I turned to Peggy. “This guy is a loser. His boys’ teams sucked.”
“Worse than sucked,” my ever-supportive friend and teammate replied, and right at that moment, Mr. Schnurr walked through the cafeteria.
“Pssst, Mr. Schnurr, Mr. Schnurr,” we called, motioning him over.
We grilled him about Earl and what he knew about the hiring.
“Come on. You can tell us,” Connie begged.
“Yeah, we won’t tell anyone,” I chimed in as my teammates tried not to laugh at the absurdity of that statement.
But Mr. Schnurr was purposely evasive and ended up shrugging and walking away with a smile, uncomfortable with giving us too much information.
We did not know it then, but we had already forgotten Mrs. Mulder.
It was considerably harder for her to move on. Still agonizing over our loss and second-guessing herself, she spent her last days at Niles West reading letters of consolation and congratulations, and cleaning out her desk.
“I’ll miss you all so very much; it hurts to think about it,” she wrote in my yearbook. “Thanks for being a part of my family.”
I don’t think any of us actually said goodbye.
CHAPTER 15
Big Whip
GENE EARL DIDN’T WANT THE JOB.
When Mr. Karbusicky greeted him the day after our supersectional loss as “the new Niles West girls’ basketball coach,” Earl replied in near horror, “No, I’m not. I’m not coaching next year. I’ve got a boy to watch.”
He was referring to his son Dave, who was going to be a junior at Elk Grove High School and on the varsity basketball team, and Earl was determined to see him play, something he often missed out on in previous years while coaching. Bud Trapp was determined to get Earl to change his mind.
“You’re taking the job,” Trapp would tell him every two or three days that spring.
“No, I’m not,” Earl would reply.
Despite the speculation, the school year ended without a new girls’ coach, and we all went our separate ways, much more interested at that moment in our summer plans.
I opted to skip Mr. Schnurr’s camp so that I could be a full-time camp counselor in Lincolnwood. It was not without considerable anguish that I came to this decision, and Connie was clearly annoyed when I told her, which was apparent more from her silence than anything she said. I felt I had no choice. Now that I was 16, I was going to be a senior counselor for the first time, and I was thrilled about my bump in (gross) salary to $80 a week. The job was tough to get, and I had been paying my dues as a junior counselor without a salary the previous two summers. As a JC, I was allowed to miss mornings the first two weeks to go to Niles West’s basketball camp, but not now that I would be in charge of my own group.
I also returned, as I did every spring and summer, to softball, where I played center field for the Lincolnwood 16- to 18-year-old traveling team with Barb and remembered why I loved the game so much. I had made all-conference that spring for Niles West, and it had always been my best sport. Aside from basketball, I was never happier than when I was diving for sinking line drives in the outfield, then bouncing up and firing the ball home to nail an unsuspecting base runner.
I also continued umpiring girls’ softball, as I had been the last few years, and with my burgeoning confidence, added boys’ Little League baseball and women’s 16-inch industrial league softball to my repertoire.
The women nearly broke me.
They were fresh off the assembly line at the nearby Bell & Howell manufacturing plant, and they were much more interested in emptying their cooler filled with Hamm’s than in learning the finer points of the game like, for example, the infield fly rule. I realized this as soon as I called it, which I was very proud to have recently mastered. The women were not impressed. In fact, they were enraged that I would have the gall to call an automatic out on the batter when the shortstop dropped the ball, though the whole point of the rule was so a fielder wouldn’t purposely drop it in order to get a double or triple play. With more than a few Hamm’s in them by then, several kept up a steady round of obscenities for the next inning or so until I enforced another call I had just mastered—disqualification.
Informing the offending team after a couple of warnings that they had just forfeited, I walked—very quickly but with dignity—to the parking lot and got into my brother Barry’s car, where I promptly—and not with dignity—burst into tears.
My brother, who paused briefly to tell a few women off, thought he noticed a carload of more angry women following us and briefly considered doubling back to the police station. But instead, we drove home and the women’s car pulled into our driveway behind us. Instructing me to run into the house, which I gladly did, pretty sure I would never see my brother again, Barry stayed in the driveway talking to the three women. Soon, my mother and I were peeking through the living room curtains, and we saw the women walking toward the house.
“Oh, God,” I said as my mom looked around for a weapon of some kind—and made sure the house was straightened up.
As it turned out, they came to apologize for their drunken teammates and were actually quite nice, my mother serving them fruit and coffee cake and forging a fast friendship as they settled in around our kitchen table.
Umping the boys was an adventure as well. In the first boys’ baseball game I ever umpired—for 12- and 13-year-olds—most of the kids didn’t see me before I donned my chest protector and mask and crouched behind the catcher, and clearly did not realize I was a girl. They didn’t have any specific problems with my calls as I hustled down the first and third baselines and halfway to second to make sure I was in good position to make the call. They did, however, have a problem with my voice, which was high and a little on the squeaky side for a man, even a short one.
They mocked me incessantly as I made calls in my, well, feminine voice, and I tried to decide when would be the perfect time to pull off my mask and reveal my identity to the little brats. I wished I had long flowing blonde hair for real dramatic effect. But my light brown hair almost to my shoulders would have to do, and after the second inning, I pulled off my mask with as great a flourish as I could muster.
“She’s a girl!” they yelled almost in unison as their coaches howled. And then the best part: “You’re really good for a girl,” they whispered as they came up to bat, obviously trying to get back on my good side.
When I wasn’t dressed in drag, I continued my backyard routine of shooting and dribbling, adding jogging to my regimen, but I felt like Connie was still a little disappointed in me, and I knew Peggy was throwing herself into basketball as never before. In addition to basketball camp, they were playing regularly at the Morton Grove Community Center, along with incoming sophomore Holly Andersen and incoming junior Lynn Carlsen, and were getting great experience playing against guys. I joined them occasionally at night after camp.
Apparently, it was a gradual process gaining acceptance there. Normally, protocol required that you’d call out “Next,” and your team would get to play the winners in the next game. So that’s what Peggy and I did. Once. Twice. Three times as still another all-guys team would jog onto the court in front of us.
I had attitude and Peggy had height and attitude, and so we did what came naturally.
“Hey, you morons!” Peg yelled, instinctively knowing she would not get punched. “We yelled, ‘Next.’”
“Yeah, that means, you know, next,” I chimed in as they laughed at us and kept playing.
We soon figured out that the trick was getting a guy to agree to let girls play on his team and then having him be the one to call “Next,” with the group taking the court before anyone could say anything.
This was the real game we had to play. That and jockeying with the ever-present wiseass, who would invariably yell out, “We’re shirts, you’re skins,” to the team with the girls. With guys who didn’t know Connie or Peggy or any of our teammates, it was always a struggle. But depending on the guys, some kn
ew us and slowly came around, our notoriety from two supersectional appearances making it somewhat easier.
Peggy found it easier for several reasons. For one, no longer as awkward and all arms and legs, she had become solid, athletic. She was always quick, but now she was comfortable at a rangy 5-10; she was a solid rebounder and was developing a consistent jump shot from 15 feet out. She also became more secure off the court after she met and started dating her first boyfriend, Brett, one of the gym regulars.
But Brett or no Brett, basketball had become her one true love.
At his camp that summer, Mr. Schnurr paid extra attention to Peggy. After camp hours, he would hold a crutch over his head and make her shoot over it. At first, she struggled, still getting used to her newfound height and still shooting from her hip. But over and over again, Mr. Schnurr drilled her, forcing her to develop a shot above her head, imploring her to take advantage of her height. She loved the special interest Mr. Schnurr was taking in her and, like all of us, wanted nothing more than to get his approval.
She would go home and plead with her older brother Al—at 6-2 about the height of Mr. Schnurr’s crutch—to guard her so she could shoot over him. Al was a top student, athletic though far from a star. He would go on to Michigan that next fall on an academic scholarship, and it was pretty clear to Peggy at that point that a scholarship of some kind would be the only way she would be able to go to college, too.
Peg was still crazy about Jerry Sloan, even more so after attending his camp for the second summer, and from him she would learn to play the game with a fierceness that was his trademark. As they had the summer before, Peggy and Holly would take two buses to get to Angel Guardian Gym, and afterward, it became a regular routine for Sloan to take them to his house, where they would play basketball in his driveway with his son Brian and his daughters, Kathy and Holly, none of whom were yet in high school.
Peggy also honed her skills on a team most of the Niles West girls played on that summer at Schreiber Park on the Far North Side of Chicago. We competed in a league against girls from Immaculata, Regina, and St. Scholastica and finished in first place after a tough 10-game schedule.
Peggy was gaining confidence every day, though she was still uneasy where Connie was concerned. Both came from the same junior high, where Connie had been one of the popular kids while Peggy had been part of the scenery, and Peggy always felt like she never quite measured up in Connie’s eyes. Connie had a backboard and net in her backyard, right across the street from Peggy’s house, but Peggy would dribble past, still too shy to walk out back and join in, and Connie didn’t think to ask.
Connie was immersed in her own world. In July, she traveled to St. Louis for the Junior Olympic basketball tryouts and a spot in the US Olympic Festival in Colorado Springs the following summer.
Connie had a lot of work to do, and she looked forward to it, but this summer would also prove to be her most trying as a basketball player. That spring, a bearded substitute teacher whom Connie had never seen before and would never see again walked through the gym one afternoon while she was shooting and stopped to give her a few suggestions.
Connie was nothing if not open to criticism when it came to basketball, and so she listened intently as he told her she needed to change her shot. At the time, she was releasing the ball from behind her head with almost no arc. He told her she needed to improve her form and release the ball with better rotation. He worked with her no more than 15 minutes and encouraged her to practice it in the summer. He also told her that it would take time and discipline to change but that it would eventually make a big difference.
Connie knew what she had to do, and she knew where she had to do it. Like a writer going off to a secluded cabin in the woods to work on a novel, she had long since decided the South Balcony Gym would be the perfect studio to practice her craft, and for the previous two years, she had begged Mrs. Mulder to slip her a key that would get her into the school when it was locked.
Shortly before she left, Mrs. Mulder had finally relented. Connie was shocked and grateful and took the gesture very seriously. What it bought her was some coveted extra shooting practice during off-hours before a custodian would inevitably discover her, question how she got there, and shoo her out. But Mrs. Mulder had sworn Connie to secrecy and she, in turn, promised not to tell anyone on the faculty about it.
Connie also promised herself that she would not allow the favor to go for naught. She would take advantage of this opportunity by working harder than ever. She would prove that Mrs. Mulder’s decision to buck the rules, which was so against her nature, was a worthwhile one.
And so, in the airless solitude of the little gym, minutes melted into hours and sweat mixed with tears of frustration as she tried to reprogram her brain to shoot properly and then to develop consistency. There were no words, no music, no outside distraction of any kind as she put up shot after shot, grabbed the rebounds, and shot some more—dozens of shots, hundreds of shots. Early mornings. Sunday afternoons. Late summer nights when her family assumed she was out having fun with her friends.
For the rest of the summer, she stole away to the school, shot in the fading light of her backyard, went to the community center when she could, and on a few occasions, joined Ricky Singer, one of the gym rats from school, on the playgrounds of some of the rougher neighborhoods in Chicago, where she was clearly out of her league.
By now, Connie could see her future or at least put her dream in focus. She wanted to play college basketball. She knew that it was within her grasp and that a scholarship would make it possible, and so she would not give up until it somehow became a reality.
The top women’s coaches in the country were not exactly camped out at the Ericksons’ doorstep, but this was hardly surprising. Women’s basketball had come a long way since Immaculata University won the first-ever national championship for women in 1972, but it still had a considerable way to go. Recruiting was a piecemeal process, and Shirley’s ill-fated attempts at making simple contact with the Illinois coach was a good example of the rudimentary state of women’s college basketball.
Barb, who was still too early in her high school career to think seriously about a college scholarship but was already a strong candidate, had seen the Robby Benson movie One on One the summer before her sophomore year, and it scared her so much that she put the whole thing out of her mind. The movie was an embellishment of the ills of big-time men’s college basketball, complete with illegal recruiting inducements and—once Robby Benson’s character got to college and was considered not good enough—physical harassment orchestrated by the head coach with the intention of getting him to relinquish his scholarship.
I loved the movie because I considered Robby Benson a fox and because he was a guard like me. Barb, however, concluded that everyone who played college basketball was bribed and then beaten bloody.
In 1978, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) was still the governing body in women’s college athletics, the NCAA being an early opponent of Title IX. Women’s basketball was a rare sight on national television, and we were only two years past UCLA’s Ann Meyers achieving the distinction of becoming the first female recipient of a full athletic scholarship.
We knew all about Ann Meyers as well as Nancy Lieberman, who played for Old Dominion and was considered the best women’s basketball player in the United States. And that winter was to be the inaugural season of the Women’s Professional Basketball League with Chicago one of the first eight franchises. They were called the Chicago Hustle, and on July 18 we watched as Rita Easterling became the team’s first-ever draft pick. Finally, it appeared, we were to have some honest-to-goodness role models, talented women on teams with real names and real uniforms with no gimmicks, who could play and, more importantly, play in games we could actually watch.
All we needed now was a coach for our own team.
Gene Earl was clearly not thrilled with the idea of coaching girls. Or maybe it wasn’t that as much as
he felt like his job was being jerked out from under him all over again. The year before, the district had cut the driver’s education department in half, and he was told he would be teaching girls’ physical education. Earl was appalled. He liked driver’s ed, had been teaching it for 13 years, and though two other male teachers would be making the move with him, he was bothered tremendously at being told to switch.
With no choice other than to relinquish his tenure and change schools, Earl made the move. And he hated it. To him, the girls were not serious about his gym class. They showed up to first-period class chronically late, with their turtleneck sweaters still on under their gym uniforms and whining about having to get sweaty.
If that wasn’t bad enough, he was told he would have to teach a folk dance class, this for a man who couldn’t do the two-step with his wife, Marlene. Horrified, he spent his free period observing the dance teacher, Josie Berns, teach her class, and whatever she taught that day, Earl would mimic in his class. If he missed watching Berns’s class one day, he would teach the same thing he had taught the day before. He did not merely find it difficult; he found it unbearable.
This was not necessarily foremost on his mind when he considered whether or not to take the girls’ basketball position, but it was not far off. In August, Earl took a car trip to New York with his wife, son, and daughter, and on the drive, the family discussed his new job offer. He asked Dave specifically how he felt about it, and his son said, “No way, Dad. Men coach boys and women coach girls.”
“Tell Trapp you’ll take it for one year,” Marlene suggested, “and then you can tell him, ‘Now I’ve done you a favor, you can do me a favor and hire someone else.’”
“What do you think, Dana?” Earl asked his daughter, then 12.
“Big whip,” she responded.
Apparently, he was going to have to make this decision on his own. Then again, some decisions seem to be made by themselves.
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