CHAPTER 9
Shirley’s Gremlin and Those Weird Lumps
WOW, DEAN TURRY HAD A HAIRY BACK.
He was a good-looking guy, Jerry Turry, Niles West’s dean of the senior and sophomore classes. Even at 30-whatever-he-was, we could see that, and a good number of the cute junior and senior girls would flirt with him, thinking no one could tell. But he did have a slightly receding hairline and, in school, he wore clothes. So it was no small shock when a few of us wandered into the Boys’ Gym one morning and saw him on the basketball court playing a full-court game with some other male coaches, guidance counselors, and teachers, his shirt off and his hairiness very apparent.
Any trauma at seeing our dean half-naked and hairy, however, was quickly overshadowed by another emotion: intense jealousy. Why can’t we do that? And how can we do that? The answer, after considerable pleading, was that we could, just as long as we were out of the gym by the time the men showed up to start their game.
At 6:30 a.m.
No problem, we figured. If we got to school by five, we could get in some decent scrimmage time. We had worried about getting in enough practice. Granted, the school year had just started and basketball tryouts were still a couple months away. But the girls’ season had been moved up again, this time to coincide with the boys’ season, and our first game was December 14. In other words, time was a-wastin’.
The best part about the 1977–78 Niles West girls’ basketball season was that after playing a 12-game regular-season schedule the last two years, we now had 21 games before regionals. And included in those games were two tournaments. It would be the first time a Niles West girls’ basketball team had ever played in a regular-season tournament, which would, by every measure, tell us the kind of team we were as well as the kind of team we were capable of becoming.
After school, the gym was booked. Shirley, Connie, and some of the other girls had volleyball practice, and it was vital to us that, once again, we established ourselves as the imaginary title-holders of the hardest-working team in the state.
The next day, Shirley’s Gremlin came rumbling up the street at 4:30 a.m., and my father almost had a heart attack. “You’re going to wake up the entire neighborhood,” he said, frantically shushing me as if I could somehow silence Shirley’s nonexistent muffler from our kitchen. I shrugged, kissed him goodbye, and bounded for the car.
“Shirley, we have to do something!” I screamed. The noise from inside the car was just as intense as from the outside. “And why don’t you have any heat in this car?”
It was fall in Chicago, which would qualify as winter in most places, and I could see my breath. Shirley assured me that from then on, she would cut off the engine and coast into my driveway. And as for the other problem, I might want to consider layering.
Shirley was the one who first suggested we begin working out in the middle of the night, and she never got an argument, her upbeat mood giving every scrimmage a festive feel. “Good morning, sunshine,” Connie chirped at her while the rest of us shuffled into the gym, still rubbing our eyes and clearing our throats and generally gathering our wits about us.
The first few days, our early sessions consisted of two-on-twos and maybe three-on-threes, the attendance less than stellar. We put the word out—phrased more as a threat—that everyone had better show up. We wanted to play full-court. Soon, sophomores like Tina Conti and Lynn Carlsen and other girls who desperately wanted to make varsity started coming. Shirley, Connie, and I were regulars. So were Barb and Peggy, Judy and Karen, Bridget, Diana, and another senior, Jo Vollmann.
It was basketball for the sheer joy of it. And yet we were deadly serious about why we were there. This was preparation for the state championship, and no one had better have any doubt about that. Connie and I, the most enthusiastic about self-inflicted torture, decided that when we were kicked off the floor by the men at 6:30, we would run. Specifically, we would run up and down the circular staircase leading up to the gym balcony. It was about 20 steps up and then 20 steps down the other side, and around and around we went, counting as we completed each circuit like a regiment of Marine recruits. First, 10 trips sounded about right, then 20 and then 30 and then 40 until the freshmen and sophomores and those who didn’t have the stomach or the mentality for it fell off.
Connie was manic, with the endurance of marathon runner Jim Fixx, and it would invariably be she who would urge us to do 10 more, then 10 more, singing out cheers as we ran. And then we would drag ourselves to the locker room and get ready for school, running to our first classes with still-flushed faces and damp hair, satisfied that for one more day, we were still the most dedicated team in Illinois.
Some days, Shirley and I would swing by and pick up Connie and Peggy on our way to school in the morning. On other days, Tina’s father, who worked the night shift at the family’s bread company, would pick up the entire Lincolnwood contingent—me, Shirley, and Barb—and take us to Niles West. Connie would sometimes be able to get the family station wagon as long as she returned it before school, and there were as many adventures with that car as Shirley had with the Gremlin.
Connie made it for days on one headlight until a patrolman stopped her one morning after she rolled through a stop sign. “I’m sorry, officer,” she told him. “I’m on my way to basketball practice.” So impressed and probably more than a little shocked was he at the sight of a cute, blonde teenage girl going to play basketball at four thirty in the morning that he let her off with a warning and a smile.
So intent was Peggy on getting to our morning session when Connie was unable to drive her one morning, that her mother rode up Marmora Avenue in the snow with Peggy on the handlebars of her bike.
At some point it entered our minds that maybe we should challenge the male teachers to play, thus extending our own practice period. But they immediately nixed that idea, and considering their game was a combination of basketball and the movie Ben-Hur, it was clear we would be taking our lives into our hands. Theirs was not a sport we recognized.
It was all at once a wonderful and yet still strangely confusing time to be a girl growing up in our country. During that 1977–78 school year, 65,000 people marched in Washington, DC, in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. An Ohio court ruled that girls could play on Little League baseball teams. The first female general in the Marine Corps, Margaret A. Brewer, was appointed. And at the University of Chicago, the first female president of a coed university, Hanna H. Gray, was inaugurated. A lawsuit by Sports Illustrated reporter Melissa Ludtke was also resolved by US District Court Judge Constance Baker Motley, who ruled that Major League Baseball teams could not keep a female sportswriter out of the clubhouse following a game.
At the same time, shows such as Three’s Company, Charlie’s Angels, and Laverne & Shirley ruled the airwaves, pretty much reinforcing the idea, for three nights a week anyway, that dumb, beautiful, or preferably both was what America still wanted a woman to be.
When Bridget noticed one day with pride how strong her legs had become and pointed this out to her mother, her mom responded in horror, “You look like a boy.” And Shirley’s mother, while outwardly supportive of her youngest daughter’s athletic endeavors, also harbored concerns that all of that exercise was making Shirley bigger all over and was perhaps the reason she didn’t have a boyfriend.
Besides basketball, I was focused on September 29, my upcoming 16th birthday and the party I was planning. I invited my teammates as well as a large group of other friends to a luncheon at a Japanese restaurant. I wore a blue velour pants suit, which was as girly as I cared to look, and cut into a giant cake in the shape of a basketball player wearing our red-and-white Niles West warm-ups, No. 10 of course. Among other gifts from my parents, I received a coveted leather basketball, and no one in the room had to guess what I wished for when I blew out the candles.
If I had known, I might have thrown in a wish for Shirley. She had recently applied to the University of Illinois, where she was planning on studying
physical therapy. And on the advice of Mrs. Mulder, Mr. Schnurr, and others, she was also trying to elicit some interest from Illinois women’s basketball coach Carla Thompson for a possible scholarship. Shirley had glowing letters of recommendation from the coaches, Dr. Mannos, and Dean Turry. And now, after a phone conversation with the Illinois coach, she had an appointment to meet her on campus that Sunday.
Shirley gathered newspaper clips and film of our games, and with her parents made the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Champaign. The Cohens arrived a half hour early for their noon appointment at the student union. They called Thompson’s office when she was late in arriving, talked to a security guard who knew Thompson, and then tried the athletic department, all in vain. After several hours of waiting, they decided to turn around and drive back home.
Shirley, at her parents’ behest, left message after message for the coach to call back. She never received a reply. Shirley barely talked about it. She was embarrassed by being stood up, but she was also conflicted. She was confident but acutely aware of her shortcomings as a basketball player—primarily a lack of quickness and height for a power forward. Maybe, she thought, this was God’s way of telling her that she really wasn’t good enough to play college basketball. And like some of us, she also wasn’t sure that she really wanted to be a college athlete.
If we had managed in high school to sidestep the stigma that still existed for female athletes, it appeared to be that much harder for girls in college. Plus, Shirley’s parents could afford to send her to college, and she had good reason to believe she would be accepted to Illinois with or without basketball.
Shirley’s father fired off a letter to the Illinois women’s athletic director asking for an explanation, if not an apology, for the coach’s inexplicable behavior, but Shirley wouldn’t let him mail it. And soon, she shook off the disappointment. But this was all the more reason, she told herself, why winning a state championship this season would be so necessary, so perfect.
We all found our own forms of motivation. One day that fall, Connie was finishing volleyball practice when Niles West’s JV wrestling coach Bill Mitz, who had once dated one of Connie’s older sisters, stopped to tell her he was working out at a community gym and had seen the star of Maine South’s basketball team, Kathy Pabst, shooting by herself. By our junior year, Maine South had established itself as our biggest rival. Its best players, Sue Leonard and Liz Boesen, had graduated, but Pabst was their heir apparent. And that day, she became Connie’s personal nemesis.
“It looked like she was working pretty hard out there,” Mitz goaded.
Connie rolled her eyes. “Come on,” she said. “Is she running stairs at 4:30 a.m. like we are?”
“All I’m saying,” he said, “is that there will always be someone working harder than you are.”
Connie scowled and decided right then and there that no one, not Kathy Pabst or any other girl in the state, would outwork her.
Whether Peggy was shooting after practice had ended or I was lingering at the foul line or Shirley was practicing her inside moves on someone, Connie would make sure she shot longer, practiced harder, and was the last player to leave the gym.
With any free time before volleyball practice, Connie and I would work on creating our new ballhandling routine. For me, I wanted us to look flashy, like Hinsdale South, to use it to get more psyched up before games. For Connie, it was more than that. It was a way to bond as a team, come together in warm-ups, and perform in sync, as one, with none of us standing out from anyone else. It showed both her humility and leadership, a maturity that, like Shirley’s, was beyond that of most 16-year-olds.
She had also begun dating her friend Bob, another sign that Connie had it made, at least to me. Bob Porcaro was cute and sweet; had a fabulously dry sense of humor; played football but was hardly the dumb jock type; and was crazy about Connie. I thought they were the cutest couple I had ever seen in my life. They even had their own song, Connie once confided in me without sounding corny: Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are.” And maybe the best thing about Bob was that he was genuinely supportive of her interest in sports and an actual fan of ours. It was the only way Connie would allow herself a commitment outside of basketball. Not only did Bob come to our games last season but he also covered us for the school paper. No one questioned his objectivity.
In November, Mulder named 14 girls each to the new freshman basketball team and JV squad, and 11 to varsity. The only newcomer to varsity was Peggy. There were four seniors—Shirley, Diana, Bridget, and Jo Vollmann; five juniors—Connie, Karen, Judy, Peggy, and me—and two sophomores—Barb and DD.
Though as talented as always, DD still perplexed us. She seemed to be more distant than ever, especially when her on-again, off-again relationship with Connie’s twin brother, Chris, was off again, and she had little interest in putting in any extra time on the court, though she was always good for a laugh when she was around.
It felt great to be out on the court as a team again, and my brand-new Converse gym shoes with the bold red star logo kept catching my eye as I ran drills. Leather Converse—bought from the boys’ section of the store—were all the rage that year, and most of the girls on the team pined for high-tops. I thought they were hideous and because I did not have ankle problems, opted for the standard low-tops, which saved my parents 12 bucks.
Still, my mother and I never actually told my father that I was buying $40 gym shoes, and Connie quietly collected Coke bottles to combine with babysitting money for her high-tops. She might have come up with the money a little easier, but in a surprise move, Connie’s mom had made her quit her waitressing job, telling her she had the rest of her life to work and that now she needed to work at basketball.
When we were younger, there was no such thing as a girl buying boys’ basketball shoes. Girls wore deck shoes or pointy PF Flyers. My new Converse reminded me that when was 11, I got a pair of the smallest Tretorn tennis shoes they made after begging my parents to let me take 10 lessons for $20 at the new Touhy Tennis Club. I also begged for—and received—a pair of white boys’ tennis shorts to go with my T-shirt. I loved Chris Evert, but she wore tennis dresses and cute scrunchies, and I couldn’t relate, and there was no way I was running around in a dress on a tennis court when I could barely stand to wear one to temple for the High Holidays.
For most of us, the shoes were a huge deal, and we accepted without question that the same pair would most likely carry us through high school. Right after practice, I returned mine to their original box as if returning a baby to its crib. It wasn’t just that the shoes looked great or were real leather or expensive, though all those things factored in. It was as if, with each new basketball accessory, like our warm-ups suits, we were that much closer to being real basketball players, to being taken seriously and taking our sport that much more seriously.
Though everyone who knew about our morning sessions could not help but be impressed by our dedication, that did not mean the male coaches were any more inclined to share gym space with us for practice after school. As basketball season approached and the boys’ and girls’ seasons were to run concurrently for the first time, Mrs. Mulder saw firsthand which male coaches were not quite as liberated as the others. To further complicate matters, this was the first season we had a girls’ freshman basketball team, which meant even more sacrificing of gym space, and the not-so-quiet grumbling of the older male coaches eventually made its way into the PE office.
Mulder had fought this battle before and remembered the conversation she had with Judy Kay, the girls’ volleyball and badminton coach, when Miss Kay stomped into the office one day during the fall season. “These guys are just ignoring me,” Kay said. “I told them we’re splitting the gym and that I want these two and a half hours, and they can have these two. And you know what they said? ‘We’ll take it under consideration.’ They can take it under consideration.”
“Judy,” Mrs. Mulder told her, “you have to start small.”
“Balon
ey,” Kay huffed.
Mulder was not worried. She had paved the way for her teams to get gym time by starting small a year earlier. She also knew whom to talk to.
“Billy, do you think I can get the gym once a week?” she asked Schnurr. “The team is at a disadvantage not playing on a regulation court.”
“No problem, Arlene,” Schnurr told her. “We can play later. We’ll work with you.”
Arlene Mulder never considered herself a feminist, though she had a fierce interest in seeing females get the same basic opportunities as males. She was simply a realist, and unlike her close friend, gymnastics coach Judi Sloan, who would also become angry when the male coaches openly discriminated against the women, Mrs. Mulder went more for the kill-’em-with-kindness approach. She also learned from Miss Heeren, whose strategy was to get the men to think it was their idea.
Mulder was no politician, but she did have her own opinions. And in meetings with area coaches in the early days of Title IX, she would stand up and urge them, “Let’s not get so caught up with equality that we repeat the same mistakes the men have made,” and the other women in the room would applaud in approval.
Sloan was happy for Mulder and the other women taking whatever approach worked. But Sloan had been fighting battles for longer than all of them and knew the frustration of having to fight for a seemingly simple matter, like getting a photograph of a top girl gymnast and the school’s first female conference champ mounted on Niles West’s Wall of Fame.
That was in ’72, only five years earlier, and Sloan had her picture in the school paper during that battle and was depicted as the Bella Abzug of Niles West by male staff members. She also received hate mail over the incident. But she persevered. And when her gymnastics team had to take apart their own equipment and move it from the balcony down the bleachers and into the gym for their meets because the school wouldn’t pay maintenance to do it, she gritted her teeth and did it. The men laughed at Sloan when she had her girls jogging in the pool and jumping on and off boxes because she had read about plyometrics as a means to increase foot speed and agility.
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