by Janet Walker
Chapter Twenty-Five
THE POWER OF GRACE
No extracurricular honor generated more interest and speculation at Beck Academy than did the distinction of being called a Grace Girl. The Girls were regarded with envy by some, admiration by others, and mixed emotions by those who hadn’t yet decided whether or not being a Grace Girl was really all that much of a blessing. The Girls, always twelve of them, sat together during pep rallies in bright white tennis shoes and sweat suits the color of a lion’s coat. Beneath the tawny raw silk, each girl wore a burgundy T-shirt with tan velvet figures on the back proclaiming her jersey number and surname. Often, several of them sat together in the cafeteria, laughing and waving teenage hands in animated gesture as they described some dramatic move that had won a game or some foolish error that had cost them a basket. Even more loudly, they complained about a word or action produced by their coach, for they constantly sought to remind others of the proximal relationship they shared with her.
An athlete from Beck’s brother school, Langston Academy, considered it an honor to attend a school dance with a Grace Girl on his arm, or to escort one in the Beck-Langston Homecoming Pageant. And the boys’ fascination didn’t stop there. Many an afternoon would pass during basketball season when the boys hung around after school, hoping to be let inside to view a practice session of Miz Grace and her Girls. And sometimes, after the season was underway, the woman would unlock the doors and allow the boys in to view dazzling sessions of elaborate ball-handling drills that molded the Girls into a rhythmic unit, or scrimmage games filled with slick passes and female shouts of warning and hand claps that behaved as orders, with productive fast breaks and strategic fouls and well-executed plays. Once inside, the boys sat obediently on the bleachers, enjoying the view and speaking little, for it was Miz Grace’s rule: If your talking distracts from her coaching, you will get the stick—meaning, she will walk over, point her polished cane your way, and order, “You.” Any boy so singled out always obeyed the order to leave, not just because he feared Big Stan, the APD officer who patrolled the girls’ campus, but also because he respected Miz Grace. Only at appropriate times could the spectators express themselves raucously—when a player powered in a particularly impressive basket or grabbed a much-needed rebound or sank a critical free throw—and any boy employing profanity or lewdness was never let inside again.
When she joined the faculty of Beck Academy in the fall of 1986, Grace Gresham, as head coach, had every intention of turning the floundering athletic department of the eighty-year-old school into one that reflected the beauty and expertise she had exhibited during her brief and glorious Olympic career. So the first thing she did was request that Beck be permitted to compete in a higher classification in the public-school arena, which would cast it against large schools and not merely small ones. She wanted, she said, the most competition available and wished to perform in a sphere that was the norm, not the exception. The second thing she did was ask for approval in changing the name of the girls’ teams from the Beck Lionettes to the Lady Lions. Lady Lions, she said, reflected what her girls were going to be—ladies—and besides, “lionette” was an insulting diminutive and not even the proper name for a female lion.
To both requests, the school complied.
She ordered additional equipment for training: barbells and jump ropes, more basketballs and volleyballs, better-quality shot puts, cleats, cushioned mats, and high-jump poles. She recalled the high-school and college teams for which she had competed, and the teaching styles of those who had coached her, and blended the memory of them into what she thought was a method for winning. But she made three mistakes that first season. The first was choosing too many players and runners—eighteen for basketball; thirty for track and field. The large numbers flustered her; she was unable to gain insight into each athlete’s mind and strategically manipulate them as a body. Her second mistake was being overly demanding of her athletes and never interacting warmly with them. They interpreted her actions as a sign that she did not like them, and so they reciprocated by not giving her their best. The third mistake that first season became a controversial one. With little knowledge of public-school sports (she had always attended private Catholic schools), Grace imitated the methods of recruiting carried on by college and pro scouts. She ventured into the realm of metro Atlanta’s public and private school systems, seeking the best ball players from the previous season and requesting their presence at her tryouts. All eight girls asked complied. Of the eight, three made the team (including the recruit she wanted most, Sarah Trendenburg, from a white Episcopalian school in north Fulton). One of the recruits was a poor girl from Lithonia, an outstanding player who could neither afford the school’s tuition nor qualify for an academic scholarship. When a full scholarship materialized in the girl’s name, from a private donor, rumor spread among metro-area coaches that Grace Gresham was “buying” players for her program.
It caused an outrage.
Public-school coaches from the metro area said it was already unfair that independent schools in Georgia were not bound by county lines and so could legally enroll students from as far away as China; it was therefore an added insult, they said, that Amazing Grace Gresham could use her Olympic clout, and whatever financial advantage she had, to lure away the area’s best players. They complained to the school boards of Fulton County and Atlanta Public Schools, which while they could not reverse Grace’s actions (Beck was, after all, a private institution and not under the authority of either school system), they did not dispute the coaches’ claim that Grace Gresham, in going forth to recruit, had committed an unethical act.
The charge incensed Grace so much that she broke a vow of silence and spoke, for the first time in six years, to the media. To the Journal-Constitution’s Mike Lindsey, she said, about the other coaches, “Frankly, I’m baffled by their reaction. They obviously have no idea what the real world of athletic competition is all about. If they have a problem with it, they should take it up with the Georgia High School Association. Or with the legislature. I’m within my rights.” That would have been the end of her comments to the press, but a persistent reporter for a black weekly showed up at Beck and asked Grace to explain why, if her actions were as common as she insisted, she had so angered other coaches. Her response was less than gracious: “It’s simple. I’m about to raise the level of play in this district and most of them know they won’t be able to keep up with me.” Her statements, when printed, incensed her colleagues more than her actions alone had done, and it began a heated basketball season in the fall of 1986. But the end did not justify the means, and though her ball and track teams finished with good records, losing only a fourth of their contests (a substantial improvement over previous Beck seasons), Grace Gresham’s teams failed to garner any championships that first year.
Rival coaches rejoiced.
After a brief period of self-pity, Grace spent the summer of 1987 poring over library books about coaching; slipping into the Summit and watching the scrimmaging tactics of the Majestics’ coaches; engaging in question-and-answer sessions with the head coach and with college coaches whose styles she admired; and discussing strategy with a Majestics player who had taken a special interest in her. She even wrote a proposal, complete with a two-year strategic plan and a policies-and-procedures manual, that outlined the restructuring of the Beck physical-education program into a university-styled athletic department. The school did not have, in 1987, the budget to finance her ambitious proposal, but they promised to consider the idea for the next year and, because they did not want to lose her, gave her a raise and increased her staff from six to eight.
And when the fall of ’87 came, she was imbued with purpose and filled with a fierceness that hadn’t burned so strong in her since she took off from the blocks in the ’76 Olympics and dusted the records of every woman who had run before her. She remembered the advice of her earliest high-school coach, Sister Sonja, who had been a collegiate runner before she became a
nun and who used to say that Jesus chose seventy to go out and preach, yes, but the fact of the matter was he started out with only twelve, because that was all he really needed. Sister Sonja’s point: A lean machine is a more efficient one. And so at the end of tryouts that second year, Grace pared away the excess baggage from a group of fifty hopefuls and ended up with twelve, because she knew that was all she really needed. For that second season, she did not recruit from without but retained three of the recruits from the year before (Sarah Trendenburg was one). At a press conference, which she held with reluctance but with the knowledge that it was necessary to clear her name, she told a small group of reporters why she had decided not to recruit for the ’87-’88 season. She firmly denied it was because she feared backlash from other coaches but declared, instead, that because she knew she would thenceforth create only championship teams, she wanted no one to be able to say she had attained victory by stealing players from other schools. She would, she told the journalists, use only what Beck had to offer and, with that, she declared, she would beat any team, anywhere.
And so she used a whipping tongue to beat her first group of twelve girls into submission; used simple textbook language to explain to them the basics of basketball; introduced to them her rules of grooming and fitness and insisted they follow these; urged them through grueling training sessions that transformed them in a matter of weeks; made them regard her with all the admiration of Greece for Athena, and instilled within them all the fear of that same city for Medusa. She even occasionally tossed them bits of warmth and humor to satisfy their desire to feel close to her. And in the end, in the spring of 1988, at the close of her second year of coaching, Grace Gresham and her basketball girls had left behind a trail of fallen other schools and broken other coaches—most notably, the historic Atlanta city champs, L. Carlton Haines—and were holding high the city, state, and regional championship trophies. They had also done what no other girls’ high-school team in the region had ever done: completed the regular season with a perfect record. In track and field, Grace also reached many of her goals, although it was noticeable, and everyone agreed, that the former world-class runner was a better coach of basketball than she was of her own Olympic sport.
She spent the summer of 1988 smiling but examining the strategies of military leaders and successful coaches to see what she could learn from them. Also during that summer, she got married. When the fall of ’88 rolled around, Grace did the same thing—pared down a great crowd of hopefuls to a small remnant of twelve—and whipped them into a glorious winning machine that reflected her athletic prowess and femininity. That was the year someone started calling her “Miz Grace,” since she was no longer “Miz Gresham” and since her new name, Mrs. Gresham-Nelson, was too long. Everyone latched onto the new designation and started calling her girls Miz Grace’s Girls (later shortened to just the Grace Girls), labels she liked right away and which she felt suited the persona she was constructing for herself.
At the end of that third season, in the spring of 1989, her ball players had garnered a second perfect season and championship title, but this time they took their perfection all the way to the national level. (Her track team finished second in regional competition.) Then it was proven: Miz Grace and the Grace Girls hadn’t merely had a lucky year the preceding season but were a force with which to be reckoned. She had earned a name for herself, and the folks at Beck who had persisted in calling her “Jazz Nelson’s wife” started calling her “Miz Grace,” with respect.
At the start of the ’89-’90 season, however, Grace was brought before Principal Allen by a tenth-grader and her parents who couldn’t understand why their daughter was not chosen for Miz Grace’s team when the girl had been a star in Beck’s junior-varsity program under Coach Julia Brown. The girl charged it was because Miz Grace had favorites and only picked “certain types” of girls for her team (pretty and feminine girls—a charge that ceased to be true after Grace’s disastrous first season). The principal said he’d heard—and he apologized for the mention—that Grace had a fetish for the number twelve and excluded good players for the sake of preserving that number. And the parents demanded that the girl be allowed to play. Grace had simply said that it didn’t matter if a Harlem Globetrotter wanted on her team—if she felt he would create disharmony and hinder the gaining of a championship, she would refuse him as well. She also added that limiting the team to twelve was an official standard of basketball, not one of her own creation. What she didn’t say, and which was the truth, was that she hadn’t chosen the tenth-grader for two reasons: One, because Julia had complained about the girl’s arrogant and uncooperative spirit, qualities Grace had observed during tryouts; and two, because the girl was, quite frankly, too masculine for Grace’s tastes—prime reasons for being denied entry into her program.
When Principal Allen dismissed the student and her parents and asked Grace to consider including the girl to pacify the parents, she told him, “Okay, she can be on the team. And you can let the parents coach it.” That had settled it. The girl left Beck, disgruntled, and all that year faced the Grace Girls with vengeance whenever her school played theirs. And she wasn’t alone; more than a few others whom Grace had rejected left Beck, too, and scattered throughout the school system, harboring resentment against her and her Girls, something the departed students didn’t hide whenever their teams met in competition. And the fact that the Grace Girls always won, and gracefully so, generated in the mouths of losing opponents a bitterness hard to swallow. At the same time, the opponents, especially the former Beck girls, felt a reluctant admiration and envy that made them secretly wish they, too, were part of the privileged group of girls who learned at the feet and fought battles in the name of the beautiful and private woman everyone called Miz Grace.
