“Now I want you two to understand that you will probably not be playing much this season,” he said bluntly. “If you have any problem with that, you can still quit.”
What was clear to Earl and eventually to us, was that he would continue to coach as he always had. Unlike Mrs. Mulder, who believed in picking the 10 best players for varsity and utilizing her entire roster to build depth, Earl knew immediately that he would choose a starting five and would keep that group intact, barring illness, injury, or ineligibility. Further, he knew he would be rotating in one or two regular substitutes and the rest would play sparingly. And he knew after the first three days of practice that Nancy and Deb would not play at all, barring the last minute of a blowout.
Neither ever complained. Deb was happy to be a part of the team and figured she could only improve by practicing with the best players. Nancy was like a grown woman in a teenager’s body, with all the sensibilities of an adult, and likewise did not rock the proverbial boat.
Earl was looking for three main things—quickness, shooting, and height. The fact that I possessed only the first would have given me a clue as to how he felt about me, had he shared these favored traits with us. Ironically, as a junior, Connie had possessed only quickness as well. She had everything else going for her: great passing abilities, an innate talent on defense, intelligence, floor leadership. But she did not consider herself a great shooter and she wasn’t until her summer of reckoning in the South Balcony Gym.
As for height, Earl was going to have to get used to that deficit. He now had Holly, at 5-11, in mind for center and Peggy, at 5-10, as our undisputed starting power forward replacing Diana Hintz. But after that we dropped off pretty dramatically in the height department. He already envisioned Tina, at 5-7, as his eventual starter at the wing spot. He liked that she was left-handed and could handle the ball well. Though Barb, at 5-6, was of average height for a high school guard, she certainly was not tall, and neither was Connie, who was listed her senior year at 5-6 but still wasn’t more than a hair over 5-5.
Whatever nervousness Earl may have had over our lack of height, however, was quickly assuaged by what he saw in practice. Never had he walked into a gym for a practice to find that his entire team had already started without him, but that’s what he found us doing the first day. He also found that first week that most of us stayed on the court well after we were dismissed to practice free-throw shooting, run laps, play three-on-threes, and whatever else we could do before getting kicked out by the freshman boys’ basketball team or rhythmic gymnasts or anyone else who needed the gym.
But what Gene Earl found most interesting about coaching girls for the first time in his life was that we were a much more mature group than he was used to. The two-time Sweet 16 Niles West girls’ basketball team not only worked exceptionally hard but we actually listened to what he was saying. Now he was dealing with mostly 17- and 18-year-old girls who were clearly more serious than the 14- and 15-year-old boys he was used to coaching, most of whom seemed interested primarily in pulling each other’s shorts down. Or up, depending on the situation. Even at 14 and mid-wedgie, those same boys tended to believe they knew everything there was to know about basketball. And even after three years of playing among the elite teams in the state, we did not.
Our hunger, that word Arlene Mulder had drilled into us and then used as a constant barometer, was intact and as strong as ever. Though we were apprehensive about our new coach, Peg and I in particular, we all wanted to know what this man had to tell us. We were, in fact, desperate for someone new to share with us exactly where he thought we stood and what we needed to do to win a state championship. We were no more satisfied with two supersectional berths than we had been with one. And now the seven seniors who remained were infused with the same sense of urgency that Shirley and Diana and Bridget had had festering inside them last year.
And so, as we took this collective leap of faith with a man we knew so little about, we seemed to agree silently to give him the benefit of the doubt. When Tina secretly cried in the locker room every time Earl screamed at her in practice, we told her to suck it up. When Peggy got elbowed in the mouth on a rebound and spewed blood into the water fountain, we laughed it off when Earl yelled, “Peggy, spit out the Chiclets and get back in the game.” And when we practiced an inbounds play intended to set up a last-second shot and I fired up an air ball only to have Earl glare at me sarcastically and announce, “Isaacson, if you have the ball and we need one shot to win, we’re in deep trouble,” I did not flinch.
I did, however, complain to Shirley. In a running dialogue we kept on a cassette tape mailed back and forth between Lincolnwood and Champaign, I informed Shirley that I was pretty sure our new coach couldn’t stand me. And I also thought his coaching style and expectations of our collective basketball IQ bordered on condescending.
Just the same, if this was what it was like to be coached by a man, then we would become tougher, stronger, and less sensitive in the process, just as we had become when we scrimmaged with boys for the first time. In turn, Earl grew more impressed with us by the day. One afternoon, Judy ran into practice uncharacteristically late and with an excuse that our coach did not want to hear.
“Drop and give me 20,” he barked at Judy as we looked on, stunned at this form of discipline.
“What is this, the Marines?” I whispered to Peggy. But we never took it further than that, and neither did Judy, who jumped up upon completing the push-ups and said, “Sorry, Coach, won’t happen again.”
Earl was amazed and impressed with Judy’s response. When he had inflicted a similar punishment on boys in the past, he would invariably get an annoyed or at best defiant look that said, “I’ll do your damn push-ups all day.”
Even the most seemingly innocuous moments began to make a lasting impression on him. One day we were in two lines for a practice drill when he began to show the first girl in each line what they were doing wrong. Instinctively, we fanned out around him, making sure we were all able to see.
Driving home that night, Earl found himself smiling. “They’re so receptive, this is really a joy,” he told Marlene when he got home. “I really feel like I’m teaching them.”
He could not get over it.
CHAPTER 17
Earl’s Girls
GENE EARL WAS A HICK. From his easy smile to his corny humor to the way he pronounced school “skyewl,” he screamed southern Illinois, and he was the first to admit it.
The oldest of five children born to George and Faye Earl in Zeigler, a coal mining town of about 3,000 people, George Eugene Earl Jr. came into the world on October 1, 1934, as the country was beginning its long recovery from the Great Depression. He joked that he never knew he was poor until he moved to Chicago and “got rich,” and he remembered fondly a childhood filled with sports, friends, and few responsibilities.
Other than the bankers and the barbers, all of the men in his hometown, including his father, worked in one of Zeigler’s two coal mines. When World War II began, George Sr. worked 20 to 25 days in a row to support the coal production for wartime consumption. Meanwhile, Gene, as they came to call him, played with his two younger brothers and two younger sisters, his only real jobs filling the coal bucket at night to warm the house and taking his siblings to the movies.
At Zeigler High School, Gene received nine varsity letters, excelling in football, basketball, and track. Routinely, he would make the honor roll at the beginning of school only to fall off after the first six weeks, much more concerned with sports and hanging out at the local pool hall with his buddies. Based on his athletic prowess, he was invited for a campus visit to Southern Illinois University but decided he had had his fill of studying in high school and was not interested in going to college. It was 1952, two years after the Korean War had started, and Gene wanted to enlist.
Like his buddies, he knew that by avoiding the Army, he would not be sent to Korea. But after some convincing, George Earl agreed to sign the papers that would a
llow his oldest son to enlist in the Navy at 17, reasoning that it kept him out of the coal mines and that Gene could attend radar school, learn aircraft mechanics, or be trained in any number of other vocations.
The Navy, it turned out, would be almost as carefree as Gene’s childhood. After boot camp in San Diego, he went to Norman, Oklahoma, for aircraft repair school, then spent 27 months in Northern California at Moffett Field, which was situated between San Jose and Palo Alto. The extent of his sea duty was a 12-day stint that included 11 days tied to the dock and the 12th day crossing under the Golden Gate Bridge.
To a small-town innocent, the service was a constant education. Once, while Gene was standing at the rail of the docked ship, police came on board to investigate the suspected buying and selling of illegal narcotics by sailors. Gene asked an older sailor what was happening and was told “drugs.”
“What’re drugs?” he asked the sailor, who walked away in disbelief. The only drugs Gene knew of were the pills his mom sent him to fetch from Mr. Green, the town druggist, and that couldn’t be what they were talking about.
Discharged in August of 1955, still two months shy of his 21st birthday, Gene had the idea that he wanted to go to college after all, study to be a civil engineer, and build big highways and buildings. But after his first drafting class at Southern Illinois, he realized he would never be an engineer and instead majored in social studies with a minor in physical education.
In ’56, Gene married Marlene North, a girl from nearby Carterville whom he had met two years earlier while on leave from the Navy (Gene’s best buddy was dating her best friend at the time), and the couple had their first child, David, in April of 1962. By then, both Gene and Marlene were on staff at a high school in downstate Sesser, Illinois—Gene teaching economics and geography and coaching basketball, and Marlene teaching English. Gene then moved on to Bridgeport, also close to both of their hometowns, where he taught PE and American history.
Gene Earl’s first teaching job at Sesser paid him $4,800 a year. At Bridgeport, his salary rose as high as $6,300. But when his high school coach and mentor became the first chairman of the boys’ PE department at the brand-new Niles North High School in Skokie, Gene knew he would soon be making the trek upstate—and hitting the big time. Soon enough, he was hired to teach driver’s education and to be an assistant football and track coach at neighboring Niles West for the ’64–’65 school year, and he received a whopping $3,000 above his salary at Bridgeport. But the best part was that every week, it seemed, he got a raise. They would add cafeteria supervisor to his duties and bang, raise him $100 and free lunch. The next week, it would be bus supervisor and another hundred bucks. A week or so later, they gave him indoor track and another raise.
At 30 years old, Gene Earl was in all his glory.
But life, as it so often does, intervened, and two and a half years later, now with David, four, and a daughter Dana, 13 months, Gene and Marlene’s idyllic suburban world was shaken.
It was the spring of 1967 and Gene was finishing up the school year when doctors told Marlene that the lump in her breast was nothing to worry about. It was a Friday when they removed a section of tissue in routine surgery and sent her home. On Monday, she was told she had cancer.
Gene’s first thought was instantaneous. “Here I am,” he said to himself, “with a four-year-old boy, a one-year-old daughter, and no wife.”
Marlene underwent a radical mastectomy, which meant the removal of one breast along with the underlying muscles and lymph nodes, followed by skin grafting. Her summer was spent in bed while both Gene’s and Marlene’s mothers took turns traveling from downstate to help out while Gene learned how to be a full-service dad, handling meals, baths, and diaper duty.
He was teaching summer school by then and might have taken off work except that his family needed the $1,000 stipend. When doctors told them they believed they had removed all of the malignant tissue, Gene and Marlene told themselves they were over the worst.
And it seemed they were. Until four years later in the summer of ’71, with David now nine and Dana, five, when doctors found a malignant growth they estimated to be the size of a grapefruit on Marlene’s ovary.
They said the new malignancy was not related to the previous one and, again, that they thought they had gotten it all. She would have to receive cobalt treatments, they told her, but her prognosis was good. Still, the mood was grim in her hospital room the day after surgery when Marlene looked at her husband of 15 years and asked plaintively, “Gene, what are we going to do?”
He knew what she meant. But they had never had the conversation, had never talked frankly about the worst-case scenario before. Not after their last scare and not this time. And Gene would have no part of it. “Dammit,” he told his wife, “we’re going to raise two kids; that’s what we’re going to do.”
And that was that. No more discussion. No other alternatives. He would not hear of it. And Marlene followed his lead.
By fall 1978, Gene Earl’s outlook on many things had changed. When he first moved up north, he envisioned himself as a varsity football coach at one of the big suburban high schools. But after a few years as an assistant coach at Niles West, he found he could experience all the joys of coaching without the headaches a head coach had to endure, and he soon allowed his long-held dream to fade away.
Now, suddenly, he was the man in charge. And not simply in charge, but in charge of a team with outrageous expectations. A state championship? Did these people know how hard that was to achieve with more than 600 schools competing? Sure, these girls he was now entrusted with coaching were working hard and seemed talented, but how did he know exactly how we stacked up to the other teams in the state? And suddenly, after years of installing Billy Schnurr’s offensive and defensive systems with the freshman and sophomore boys, he was now left completely to his own devices with the girls.
How much would he change us? How much should he?
In the end, he took what we already knew was a well-oiled motion offense and tinkered. Instead of one big post player, two forwards, and two guards as we had last year with Bridget, Shirley and Diana, and Connie and me, we had two post players in Holly and Peggy, and ultimately three perimeter players in Connie, Barb, and Tina. We’d pick and we’d move. Pass the ball and pick away from the ball, or pass and screen for the ball. If one of us had a free lane to the basket, he wanted us to take it. It was simple. He wanted both his players and the ball to move faster than the defense.
Defensively, we would continue to press full-court, adding to an already heavy complement of zones several more variations under Earl. If we missed on the offensive end, we would drop back into man-to-man. Otherwise, we would scramble and trap, forcing turnovers and converting them into easy buckets. On court, the transition from Mrs. Mulder was an easy one. We got it. The system suited us, and the newcomers picked it up quickly.
Off the court, it was still going to take a little time.
Earl was still a little shocked at the way we did things, and our music topped the list. At the beginning of every practice while we warmed up, shot, and ran drills, and at the end while we ran sprints and shot free throws, the record player was on. It was as old as the school itself but it did the job, playing our favorite albums and 45s—The Beach Boys, Barry Manilow, Queen, with “We Are the Champions” quickly becoming our new anthem, Styx, Elton John—infusing us with added energy and giving practice a rhythm all its own.
It was as second nature to us as pulling on our socks and lacing up our shoes. It did not alter our concentration or interfere with our work. Rather, it inspired us like old friends giving a favorite pep talk, and in our minds, these voices would accompany our journey as they had from the beginning. But that did not mean that Earl understood, and he rolled his eyes a lot.
It was the same thing with all that infernal cheering we did. After practice, during timeouts, and especially on the bus, the never-ending patter psyched us up, bonded us. We did not believe, as the boys w
ere trained from birth, that you screwed on your game faces several hours before competition and did not take them off until you were back home.
We talked. A lot. We teased the coach and each other; gossiped about boys, parents, teachers, and teammates; and chatted about movies and TV and whatever else struck us, whether we had a game in two hours or had just finished one. We talked about our opponents, too, but even for our most formidable foes, there was a looseness that we carried with us, that perhaps all good teams did, and that confounded our coach at first.
“Give me an R!” one of us would yell, and we would be off, spelling the name of Ray Rayner.
Earl was floored. You didn’t talk about what you were going to do after you won the state championship any more than you talked about the opponent after your next game. But there were Judy and Barb, drumming on lockers and bus seats, the rest of us bopping our heads and singing merrily along. I would not be writing poems for every game anymore. It just didn’t seem natural after Mrs. Mulder left. But it was left to me to pen a team song and so, with a little help and no other inspiration handy, I did, to the tune of The Brady Bunch theme song:
Here’s the story
Of a group of Indians
Who were looking for someone to coach their team.
All of them had just one dream
To go downstate,
And they worked hard to win.
Here’s the story
Of a man named Earl
Who was looking for a team that he could coach.
He had experience
In the game of b-ball,
Yet he was all alone.
Till the one day when the girls met this fellow,
And they knew that it was much more than a hunch
That this group could one day be state champions,
That’s the way we all became Earl’s Girls.
State Page 20
