by Glenn Stout
“What?” I said.
“I forgot my purse,” she said.
“I’ll get it,” I said and took the stairs two at a time, not waiting to hear if I had permission to go into her room. The nylon sack she called her purse was alone in the middle of the made bed, but I stopped short before grabbing it. The many photos, ribbons, and awards, the half-used makeup and bits of clothing, were all gone. A few books still lined the low bookshelf in the wall—her Central and CMR yearbooks, two fat paperbacks of Don Quixote and One Hundred Years of Solitude, and a dog-eared copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves—but I didn’t notice them until later.
I walked slowly back down the stairs and held out her bag. “Where are you going?” I said.
She undid the drawstring and looked inside. “Back to school,” she said, without looking up. John was already gone, so she was getting a ride from a friend of the Mitchells, someone she’d never met. She closed the purse without touching anything inside, then turned the corner to the kitchen without saying good-bye. I could hear her talking to Mom, but I didn’t try to listen. I’d overheard too much already, things I wanted to forget.
I tiptoed back up the staircase and into Padeen’s room, where I found the books, then an old curling iron in the bedside table drawer with a cord so twisted the wires poked through in places. Tangled up with it was a green-and-gold graduation tassel with a plastic ’75 attached to the topknot. The dresser drawers were empty but for two shiny plastic shells that once held pantyhose and a pair of bike shorts balled up in a dark corner of the bottom drawer. I didn’t dare open the hope chest yet.
I crawled across the bed, then kneeled at the brass headboard as if it were a communion rail and pressed my cheek flat against the glass, waiting for a strange car to come down the driveway. I knelt there a long time, patient but expectant. I wanted to see Padeen do it, to bear witness to my sister, that strong swimmer, rescuing herself in the wake of fate. Striking out alone for a new destiny.
ALLISON GLOCK
At the Corner of Love and Basketball
FROM ESPN: THE MAGAZINE
Part 1
MALIKA WILLOUGHBY LOVED Rosalind Ross. She loved her from the moment she saw her, when Willoughby was only 14, playing summer league basketball, and Ross, 17, already a local star full of swagger, approached her and complimented her game. Ross told her she had potential, looked her right in the eye, and smiled. After that, Willoughby was seized with a sense of recognition so jarring that she could not stop thinking about Ross, about how Ross made her feel and what that might mean.
Rosalind Ross loved Malika Willoughby too, but she was cagier. Three years older, raised in Milwaukee’s rough Harambee neighborhood, Ross had seen some things. She’d heard her father talk about “faggots.” Seen what happened to those kids, the ones who were different, like her younger brother Spencer, who played with her dolls and knew how to double-Dutch jump.
When Ross and Willoughby met, Ross had a boyfriend, Kevin. He and Ross later attended the prom, where she’d wear the third dress of her entire life and pose for the camera, smiling, head tilted, demure, the way she knew she was supposed to be. Kevin was handsome and kind, but he was not Willoughby. He did not make her laugh or cry. He inspired no feeling at all, not like Willoughby, young and beautiful and hungry for Ross in a way neither of them fully understood.
“I’m not gay.”
“I’m not either.”
So they told each other, even as they courted, exchanging passionate letters, then kisses that Willoughby said made her “lose her mind for two days.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
So they told each other, and no one else, knowing what would happen if they did.
By all accounts, Rosalind Ross was a radiant baby. The family charmer who quickly became the family poster child, the hope. The eldest child of two high school dropouts, reared in a neighborhood where crime was wallpaper and dreams were for dummies, Ross dreamed anyway. Mostly, she dreamed of basketball.
Tall, strong, and attractive, with a wide, open face and cheekbones like switchblades, Ross stayed in school and out of trouble, devoting herself to making grades and mastering her court skills, which she told her parents would be “my ticket out.”
A talented five-foot-nine guard, she played with monastic dedication, disregarding all temptation until the afternoon she spied Willoughby running down the court, all flop and fury, and broke into a grin so wide it hurt. Coyly, she suggested they play together, improve each other’s game. “Okay,” Willoughby agreed, mumbling, chin sunk to her chest.
From then on, the two teenagers spent every day and night together. “Best friends,” they told everyone. “Sisters.”
Ross taught Willoughby to drive. Told her she was beautiful. Gave her a ring. Before her senior season, Ross pulled her brother Spencer aside (also gay and then closeted to everyone but her), confiding that she “really liked Malika.”
Spencer smiled.
“No,” she repeated, her face flush. “I really like her.”
These were the puppy love years: Ross and Willoughby alone in their bubble, planning their future in another, better world. Then one day, while going through her wallet, Ross’s father, Willie, found a mash note from Willoughby. The bubble popped.
Willie was not reared to tolerate homosexuality. When Ross was a girl, Willie was the one who pinned her hair, ironed the creases in her slacks. The two had been tight as ticks, both larger than life, turning the attention in any room. “She was always the favorite,” Spencer says with amicable resignation. “If we had a $100 budget for shoes, Rosalind’s cost $80.” Then Ross hit puberty, and with it, feelings unwelcome in Willie’s home. The afternoon he discovered the letter, Willie confronted his daughter in a lather. The argument escalated, ending with Willie telling Ross she would have to leave home if she ever saw Willoughby again.
One month later, Willie found Willoughby sneaking away from the house. He demanded that Rosalind go with her.
“Growing up, my father was very hard on us,” says Spencer. “He had so many expectations of Rosalind. After he kicked her out, she disassociated from him. They stopped speaking. He thought he was right.”
Ross’s mother, Pamela, did not share Willie’s views but felt powerless to act. She could not choose between her husband and her daughter, and anyway, it was his house.
Ross, heading into her senior year, moved in with her grandmother, where she stayed until she left for college. She continued to see Willoughby. Rejected by members of their families, they became a family unto themselves. Us versus them, their bonds stronger for the adversity. “Like Thelma and Louise,” Spencer recalls.
During this time, Ross persevered on the court, setting records and netting awards for Milwaukee Tech High School, her only weak games the ones against Willoughby’s Washington High. “I didn’t want to make her look bad,” Ross would explain. Still, her father’s rejection weighed on her. Spencer says he saw his sister “toughen up,” felt “this wall she built.” It was only with Willoughby that she softened. With her, Ross could relax, act giddy, let loose with what her teammates called her hyena laugh, a sound, says Spencer, “so crazy, all you could do was laugh too when you heard it.” With Willoughby, Ross could be a girl.
Malika Willoughby did not have a contagious laugh. Born into Dickensian circumstances, Willoughby was reflexively serious, controlled. Her mother, Rebecca Harp, a bus driver, was erratic, unforgiving, often depressed. Willoughby’s father, Craig, an admitted crack addict, “came and went,” she says. As such, Willoughby was frequently left to raise her younger sisters, one of whom was severely disabled with cerebral palsy. She cooked, cleaned, changed feeding tubes and diapers, socializing little, except with Ross.
Willoughby’s mother hated Ross, an abhorrence that only intensified when she discovered the true nature of her daughter’s relationship.
“I didn’t raise no dykes!” she screamed at Malika. Harp blamed Ross for corrupting her baby. F
or taking advantage of a 14-year-old girl with no previous sexual experience. For confusing her.
But Willoughby did not feel confused. She felt, for the first time, loved: she could listen to the sound of Ross’s voice and see a dream unfolding in her head, a life together.
Though she was under five-foot-eight and rail-thin, Willoughby nonetheless excelled as a point guard at Washington High. She was scrappy, determined. According to Pam Kruse, Willoughby’s coach, Willoughby understood that basketball would provide a college education, not a career. She knew, Kruse says, she was not pro material.
After graduation, Ross headed to a junior college, Northeastern A&M in Oklahoma, where she led the Lady Norse in scoring. Ross made promises to Willoughby, still in high school, told her not to worry. But college was college. Ross was studying, practicing, playing, her hours full. Willoughby consoled herself by hanging out with Spencer in Harambee. “She was always wondering what Roz was doing,” Spencer remembers. “She wanted to be more important than her academics and athletics. It became too much for Rosalind.”
In 2000, after being named a juco All-American, Ross transferred to Oklahoma. Before she left, she told Willoughby that after nearly three years of unremitting companionship, she needed a breather.
Willoughby handled the news poorly. Ross later told several family members and friends that Willoughby jumped on a bus to Oklahoma armed with a bowie knife. She sought Ross out at her apartment and confronted her, accusing her of cheating. Ross talked her down. Not long after, amid the unanimous dismay of their respective families, Ross and Willoughby resumed their relationship.
By 2001, Willoughby had earned a full scholarship to the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, but she seemed miserable. Hoping a change of scenery would help, she transferred to Kent State. During that time she met with therapist Anna Campbell, who subsequently diagnosed Willoughby with Avoidant Personality Disorder, a condition marked by feelings of persistent inadequacy and extreme sensitivity to rejection. In a letter to Willoughby’s mother, Campbell warned that it would be “very difficult for [Willoughby] to develop friendships.”
“When she came on at Kent, we were doing an open gym, and it was obvious she was talented but also very shy,” recalls former teammate Jamie Rubis, 31. “But basketball was a common ground, and we became close.”
Rubis, then a senior, mentored Willoughby. With her help, Willoughby was named captain in her second year and later tapped as one of five designated student-athletes to be featured on promotional posters hung throughout campus. In hers, she smiles sweetly, hair combed flat across her forehead, her eyebrows lifted high.
Rubis says she met Ross only once in those years, when Ross came to visit Willoughby on campus. “Malika did not tell anyone she was gay,” Rubis says. “She told us they were close friends that grew up together.” (Ross also remained closeted throughout college, believing the climate to be “unreceptive” to lesbian players, she told her mother.)
For a time, everything clicked. Willoughby was a Kent State role model with a promising future, and Ross had led Oklahoma to the 2002 national championship game, which helped make her a first-round pick of the L.A. Sparks. Later that year, Ross left for California, a few credits shy of her degree. There, she had dinner with Lisa Leslie. Fans kept approaching the table, which made Ross chuckle. It was improbable to her, so far removed from Harambee. Leslie told her new teammate: just you wait, this will happen to you too.
Ross imagined. She would be a professional basketball player. She would live in Los Angeles. She would be famous, free. Ross laughed her hyena laugh, let herself believe.
But Ross had white-knuckled through years of chronic knee pain (and an undiagnosed torn ACL and other knee ligaments). When she arrived at Sparks camp injured, the team sent her in for medical tests. She needed surgery. Then rehab. A year later, she got devastating news.
She would not be a professional basketball player. She would not live in Los Angeles. She would not play a single pro game. Instead, she was cut loose. Adrift, Ross rushed to the only anchor she knew.
In 2006, after Willoughby completed college, she and Ross, now in their midtwenties, moved back to Harambee. Ross took a job as a security guard for Briggs & Stratton. Willoughby looked for work, eventually finding it as a bank teller—and then a manager. They set up house in a tiny apartment. They tried not to focus on what could have been.
Though her pro career was over, Ross remained a neighborhood star. Locals would solicit her attention, succumb to her charms. “Roz was a trophy to Malika,” says Spencer. She was also threatened by Ross’s status.
Not long after Ross moved home, Spencer recalls, she said that Malika was doing “crazy things. Hiding Roz’s keys. Deflating her tires so she couldn’t leave.”
Ross responded to her lover’s insecurity by lying. Then cheating.
“Roz was always playing around,” acknowledges her mother, Pamela. “She had trouble saying no when people came after her.”
Willoughby swore to friends that she didn’t care, as long as Ross came home to her. But the relationship deteriorated. Tempers flared. Suffocated, Ross would walk out. Inconsolable, Willoughby would lure her back. And so it went. Willoughby and Ross parting dramatically, then reuniting, the pattern recurring countless times over the decade and a half they stayed involved, the separations never true, the pull of the other constant as gravity.
“Your first love, sometimes you never get over it,” surmises Spencer. “Malika had never been with anybody else. She still had the fairy tale in her head.”
During the last effort at reconciliation, Ross, now 30, was broke. She had part-time work at an inner-city children’s home and as a basketball referee, but it was a far cry from the future she’d envisioned. “One more shot,” Ross told her brother about starting up again with Willoughby.
It was 2010. The strain was showing on them both. Willoughby, 27, had taken to drinking heavily, carrying a flask even at home. Already lean, she grew skeletal. Ross slept alone on the couch of their condo, numbing herself with pot and video games. They quit having sex. They argued loud enough for neighbors to hear. Ross told friends she felt dead inside, that she needed to get out. Willoughby promised Ross a Chevy Avalanche if she stayed. Ross hated herself for not leaving. Willoughby hated herself for trying to buy affection.
In February, Willoughby had purchased a weapon from Badger Guns; she wanted it “for protection,” she said. She later upgraded to a more hand-friendly Beretta 84FS Cheetah .380 compact semiautomatic pistol, a light shot regarded for its easily accessible safety. Willoughby kept the pistol loaded under her and Ross’s bed.
On the evening of September 12, 2010, Ross’s mother awoke from a nightmare in a sweat. She’d had a vision of Rosalind in a casket, dressed in a mustard sport coat. She called Ross, told her about the dream.
Her daughter told her to relax, that she “had it under control.”
“She said she was planning on leaving Malika—she just didn’t know how,” Pamela recalls.
Three days after her mother’s vision, a little before 9:00 P.M., Ross’s cell phone rang. It was, as ever, another woman.
“Who is that?” Willoughby asked, piqued.
They were in her used BMW, ordering dinner at the Popeyes drive-thru.
“None of your business,” Ross snapped back.
“I pay your phone bills.”
“Are you trying to front me off?”
Then the punching started. And yelling that could be heard by passersby on the street.
“I wish . . .” Willoughby spat out, stopping short.
“Wish what?” Ross taunted. “You hard? The gun is in the back.”
And just like that, the dream Willoughby and Ross shared for 13 years collapsed on itself. In its place, a black hole of reality yawned open, a mirror held to the lie, and Willoughby, seized with despair, did the only thing she believed she could do to save herself. She killed the dream.
She killed it by taking the Beretta .380 c
ompact semiautomatic pistol and firing a bullet into the left side of her lover Rosalind Ross’s head.
Part 2
Pamela Collins, 51, still lives close to where she raised Rosalind and her brothers, Spencer, age 29, a Navy veteran and high school basketball coach, and Kenneth, 20, a tech-college student. The walls of the family home are covered with photos: Pamela vamping with her sister in ’80s hair, wedding pictures of her and her husband, Willie, 53, older family portraits showing kin from generations back. The entire Collins and Ross clan is represented, but the bulk of the real estate belongs to Roz.
There are photographs of Ross as a schoolgirl in braids, snapshots with friends, and class portraits, but these evergreens have been largely eclipsed by newer pictures, collages and poster boards donated by friends and family, assembled as tributes after her death. There are so many memorials and donations that photos have found their way into potted plants and coffee mugs, albums stacked thick on the table, haunting collateral too heartbreaking to curate.
Beside the dining table sits a floor-to-ceiling china cabinet chockablock with trophies, plaques, and other evidence of Ross’s high-achieving life. It is from this cabinet that Pamela retrieves the pack of Doublemint gum that her daughter was carrying the night she was shot. “You can see her blood on it,” Willie says, wresting it from his wife’s palm. He points at an indistinct splotch on the package, then delicately returns it to its place among the certificates and ribbons.
The family settles into the TV room. America’s Funniest Home Videos plays at high volume. Spencer and Kenneth sit side by side, both dressed in snappy checked button-downs and well-fitted jeans, idly watching. Willie stands behind the couch, still wearing his leather jacket, restless.
