pizarrón).

  Every day a different child was chosen to be estudiante del día. Her goal was to see their eyes shine.

  Money was short, the car kept conking out, the job was draining, the house with its one bath and no room for a dining room table would have been even more frustrating if she didn’t keep in mind that at least the landlord had rented to them when others had declined to do so. There had been one house they’d liked, but the landlord kept saying he couldn’t show it to her because the family living in it was away at the Cape. As Ilene Madison told Lucia’s mother, “My sister-in-law called in her white voice and he said, ‘Yes. Come on and see the house at three o’clock tomorrow.’ It’s so hard. We know we are professionals and educated people, but they smash your pride. This guy was a hillbilly. So we had to pay a fee to a company to find us a place. We paid fifteen hundred dollars to get the place we got.”

  She sometimes compared Amherst to a beautiful woman who is rotten on the inside, or to a lotus flower, a fruit famous for its ability to produce indolence and dreamy contentment. But the time in Chicago had not been a solution to anything except perhaps the predicament of her oldest son, who had seemed without purpose, but who was now in college and who worked part-time at Kinko’s Copy Center. For Jose’s birthday Tony bought him a new bike and a helmet and a lock. Patri had been accepted at U Mass as a premed student. “I always dreamed to have a daughter like her, so beautiful and so smart.”

  Reggie was healthy: “My children have all bloomed into super flowers.’’ In a life where time and money were both at a premium, she was most obsessed with only one real arithmetic, the sum of her children’s well-being.

  And so, on the way home, “We started singing, and that put her up and up and up. We sang, ‘We love you, Patri, oh yes we do,’ and we sang the song from Barney:

  I love you.

  You love me.

  We’re a happy family.

  With a great hug and a kiss from me to you,

  Won’t you say you love me to
o?

  Lucia went home and puzzled about the incident.

  She talked to her mother about it late that night, and again in the morning. Like most mothers of teenagers, Gigi Kaeser secretly welcomed the garrulity.

  “Mom,” Lucia kept saying, “it isn’t fair. If Patri wasn’t taken seriously enough as a player to be criticized in practice, why would Coach Moyer take the time now to criticize her tonight in front of so many people?”

  Jen was also troubled.

  Sure, Patri could have been more serious in practice sometimes, but the timing was “pitiful.” At first it made Jen feel almost lonely, as if she couldn’t completely trust Coach Moyer’s leadership, and then a different realization took hold. The Hurricanes would have to count on themselves, have to be their own leaders.

  After the game, Coach Moyer went out with Bob Pariseau and Tracy Osbahr and had a quick bite of pizza.

  He had no misgivings: “Patri rolled into school late. She’s been goofing off at practice. She had to skip out one day because some form was missing from her application to U Mass. I don’t have a deep doghouse or a long memory. All she has to do is come back tomorrow and work hard, and she’ll be the first kid off the bench at the Cage.”

  The Cage! Despite the snarling menace of the name, this was a revered facility at U Mass, built specifically for basketball in the large barnlike style of East Coast gyms with, originally, a dirt floor and a glass ceiling. The Western Mass semi against Wahconah was scheduled to take place on the U Mass campus at the Cage, the same facility where Julius Erving (Dr. J) had mesmerized the masses in the seventies. This was a site that combined sentiment and prestige.

  Coach Moyer finished his pizza in a hurry. He had promised a couple of kids that he would go to the boys’ hockey game at Orr Rink at Amherst College, and he arrived just in time to see Amherst make two goals.

  It was Kathleen who talked her best friend back onto the team.

  She spoke to her on the phone late at night with whispered urgency. “I know you’re mad now, but I don’t think this is what you want to do. Mr. Moyer was wrong. But the team isn’t him. The team is us. He can have his fist and flag, but as Jenny always says, we have our heart and our legs. There’s only one way to prove him wrong: Go back in and work that much harder. Show him he made a mistake.”