Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  Pat calls Michelle’s mother to try to explain. “She’s all yours, Pat,” says Betsy, but privately she and her husband are aching for their child and wondering about Pat, too. Doesn’t Pat understand that Michelle isn’t just like her? Doesn’t she know that Michelle’s father is tough too, an old college fullback, but that every night he gave his girl a good-night kiss?

  Life’s funny, though, and something else happens in that 1994 NCAA tournament game after Pat grabs Michelle’s jersey: Michelle grabs Pat’s heart. She comes in at point guard when the Lady Vols are gagging in the second half, down by 18, and nearly saves them single-handedly before they lose by 3. Furious drives to the basket, long jumpers, brilliant passes, knee-burning steals.

  Pat sits there shaking her head, the truth moving from her mind into her gut. Michelle is the only one out there refusing to lose; the only one just like her! Pat can’t wait. She tells Michelle right after the game: Tiffany’s out. You’re in. You’re my starting point guard next year. “But remember,” Pat says, “the point guard’s an extension of me on the court. You’ve never been through anything like what you’re about to go through.”

  Michelle goes home. She places one large framed picture of Pat twisting her jersey and snarling at her on her bedroom wall, and one small framed picture of the same scene on the dashboard of her car. Now Pat’s everywhere Michelle goes, everywhere Michelle hides.

  We’ve got an appointment, so let’s break into a trot. Let’s dash right past another year and a half; let’s bully Time, the way Pat does. Let’s fly by the day Pat throws her starting point guard out of practice in her junior year, past the day when Michelle finally crumbles and sobs in front of everyone. Let’s jump clean over the last day of that same junior year, when Michelle comes within a whisker of her dream but loses in the NCAA title game to Connecticut—still unsure of herself on the floor in critical moments, still whirling between Pat’s way and her way, no longer the All-America guard nor even the all-conference one.

  There it goes—did you see it?—the day midway through Michelle’s senior season when Pat makes her sit on a chair at midcourt, like a bad schoolgirl, and watch practice, then makes her move the chair to the far end of the floor after she whispers to a teammate.

  We’ve got an appointment to keep, an appointment with an ice storm in Mississippi, coldest night of Michelle’s life. It’s February 1996. Time’s not ticking now for Pat and Michelle. It’s hammering. Pat has fixed that problem she had of making it to the Final Four and losing, fixed it mostly by persuading the best recruiter in the country, De­Moss, to leave Auburn in 1985 and be her assistant. Pat has won national titles in ’87, ’89 and ’91, but four years have elapsed since her last one, way too long, and she needs her team leader, Michelle, as much as Michelle needs her.

  Michelle’s desperate. It’s her last shot at the title, her last shot to make all this pain pay off. Her last chance to regain the kind of national acclaim that vanished for her after high school, to become a player whom the two fledgling women’s pro leagues will come looking for. But how can she? The Lady Vols are 17–3, but they look nothing like a title team—and guess whose fault that is?

  Now Pat’s team has gotten skunked a fourth time, by Mississippi, and Michelle has gone 0 for 7 from the field and fouled out, having played as if she could feel Pat’s eyes burning through her back. The bus is crawling toward the airport, across the ice, through the darkness; crawling as Michelle listens to Pat, a few seats away, ridicule her; crawling as Pat rises and takes a seat next to Michelle and tells her that unless something drastic happens, she doesn’t think the Lady Vols can win a championship with Michelle as their point guard. It’s hopeless—no lip-biting can possibly dam it now that the gates are open, now that Pat has already brought Michelle to tears twice that day, at halftime and just after the game, and . . . here it . . . here it comes . . . the third wave of sobs.

  Michelle doesn’t sleep that night. She’s terrified. For the first time she has gone past anger and frustration and the hunger to show Pat she’s wrong. The girl with the brightest flame is dead inside. She cannot. Take this. Anymore.

  At 6:45 a.m. she calls Pat’s home. Only fear and despair could make her speak to Pat Summitt this way: “You don’t think we can win it all with me playing like I am,” she says, “but I . . . I don’t think we can win it all with you coaching like you are. You’ve got to back off me now, especially in front of other people. You can’t do that to me anymore.” Her breath catches.

  Maybe it’s because Pat has won so many championships that she can be more flexible now. Maybe it’s impossible not to soften a little, stop choking each minute quite so hard, when there’s a five-year-old boy in bed breathing the night in and out while you listen and then wrapping you in a hug when morning comes. Maybe Pat has no real choice this late in the season. She and Michelle speak for a while, and then there’s silence. Well? “Doesn’t mean I won’t criticize you anymore, do you understand?” Pat says. “But I’ll try it.”

  With that, everything changes. “As if we were two people in a room with boxing gloves,” Michelle will say a few years later, “who finally both come out with our hands up.” Pat gives Michelle more rope. Michelle quits trying to tie a triple knot when a single will do just fine. Tennessee reels off 15 straight wins, beating UConn in overtime in the NCAA semifinals behind Michelle’s 21 points and then blowing out Georgia to win the crown.

  Pat goes up into the stands and gets the first hug and kiss from her father that she can remember. Michelle is chosen the Final Four MVP. Her flying leap into Pat’s arms nearly knocks Pat off her feet.

  If this were a TV movie, it would end there. You would never get a chance to watch Michelle go home with Pat and finally understand the force, or to gaze down the road and peek around the bend to where the story really ends. But it’s not a TV movie. It’s summer, four months after the title, and the two women are in Pat’s car busting 90 through middle Tennessee, heading to Henrietta. It’s O.K. with the NCAA because Michelle has just graduated, and it’s O.K. with the state police because Pat Summitt can go as fast as she wants in Tennessee, and it’s O.K. between Pat and Michelle, who cried together at the senior banquet a few months before.

  From this new place, from this last ledge before Michelle leaps into the pros and adulthood, then maybe marriage and children, she looks over at Pat. The championship glow is still emanating from both of them, but it’s no longer blinding. It’s good light in which to look at Pat and assess. . . .

  Does Michelle want to be like Pat? Does she want to make herself go cold and hard inside when she needs to, or is the cost too steep? Can she have children and sweep them along with her, the way Pat does with Tyler, showering him with love and attention on airplanes and bus rides, taking him and his nanny on road trips whenever he can go . . . then steeling herself and walking out the door alone when he can’t? Can Michelle dress like the First Lady, give goosebump-raising speeches, spearhead $7 million United Way fund drives, be competent in everything—can she be, does she want to be, the woman who’s trying to do it all and pulling it off, as Pat is?

  They climb out of the car, and Michelle stares across the hayfields and the tobacco barns and the silence. She gazes at the old homestead where Pat grew up, no girls her age within five miles. She sees the hayloft behind the house, blown off its 10-foot cinder-block legs by a tornado. It’s where Pat climbed a ladder nearly every evening when chores were done and played two-on-two basketball under a low tin roof and two floodlights, on a tongue-and-groove pine floor surrounded by bales of hay, with three older brothers, two of whom would go on to play college sports on scholarship.

  Michelle sees Pat’s mother limp toward her on ankles worn to the bone by all the years of stocking shelves on a cement floor in the family grocery store, all the years of tucking her foot beneath the old 10-gallon milk cans, hoisting them off the ground and into the coolers with a thrust of her leg. All the years of milking cows before sunrise, picking butter beans all
day in summer, laying down linoleum floors on the houses her husband was building to sell, never resting from the moment she woke till the moment she dropped into bed.

  Michelle sees the three farms that Pat’s father ran along with the feed store and the grocery store and the hardware store and the tobacco warehouse and the beauty salon, all while he was a school-board member and the county water commissioner. She sees the field where he once disked an entire night, through dawn, and then hitched up the mules and began a day of planting corn . . . until his head jerked up from sleep and he saw that his rows were running together. She sees the white-haired man coming home from his tractor, on which he still spends 10 hours a day after two knee replacements, prostate surgery, two ministrokes and quintuple-bypass surgery. She sees all the command and authority leak out of her coach as Tall Man draws near. . . . Deference . . . Pat? In a funny way, it’s what Michelle needs to see: Pat’s vulnerable. Pat’s a regular person. Michelle does what Pat can’t do. She walks up to Pat’s dad and throws a hug around him.

  She sees the schools where Pat never missed a day, not one, from grades one through twelve, because illnesses were like birthdays—her father didn’t believe in them. She sees the high school to whose district Tall Man moved the family just so Pat could play basketball, because he never separated what a girl ought to be able to do from what a boy ought to. Michelle sits at the table where the family still gathers often because only Pat, of the five Head children, has moved on. She sees how bare-boned and basic the family’s life is, and how silly a spin move can seem.

  She gazes across the dirt and asphalt roads where Pat used to take the family car, killing the dashboard lights so her kid sister, Linda, couldn’t see the needle nosing 95, and it begins to dawn on Michelle that the wind that has been at her own back for the last three years is really the wind that has been at Pat’s back all of her life. And that maybe you don’t have as much choice as you like to think—after you’ve lived that long and that close to a force that strong—about the kind of woman you would like to be. Maybe the wind just sends you flying.

  But the significant moment in Pat’s story isn’t back there, in the past, or even in all those traumatic and giddy moments that she and her point guard shared. The story doesn’t end with Michelle—it goes through her, and on to people that Pat will never know, because Michelle is now the carrier of a spore.

  A year after she leaves Tennessee and a few months before she joins the Philadelphia Rage of the American Basketball League, Michelle meets a 15-year-old girl named Amanda Spengler, who plays basketball at a high school a few miles from Allentown, where Michelle grew up. Michelle takes Amanda under her wing—plays ball with her, lifts weights with her, talks about life with her and tells her all about Pat.

  “She makes you feel there’s nothing to be afraid of in life,” Michelle tells Amanda. “If you want something, you go after it as hard as you can, and you make no excuses.”

  She tells Amanda how much she misses that lady now, how much she misses that sense of mission all around her—the urgency of 12 young women trying to be the best they can, every day, every moment. Sometimes in practice with her Philadelphia team, Michelle pretends Pat has just walked in to watch her, and she practices harder and harder. She tells Amanda how she dreams of being a coach someday, maybe even Pat’s assistant.

  “Let’s run,” she says to Amanda one day, but she doesn’t run alongside the girl. She just takes off, barely conscious that she has already joined the legions of Pat’s former players all over America who are spreading the urgency, breathing into thousands of teenage girls a new relationship with Time. She’s barely aware that she’s part of a capillary action, like the one that men have had with boys for generations, whose power is too vast to measure. She just takes off, determined to run seven-minute miles for 45 minutes, and Amanda gasps, running farther and harder than she ever dreamed she could, just trying to keep Michelle in sight.

  A few weeks later Amanda goes to a high school track with a watch. We’re talking about one girl now, remember, but we’re not. We’re talking about a wave. It’s midday in the dead of summer. Amanda starts running and realizes after three laps that she has almost nothing left, and there’s only one way to come close to Michelle’s seven-minute mile. Her face turns scarlet, her body boils, her stomach turns; Nature screams at her to stop. Instead, she sprints. She sprints the entire last lap.

  The watch says 7:05 as she crosses the line. Amanda can’t believe she ran that fast, and she laughs as she reels and vomits near the flagpole. She laughs.

  Rick Reilly

  The sportswriter whose byline would become as widely sought as any of his time can point to beginnings in a tidy patch of space. Rick Reilly (b. 1958) went to college in his hometown of Boulder, Colorado, and during his sophomore year at the University of Colorado began working in the sports department of the city’s Daily Camera. After graduation he spent two years at the Denver Post and another two at the Los Angeles Times before joining the staff of Sports Illustrated in 1985. He would leave for ESPN in 2007, but not before his “Life of Reilly” column had graced the final editorial page of each week’s issue for a decade, commanding a handsome premium from advertisers placed next to it. Before that columnist’s gig, Reilly wrote features for SI off the news, including this bittersweet look at Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. He takes the measure of the team at the height of its fame during the 1990s, a decade when, as Reilly writes, Jordan “never started a basketball season that didn’t end in a parade.” At the same time, he correctly warns readers that this will be the band’s last tour. The story is characteristically Reilly in how it tumbles breezily and knowingly along, with a humanizing thread laid through the narrative. The Bulls would indeed finish that 1997–98 season with another NBA title, the last of six that their star would win; Gus Lett, Jordan’s friend and bodyguard, would live another two-and-a-half years before his death at age 64.

  Last Call?

  IT’S JUST a bus, yet kids hug it. Grown men pat it as it passes by. Women buss this bus. A kid jumped on the bumper once, trying to serve as a human hood ornament. Caravans of cars chase this bus wherever it goes. In Phoenix one night this season, about 15 cars, led by a Chevette filled with screaming teenagers, followed the bus onto the tarmac of a private airport. Hey, kids, can you spell trespassing?

  This bus is the leading cause of bad snapshots in America. Right now, somebody somewhere is opening a pack of prints to find a dozen pictures of an unmarked chartered bus and not a famous face to be seen. Even pros do it. In Paris, paparazzi on motorcycles chased the bus, madly snapping away at blackened windows.

  There is a kind of rolling panic about this bus, on account of the Chicago Bulls are inside it. If the end is coming, if the greatest sports dynasty of the 1990s is unraveling, people want to reach out and tear off its muffler before the whole thing comes unglued. In Indianapolis on March 17, so many fans gathered outside the Canterbury Hotel to witness the Bulls walk four feet—four feet—from the hotel’s secured lobby onto the magic bus that police had to close off the street. For an hour. At times like that, Michael Jordan, the center of the madness, sits in the back of the bus, smiles and says, “O.K., we love you, but it’s time to go home now.”

  What Americans are afraid of is that their Babe Ruth will go home before they’ve seen him in person. And so, this season has been the bonfire of an obsession that has been smoldering for years. In New York City last year, hundreds of people stood 10 deep outside the Plaza Hotel for a chance to see these 12 tall Beatles. Pressed into the front row were three businessmen in fine Italian suits and $300 shoes. Jammed next to them were three cross-dressers in size-20 Donna Karans and spiked heels. Shoulder-to-shoulder-pad, sideburn-to-earring, they were six guys who wanted only one thing: to be flies on the wall of history. Out came Jordan, dressed in a $3,500 tailor-made suit. As he hopped aboard the bus, the three businessmen high-fived. Then came Dennis Rodman, in bright purple bone-tight pants, an aquamarine silk blouse
open to the navel, Nancy Sinatra boots and a throw pillow for a hat. As he hopped aboard, the transvestites hugged.

  In one stretch of three road games in late March, the Bulls drew more than 98,000 paying fans. In Atlanta on one of those nights they set a one-game NBA attendance record of 62,046. Eight thousand of those seats had no view of the floor. “I think the feeling people have this year is that it’s going to end,” says Jordan. “And I think they should enjoy it, because you never know when it’s all going to be taken away.”

  Is that how you feel, Michael?

  “Yes,” Jordan says. “Yes. Exactly.”

  As the world reaches out for Michael Jordan one last time, he recoils further and further into the corners of his life. He used to come out two hours early and shoot, but he doesn’t now. He used to hang in the locker room with his teammates before games, but he doesn’t now. Instead, until visitors and reporters are barred from the premises 45 minutes before tip-off, Jordan retreats beyond the locker room, down the corridor, past the ankle-taping tables, to a little office with a desk, a small TV and a sign on the door that says DOCTOR’S, TRAINER’S OFFICE.

  It’s the emperor’s bedroom now. To be granted entry, you’ve got to be huge (Tiger Woods, Joe Montana, Muhammad Ali) or, sometimes, just small enough: The winner of last October’s Chicago Marathon, 5′4″ Khalid Khannouchi of Morocco, asked meekly if he could meet Mike and, miraculously, word came back that he could. Mostly, though, the answer is N-O-period. One night recently an Iowa congressman, who kept showing his congressional badge and insisting that Jordan would want to see him, had to be ushered away from the locker room. Supermodel Valeria Mazza’s handlers were flabbergasted recently to learn that Jordan didn’t want to meet her. Johnnie Cochran got bubkes, too.