The next day at practice Patri walked in wearing sunglasses. She didn’t look at Coach Moyer, but she followed his drills and she worked her hardest.
In the contest five days later with Wahconah Patri was put in the game early and quickly.
She took a shot that defied not only her expectations but those of her teammates and of the fans. It was not one of those wild junk shots tossed up as an afterthought. It was brave and knowledgeable. It went so high up that for a moment it was as if she had borrowed Jen’s nickname of Cloudy. It was perfect. Coach Moyer was pleased: Patri was back on board the Hoop Phi express.
If keeping Patri on the bench during the last home game of the regular season was Coach Moyer’s idea of a gambit, this shot was her idea of the perfect repartee. Or as Coach might say, punning, she had been “repatriated.”
Patri’s shot was not the only memorable one that evening. On a fast break Jen fed Jamila a behind-the-back pass for a layup that astounded the entire assembly. The skill of it! The unselfishness! The depth of friendship it revealed.
The final score: 55–39.
For two hours after the game, while Hamp and Agawam warmed up, and then later while they played, the whole team was swamped by children, boys and girls, seeking autographs. It had happened before, this wish for a signature or some other concrete remembrance from a fan, but never before for this long, on this scale, in front of so many witnesses.
Jen for one could not say which was more intoxicating: the victory or its aftermath.
10
The Long Shadow
Everyone agreed. It was the worst winter in recent memory. It was real winter. You’d go to Kiss Me, Kate at the high school under clear skies at seven-thirty, and three hours later the powder was so thick that even Volvos, clunky and wistful in their promise of immortality, littered the perimeters of country roads. The most common greeting was not “Hello” but “I saw your car on Station Road, and you weren’t in it.”
The momentum of the season had a salubrious effect on the entire town, however. Strangers stopped the Hurricanes on the street to wish them luck. Middle-aged women would touch them on the arm and say, simply, “Thanks.” The Camera Shops, a store on North Pleasant, did a booming business in rush orders for photos. At a restaurant in North Amherst called Daisy’s, featuring fancy contrived omelets and frequented by men in ponytails doing the Times crossword puzzle, Jen was recognized and treated to a free glass of fruit juice. At Hastings customers grilled Kim on the most recent games; little girls asked if her ankle was okay (they’d seen it being taped by the trainer) and asked her to tell Jen that her behind-the-back pass was awesome. At Jen’s former elementary school, teachers were scrounging up old papers and photos (from class trips or the time she dissected a rat) to honor her at season’s end with “Jen Pariseau Day,” no matter what the outcome of the Hurricanes’ game(s) in the regional and state finals.
By the time the Western Mass Regional Finals were held on March 5 at the Civic Center in Springfield, hundreds of Amherst fans proceeded down Interstate 91 in weather-weary vehicles, paralleling the progress of the Hurricanes’ thin metal bus past dark clumps of mountains and the Soldiers’ Home with its named spelled out in big letters on a hillside.
Coach Moyer sat in front on the aisle so that his legs could extend out. This was it, the long shadow on the lawn that haunted every season, the game at season’s end that Amherst had lost five years in a row.
Instead of saying hello to Kathleen, her teammates asked, “How’s the ankle?”
During the Wahconah game at the Cage earlier in the week, Kathleen had fallen and someone had run over her foot. Dr. Jones examined it the next day and suggested she go to Cooley Dickinson for X rays. In the same way that supportive fans sometimes wave their hands upward to help a free shot go in, the Hurricanes were collectively telepathing healing thoughts to Kathleen’s foot.
She marched onto the bus without any hesitancy. Coach Moyer couldn’t help worrying. Was this a sign that the ankle was all right, or was she secretly wincing?
As the wheels spun southward, the Hurricanes all appeared to be in a private pregame trance, listening to their Walkmen or, like Jen, curled up under a parka crusted with winter.
Jen hated bus rides, especially long ones like tonight. When she and her brother, Chris, were little they were always the first ones on the bus to school, and they rode forever through their little town before finally arriving at their destination. The anxiety was always there but in January it became sharper and heavier when she read a Sports Illustrated article by Leigh Montville about the accident that had claimed the lives of two members of the Notre Dame Women’s Swim Team in the previous year. She tried not to think about it, but the subject kept intruding:
For the Notre Dame women, the events of Jan. 24, 1992, always will be a part of whatever they do. Two of their friends and teammates, freshmen Margaret (Meghan) Beeler and Colleen Hipp, died. Almost everyone else was injured physically, the injuries ranging from simple scrapes to a broken back with the devastating prognosis of paralysis. The emotional injuries were as wide-ranging and serious, the insulated joys of college interrupted by sad reality. Forget it? How is this possible?
The details from the article would not leave Jen’s mind (“[The] accident occurred on the return from a meet at Northwestern in Evanston, Illinois”). She was powerless to silence the internal harangue:
Normally the men’s and women’s teams of Notre Dame travel together to meets at the same school, but on this one night the women traveled alone. The Northwestern swimming programs are separate, and the Notre Dame men had already swum against the Northwestern men. The men joked that it would be nice to be freed from the women for an afternoon workout.
Jen knew the score of the meet: Northwestern had won, 183–117.
She knew the weather was not alarming in Chicago, that “the trip was not considered long. . . . Ninety miles away, Chicago sometimes seems like a South Bend suburb.”
She’d read about the pizza and Gatorade served on the bus, about the movie shown on three television sets. The title of the movie was Dying Young.
The accident occurred so close to the Notre Dame campus that when the swimmers’ bus started to slide, some of the women thought they simply had arrived at the exit.
Help started arriving from assorted directions. Ten ambulances and fire fighters from two departments hurried injured swimmers to three different hospitals in the South Bend area.
Jen shut her eyes tight against the drafty vehicle and its southward journey. The bus almost made her sick. Buses are treacherous, unstable, ready to tip at any second. It was torture being on one. She willed herself to think about brighter topics. She had two new contenders for a niche on her “strong women” wall: Hillary Clinton and maybe this woman Janet Reno from Florida, who lived in a house in a swamp that her mother had built by hand and who was being considered for attorney general.
The bus deposited them at the entrance for players and performers. It was a short walk in the slush and over the mounds of snow.
The Hurricanes usually counted on Jen and Jamila for the pregame invocation, those talismanic words that would goad them to victory. It was important that they say something special beyond whatever remarks Coach had to offer.
Tonight in the tense private moments as a team just before the game in the washed-out light of the locker room, it was Kristin Marvin who stepped forward. Both Ron Moyer and Trish Lea, the junior varsity coach who had moved up in the postseason to lend her skills, waited outside in a dingy corridor. This was the team’s time to commune with itself. Kristin, who sometimes liked to act as if life were just a party, one huge Big Mac fully loaded with pickles and ketchup and onions, had the look this evening of zeal as she commandeered the floor. The intensity of Kristin’s expression was mirrored in the way she gripped a scroll of thin white computer paper; her face glowed from the inside out. The wor
ds spilled out, quick and interlocking, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle still stuck together, as she read from a document she had composed during a bout of insomnia two nights before:
“I’m sitting here on Thursday night, thinking that the possibility of sleep is about four hours away. Watching our hockey team lose by one point tonight got me so pumped and hyper for Saturday’s game that I’ve been pacing my house and hyperventilating. I’ve watched so many of our teams become ‘almosts.’ Almost win Western Mass, almost be good enough, almost have it. And as I stood there and watched the tears roll down Kunk’s face, I swore I would not let that kind of sorrow hurt any one of us right here.
“I know that the one obstacle that stands in the path of a Western Mass Championship is inside us. Kathleen said to me tonight she felt she wasn’t pumped enough. She didn’t feel the “fire.’’ I feel it now, and I want to record the intensity that it’s causing. I don’t need to whine about losing to Hamp two years in a row, or mention Lauren Demski, or remind you of what total bitches the team is now. You all know that. And that gets your mind pumped, and it makes you want to be angry and intense, but it doesn’t provide that indescribable rush of adrenaline and emotion that makes us go out and kick ass.
“I’m not gonna ask any of you to win the game, or try to win the game tonight. That’s Coach’s job. What I ask of you is, every time you see a loose ball, lunge for it. Every rebound, reach for it as if it were rightfully yours—’cause it is. Concentrate on every shot like it’s your last. Push and hurt your player a little harder each time. Everyone box out like you’re Lucia. And most of all, feel the love of the game and the love for each other every second you’re on the floor or on the bench. That kind of passion, which I know we have, if we play with it tonight, Hamp is gonna be out in the first four minutes. They know it too—they know as well as us what we have is unstoppable, and they’re scared. They should be. I want Hamp blood, we all do. I want to see their cowardly, prejudiced, pathetic, selfish pride squirming and dying on the floor by the end of the game.”
The Hurricanes were ensnared; the very language of Kristin’s speech was a kind of contraband, especially to the younger girls, who were at the point of trying on vocabulary as if it were a daring garment. It resounded in the dank utilitarian room, a renegade trumpet.
“Okay, I’ve gone on enough. I just couldn’t do this without putting my two cents in. I was gonna write a petition, but I was afraid Jen wouldn’t sign it.”
There was a brief pause, a momentary inward gasp as everyone wondered how Jen would react to this acknowledgment of the tensions that sometimes existed between the two friends. Jen hated petitions, the way they preened with the often false promise of due process. Under most circumstances, she believed it was better to “suck it up,” teenage slang for “grin and bear it.” Would Jen flinch or smile, look askance or raise a fist? Jen gave Kristin an approving look: “You go, girl.”
“Let me just say, this could very well be the last time in my life that I put on a uniform and play in a real game of basketball. Last time. It could also be the last time we all play together as a team. Just think about that. It’s a pretty intimidating thought. So I just ask that you all pretend tonight as if this were the last game of basketball that you could ever play, and put that much heart into it. But I don’t really need to. I know you’ll all do it. I hope you all feel that fire, because tonight we all need each other to be here. You are my sisters, and I honestly love every one of you that much. Thank you for providing the most rewarding, special experience of my life. I will never forget any of you. No matter what happens tonight, I want you to remember Hoop Phi and know we’re the best.
“We have more heart than the whole fucking town of Northampton, so let’s prove it.”
And then Kristin paused, and with all the dignity of a priest who recites a sacred phrase and all the feistiness of a drill sergeant who expects the troops to hop to, she shouted her most rousing rendition ever of “Hoop,” to which the crowd of girls huddled in their circle, arms entwined, fired back, as in a fusillade:
“Phi!”
Coach Moyer knew they would win.
Two of Northampton’s strongest players plowed down Kathleen just as she took the first shot of the game, a successful two-pointer on a fearless drive down the middle. He was terrified she’d landed on her ankle. But she scurried up from her momentary spread-eagled pose on the floor, and at the foul line where she had the chance to make another point for a three-point play, she situated herself square to the basket.
As the tension grew, and the contradictory cries from fans on both sides filled the air, she hoisted the ball with strong arms and, using her entire body, propelled it upward in a clean curve.
Another nifty point.
Even though there were twelve minutes left in the first half, it was at that moment that Coach Moyer decided the game was over: If we have Skippy, we have everybody, and Skippy was one for one from the floor, three for three from the line. And of course he was right.
The Hurricanes were also able to employ a play they’d been working on all week called the Emily.
The plan was this: Bring Jonesbones off a double screen from the top of the key at the three-point line, and get the pass to her so she could shoot it up for three over the double screen. Everything went perfectly. Jonesbones got the ball, and she put it up, pure swish.
Jen wanted to stop the action for applause: What she admired most about her teammate was the way she accepted her role on the team.
Jen stood there, thinking:
Jonesbones’s job was to come off the bench and grab rebounds, and dang, if that girl didn’t grab rebounds. All season she’d played with an injury, a bum elbow she’d gotten during softball when she’d slid right over her arm. She had never complained. She wouldn’t even mention it unless you asked her. She was a pro.
The story in the next day’s paper captured a portion of the emotion:
CANES FINALLY REIGN AFTER BLASTING HAMP
by Marty Dobrow, staff writer
SPRINGFIELD—When the friendly, but ferocious rivalry was over, Jamila Wideman and Beth Kuzmeski hugged each other in an emotional press of consolation and congratulation.
Wideman’s Amherst Regional Hurricanes had just dethroned Kuzmeski’s Northampton Blue Devils as Western Mass Div. 1 champs, 63–41 Saturday evening at the Springfield Civic Center. It was a one-sided game, devoid of drama. The poignancy waited until afterwards, the farewell between stars who had lifted the local interest in girls’ basketball to unprecedented levels.
“Last year was our year,” said a still teary-eyed Kuzmeski. “This year Jamila was so determined to win it, and I’m happy for her.”
Kuzmeski’s glittering high school career comes to an end. Wideman will lead her crew into tomorrow night’s state semi-finals against Central Mass champ Wachusett.
Even before Saturday’s showdown a sense of finality hung in the air. In the introductions Hamp coach Tom Parent, who has had to contend with Wideman since she was in the seventh grade, gently grasped the all-American’s forearm and spoke to her for several seconds.
“It feels like I’ve been playing against her since she was ten,” Parent later reflected. “I said [to her], ‘Is this finally the last time?’”
Thankfully for Parent, this was, indeed, the end.
Wideman lived up to every bit of her considerable billing, scoring 25 points, grabbing 11 rebounds, nabbing 7 steals. And in the end, she had the Western Mass crown, a prize that had somehow eluded her throughout her career. For all the individual accolades she had received, this was the prize she wanted most.
“This is it,” she said, beaming. “Since seventh grade this is what I’ve been pushing for. It’s the greatest feeling in the world.”
The story caught the broad outlines perfectly.
But to an “affectionado,” as Coach Moyer liked to call himself, the narr
ative that had unfolded was even richer, filled with the history of place (Cathedral had for years been the frequent site of Amherst’s doom) and also all those side stories easily overlooked in the sweep of Jamila’s accomplishments.
Bob Pariseau was struck by the difference between Kathleen a year ago and Kathleen on this evening. In all his time of watching sporting events, he could not name another transformation, amateur or professional, on such a sweeping scale.
Kathleen herself could hardly believe that it had been at the exact same point in the season a year ago that she’d collapsed in a sniveling heap outside the gym at Cathedral. She had bottomed out, and that plunge downward had triggered a transition in her head, a psychological transformation as slow and subtle as water and air and light on the smallest seed.
She thought about last year’s final game:
After such embarrassment, you kick yourself. You kick hard and it hurts. But after that, you get pissed. You realize that in all the Mr. Nice-Guy, “Nah, I’m not good” games, you’ve been pushed around. You start to feel used and manipulated. All this time, not taking what you should have, always being polite. Not anymore—look where it got us. Sorry, but it’s time we got what we worked for; we simply didn’t realize that after you put in the work, you don’t automatically get the reward. You’ve got to be greedy, you’ve got to push, you’ve got to do impolite things like taking the trophy.
Politeness is nice, and niceness is, well . . . nice. But when do you stop kicking yourself for being nice in the past and start smacking yourself into waking up to the present, pushing yourself to prepare for the future? Enough regrets, enough “I should haves,” because pretty soon there are no more chances.
In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle Page 21