Promise Me

by Nancy G. Brinker

  The first event was on horseback: a three-mile course with twenty-eight jumps. After that came fencing, pistol shooting, a four-hundred-meter swim, and a three-mile cross-country run. (Yes, I know. No shortage of testosterone there.) Toward the end of that first event, the horses had to jump over a fence onto a bridge, then go around a big tree.

  “I figured I could save about three seconds if I took the fence at an angle and went under the tree,” said Norman. “Unfortunately, the tree had other plans.”

  When Norman was snagged by a low branch, the horse’s gait was thrown off. Going into the next jump immediately in their path, the horse fell and Norman flew from the saddle in one of those spectacularly terrifying, Superman-destroying moments that define this dangerous sport.

  “I heard something when I hit the ground,” he told me. “I knew something was broken, but I managed to grab hold of the reins and get back on. Finished eighth out of sixty, but I was out for the rest of the competition, which was unfortunate.”

  “What broke?” I asked.

  “Collarbone. Right here.” He indicated his left shoulder. “They hitched me up with a metal sling and knocked me out with painkillers for a few days.”

  “You were lucky,” I said. “That could have ended badly.”

  “Don’t I know it. But you can’t think about that when you’re in the saddle,” he said.

  “In 1954—the height of the Cold War—it’s remarkable that they had Americans competing at all.”

  “Oh, the people were great. They’re just grand, proud, strong people over there. But there were only about two dozen Americans in the whole Eastern Bloc. The next day, I came to in the hospital and found a crowd of Hungarians packed into the room, reading my American magazines, asking me about Jesse Owens and Bogey and Bacall, looking for news of the outside world. It was the darnedest thing—they were so isolated, so misinformed. These people didn’t stand a chance under the Communist regime. No way to get out into the world or even know what was going on. No way to make anything of their lives other than what the government told them they could. Even at that age, I appreciated what it means to live in a free country.”

  I smiled, remembering Suzy. Nothing compares with good old America.

  “I like your adventure stories,” I said. “They’re all about horses.”

  “I’m playing in a polo tournament down in Argentina later this month,” said Norman. “We should go riding when I get back.”

  “I’d love to.”

  “Do you ride Western style? Or are you one of those DAR types who has to have an English saddle?”

  “I can handle anything you put under me.”

  Norman raised one eyebrow.

  “But I am a proud Daughter of the American Revolution,” I added. “And a Daughter of the Confederacy.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “My mother’s grandfather came from Germany and settled in Kentucky.”

  “How’d he end up there?”

  “No idea. We didn’t spend much time with that side of the family, but I’ve seen pictures of my great-grandmother sitting on the front porch in Hopkinsville, smoking a corncob pipe. They raised hogs. My Grandpa Leo was a butcher.”

  “Jewish hog farmers of the Confederacy. That’s good stock.” Norman laughed, crowing straight from the thorax, wide open, highly contagious.

  “You have a terrific laugh,” I told him. “I hate a pinched laugher. You’re the polar opposite of that.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “So. Mr. Brinker. Is there anything else I should know about you?”

  “I’m not easily smitten.”

  “Lucky you.”

  The suits were loitering over coffee and whiskeys now.

  “Those gentlemen over there keep looking at us,” I said.

  “You’re very easy to look at.”

  “Are you allowed to flirt with me?”

  “That would be up to you,” he said. “Do you play polo?”

  “No, but I think I’d be good at it. Is it as dangerous as it looks?”

  “People say it is.” Norman shrugged. “If you took the danger out of it, I think I’d just as soon go do something else. It’s like a business deal. If there’s no risk, where’s the fun in that?”

  “I’d love to take some lessons. I really need to get … just get out of myself. Learn something new. Do something hard. I want to leave the last year behind and start the decade all over again.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “My sister … Suzy. She had breast cancer.” I made a point of saying it now. Saying it the way it should have been said before. “She died.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you. That’s very kind,” I said automatically.

  “Cancer’s a hard way to go. A hard thing on the family.”

  I nodded because saying anything risked my bawling like a calf. If he’d said another word, I would have had to leave the table, and what made me fall a little bit in love with this man right then was his respect for that. There was no searching for the right thing to say because he knew there were no words—or there was something beyond words—I don’t know. I felt safe with him, that’s all. Here was another small refuge from the wreckage: a quiet conversation with someone who had no expectation that we should rise above these losses we both knew would tower over us for the rest of our lives. There was, however, an expectation of redemption and the return of joy.

  “Tell me about Little Mo,” I said.

  Norman’s face lit up, and without hesitation, he brought her to the table with us, telling me how they met and fell in love, what she was like on the court, in the kitchen, in her business, how she shined, and how thrilled he was whenever he saw a spark of her in his daughters.

  This, I realized, was how you let go of someone you love.

  You don’t.

  When You Hear Hoofbeats

  MAUREEN CONNOLLY won her first Wimbledon championship in 1952. The city of San Diego was so proud of their hometown girl, they decided to present her with a car.

  “Thank you,” she said politely. “But could I have a horse instead?”

  I imagine city council members were a bit taken aback. What seventeen-year-old girl wants a mare instead of a Mustang?

  An unusual girl. To say the least.

  Maureen’s father, an athletic trainer for the navy, walked out when she was four. Her mother, Jessamine, was a pianist who aspired to play concert halls but wound up playing weddings. As a little girl, Maureen was wild about horses, but Jessamine couldn’t afford riding lessons. What she could afford was $1.50 for a tennis racket.

  A fireball is born.

  Maureen was left-handed, but when she started playing on the public courts in San Diego, she was advised to switch. It felt unfamiliar, counterintuitive, but with singular focus and self-discipline, she did it. Her star began to rise. San Diego sportswriter Nelson Fisher dubbed her “Little Mo” when she was just eleven years old, comparing her backhand to the big guns on “Big Mo,” the USS Missouri. Whether she was working out her abandonment issues or just doing what she was born to do, she tore up the courts, playing aggressively, intensely and unapologetically hypercompetitive. She wrote a sports column for the local paper, in which she waxed poetic about psyching herself up with utter loathing for her opponents.

  “I have always believed greatness on a tennis court was my destiny,” she wrote, “a dark destiny at times, where the court became my secret jungle and I, a lonely, fear-stricken hunter. I was a strange little girl armed with hate, fear, and a Golden Racket.”

  Oh, that hyperbole! Don’t you love that? And who’s better at it than sportswriters and seventeen-year-old girls? The two rolled into one nattily dressed sports legend who was just too fabulous for mortal kind. Back in the 1950s, Suzy and I and every other little girl in America worshipped Little Mo like she was a Marvel-made superhero. Cameras loved her, and the press decked her out in superlatives; she was the tiniest, the hugest,
the fastest, the best. A new coach came into her life and taught her to play a kinder—but not gentler—tennis game. Powered by love for the sport instead of hatred for the girl on the other side of the net, Little Mo matured, as an extraordinary athlete and as an exceptional young woman. She abandoned her anger without losing that singular focus.

  “All I see is my opponent,” she told a reporter. “You could set off dynamite in the next court and I wouldn’t notice.”

  During that terrible polio epidemic of 1952, at a moment when it meant so much to see this all-American phenom, so unstoppable and light on her feet, Little Mo won Wimbledon—along with the hearts of pretty much everyone in the world. The city of San Diego happily presented her with her mighty steed, Colonel Merryboy. She boarded the horse at a stable in the valley, where she met Norman Brinker, who was a born-and-bred fireball himself. He lived to ride and had earned a spot on the U.S. Equestrian Team, its youngest rider at the Olympic Games in Helsinki that summer. She asked him about horse training. He challenged her to a game of tennis. Sparks flew. About thirty minutes into the smashfest, a boy peering through the chain-link fence with about fifteen other onlookers said, “Boy, mister, do we feel sorry for you.”

  Norman had met his match, and he knew it.

  The following year, Maureen won the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open. She was the first woman—one of only five players in the history of the game—to achieve the Grand Slam. In 1954, she won Wimbledon for a third time and for the third year in a row was voted Female Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press. That summer, she was ranked number one in the world, on a winning streak that showed no sign of slowing down, until one afternoon when she was riding Colonel Merryboy down a Mission Valley road. An oncoming cement truck startled the horse. He shied, spun sideways, and crushed Maureen’s leg between his body and the moving vehicle. Her fibula was broken, muscles and tendons torn. She applied herself to rehab, and tried briefly for a comeback, but it wasn’t going to happen.

  At the ripe old age of nineteen, her extraordinary tennis career was over, but her extraordinary life had just begun. She’d lost none of her love for the game or for horses. All her drive, ambition, and hyperbole were perfectly intact. She just needed a new place to put all that, and because of the kind of woman she was, she didn’t sit around whining about it. In the years that followed, she wrote, she rode, she taught, she brain-stormed. She provided color commentary for tournament broadcasts on radio and television and shared her love of the sport, nurturing and mentoring young players around the world.

  Maureen and Norman were married a year after the accident. He rose to oversee the expansion of Jack in the Box, led the team that took the company public, then left it behind to open his first coffee shop. She was by Norman’s side as he laid the foundation for an empire. He was by her side as she was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame and founded the Maureen Connolly Brinker Tennis Foundation. They were famously devoted to each other and had two beautiful daughters, Cindy and Brenda, who brought Maureen the full, loving family she’d longed for as a child.

  “I’ve got everything I want,” she said. “Everything I’ve had I got through tennis. It gave me a terribly exciting life. I met so many people in exalted positions. It opened so many doors, and it’s still opening them. I’ve had a wonderful life. If I should leave tomorrow, I’ve had the experience of twenty people.”

  The Brinker family moved to Dallas in 1964, and Maureen enrolled at Southern Methodist University to finish the history degree she hadn’t had time for when she was younger. Norman and his business partners had launched the Steak & Ale restaurant chain, and were rolling into a time of major expansion. Maureen was thirty years old and vibrantly healthy. When she began experiencing persistent back pain, it was reasonable to assume she’d pulled a muscle riding or maybe played a bit too hard with Cindy, who was starting to seriously hold her own on the tennis court.

  Maureen and her physician reasonably proceeded on that reasonable assumption for several months. There’s a tried-and-true philosophy applied to the practice of medicine: “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” It’s essentially the same as Occam’s razor, which states that the simplest solution is the best. It makes perfectly good sense.

  Except when it doesn’t.

  Maureen was eventually diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Her hopes were high after surgeons initially told her they’d “gotten it all,” but a year later, scans revealed the cancer metastasizing through her abdomen. Norman was beside himself. For the next year, the expansion of Steak & Ale, along with polo and everything else, took a backseat to tracking down the best care that could be found for Maureen.

  The Brinkers were as tough and tenacious as they come—smart, resourceful, and financially well set. A golden couple. (In the 1978 movie Little Mo, Maureen was played by Glynnis O’Connor, and Mark Harmon played Norm.) The media, reporting that Maureen had “stomach” or in some cases “women’s cancer,” portrayed the spunky, determined champ everyone loved. If anyone could beat this, Little Mo could. But off-camera, Maureen knew she was dying, and she did an admirable job of preparing herself and her family for that eventuality. She kept up her business and charity activities and made time to visit friends, but her daughters were the center of her singular focus now. The lasting effect of her love for them is clearly evident in their lives today.

  Despite his saddle-leather hide, Norman struggled under the weight of his emotions as Maureen lost ground. My heart ached when he told me about a telling incident during her last Christmas with the family. Norman left the company Christmas party to walk through the restaurant and greet customers as he always did. In the bar, a guy who’d had a few too many was throwing ice, giving the waitress a hard time, and generally being obnoxious.

  Norman, who was invariably soft-spoken, kind, and unbelievably patient with this sort of thing, said, “Hey, fella. That just won’t work. Why don’t you go on outside and get some fresh air?”

  The drunk, a head taller and a bushel of bricks heavier, sneered down at Norman.

  “Sure,” he slurred. “Let’s go.”

  One thing led to another, burly words, back and forth, the guy called Norman something filthy, and Norman wheeled around with a right hook that sent the drunk flying back through the kitschy swinging saloon doors. He landed flat on his back in the vestibule. Norman’s employees were stunned by this entirely aberrant event, but everyone knew what he was going through at home. If anything, it made them love and appreciate him even more. “That Time Mr. Brinker Decked the Guy” went down in restaurant history. (Frankly, it’s probably the only public service the obnoxious drunk ever did; I can think of a few times when Suzy was ill where Daddy might have realized great therapeutic benefit from punching someone’s lights out.)

  After a last desperate trip to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York, Norman hired a nurse and had a hospital bed installed by a big bay window in the living room. Maureen spent a few peaceful weeks there, surrounded by a tight circle of love. She died in June 1969, the night before Wimbledon.

  I owe a lot to Maureen Connolly Brinker. Wherever Norman and I went over the years, Little Mo’s tennis racquet went with us, occupying a place of honor on a shelf or mantel in every home we lived in. I cherished it as a bit of women’s history and a potent good luck charm. She taught my husband how to love a wife with a life of her own, how to appreciate a woman of singular focus. He was always a work-hard, play-hard kind of guy, and his marriage to Maureen taught him to respect and appreciate a woman as driven as he was.

  Theirs was a rare partnership for that time and place. To understand the role of the executive’s wife in the corporate culture of the 1960s, all you have to do is watch a few episodes of Bewitched. By and large, a wife who was decorative, quiet, and schooled in the social graces was considered an asset; a wife with talents, ideas, and ambitions of her own was quite often an ex. That mindset was still alive and well in the 1980s, b
ut Norman never bought into it. Maureen had taught him the value of a life partner who has an entire life of her own. Because she was fully rounded and fully grounded in her own accomplishments, Maureen was able to stand beside him, a tower of strength, supporting him in his endeavors—and that made it a joy for him to support Maureen in hers. He found the equal partnership thrilling, and he wanted to have that—expected to have that—with me.

  Norman’s brilliance was in his ability to assess and mentor people. For him, there was no greater personal achievement than raising someone else to succeed. He had a keen sense of strategy, and he knew how to communicate direction without barking orders. Most CEOs (the good ones anyway) are visionary in the way they see the possibilities outside “business as usual”; Norman also saw the limitless possibilities inside people. And he knew how to bring them out. He loved women and thoroughly enjoyed them in all the ways you’d expect a roguish Texas millionaire to love and enjoy women. But he genuinely liked women, too, and it showed in his hiring practices. Like Stanley Marcus, he was eager to see women on high-trajectory career tracks, breaking through the old glass ceiling. In their early years together, Maureen was a famous professional athlete and Norman was on navy pay. As his star rose in the restaurant industry, it frustrated him to see promising careers stifled by the old folkway that claims a woman shouldn’t out-earn her man, and he brought up his daughters to believe in their own potential.

  Norman was enormously instrumental in the early success of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, not because of his money, but because of his dynamic participation on the board, his unique understanding of what’s at stake for a family when a woman has cancer—and because of the way he mentored and believed in me.