We were getting closer, but we weren’t there yet. As she left the court, Connie held up four fingers as in “We’re at least No. 4 in the state,” and a player in the stands from an opposing suburban team that had not made it downstate leaned over the railing and chided her for being underconfident. Obviously, she did not know Connie very well.
Though it may not have been the most relaxing way to spend the rest of our day, we watched all three remaining quarterfinal games, including East St. Louis Lincoln versus Waukegan West and Oak Forest versus Bartonville Limestone, which tipped off at 8:30 Friday night. In between the afternoon and night sessions, we went T-shirt shopping. For us, though, this was relaxing, especially after winning our game so easily.
Back home, in the middle of Saturday’s Lerner Life detailing our victory over Marshall, there was an insert telling readers that a parade to honor our team would be held on Sunday. It would start at the school parking lot at 2:30 p.m., when we arrived from Champaign, and it would wind through Morton Grove, Skokie, and Lincolnwood to be joined by marching band units.
If we had seen the paper, we would have laughed at the prematurity of the announcement. But not much. Next up was Oak Forest in the state semifinals, and on the blackboard in the locker room before the game, we all took turns doodling slogans like “Beat Oak Forest,” “Sky,” and the ever-popular “KA,” short for “Kick Ass.” “Sky” was especially important as Oak Forest boasted a towering and talented front line of 6-2 senior Karen Stack, 6-1 senior Nancy Galkantas, and her even more gifted 5-11 sister Sue, a junior. Oak Forest was now 26–1 after defeating Limestone 70–67 the day before in overtime.
In the two previous girls’ state tournaments, the teams to defeat the Public League champion became the eventual champions. It was the very last thing Coach Earl would consider telling us, and it was just as well. Besides, he was too busy keeping the press entertained in Champaign.
Alternating between characterizing himself as “a dumb hillbilly” and “dumb as an onion” when he began coaching, Earl was quickly ingratiating himself to reporters who were normally forced to consider “We’re going to give 110 percent” a colorful quote. One writer wrote that “Earl’s pleasant low-key style made him a favorite among the sportswriters.” This did not do us any immediate good, but we certainly were not being ignored either as we were quickly emerging as the favorite to take the title.
In the locker room before the game, our coach pulled out one of his favorite axioms. “The big take it from the small,” he intoned, “and the quick take it from the tall.” Oak Forest was big, but we had seen big before, and they had not seen a team as quick as Niles West. Besides, at 5-10, Peg moved better and faster than most guards. And we were pretty sure they had not seen a backcourt like ours before.
Oak Forest tried a box-and-one with its guard Tami Sender shadowing Connie, which resulted in shutting down Connie’s point production but also resulted in Sender’s picking up four fouls before halftime. Connie had detected the defensive strategy first and had jogged over to the bench in the opening minutes to tell Coach Earl, who instructed her to use Sender to screen off her teammates.
The tournament featured all-women officiating crews, and we were still unimpressed by their collective performance. We had been waiting since our supersectional loss to Dundee last year for the women to catch up to the level of the players. Games in Champaign were not merely closely called but were downright suffocating, dominated more by the refs’ stoppage of play than by game action. Every touch was called a foul, every imperceptible slide of a pivot foot whistled for traveling, every pause in the lane was three seconds.
It was infuriating, and I could only imagine how it was coming across to first-time girls’ basketball viewers. With their well-intentioned efforts to enforce the rules of the game, the woman officials, in my eyes and my teammates’, were affecting the overall quality and entertainment value of the game. That said, I was proud of how we responded, in most cases quietly handing the ball over to the official after the whistle without so much as a stare, in a vestige of the Mulder days. And fortunately, their whistles were not affecting the final outcomes.
We led Oak Forest by seven at the half, and in the second half, we destroyed their 3-2 zone defense en route to a 51–35 lead after three quarters and an easy 68–44 victory. Barb and Peggy scored 18 and 17 points, respectively, while Connie was 5-of-5 from the floor, all in the second half, to finish with 17 points along with nine assists and eight steals. Just like that, we would be playing for the state championship. In less than eight hours, we would know.
After a dinner of McDonald’s and a short rest at the hotel, we were back at the arena, a couple of hours earlier than we needed to be. While the starters tried to nap, I had just enough time to scratch out a pregame poem, my first of the year.
To Mean Gene:
Tonight’s the night we’ve been waiting for,
We’ll hit the boards and really soar.
We’ll run and gun and play tough D,
The best in the state, they’ll have to agree.
All our hard work and dedication,
Will finally pay off with some concentration.
We want it badly, so let’s start with a burst,
Why settle for second when we can be first?
Let’s go get it, the season’s almost through,
We’ll be state champs, our dream come true.
Love always,
Earl’s Girls
1979 State Champions
Coach Earl smiled when he saw it. And again, no thought of a jinx occurred to me. At 32–1, East St. Louis was by far the most talented team we had ever faced. Four of its players had competed in the Class AA state track championship the year before, including Jackie Joyner, their 5-10 junior extraordinaire who was the two-time national AAU junior champion in the pentathlon as well as the Illinois state champion in the 440 dash and second in the long jump. They were talking about her as a “hopeful” for the 1980 Summer Olympics.
During warm-ups, we watched East St. Louis go through a normal layup drill that caught our attention significantly when Joyner leaped up, her hand above the rim, and tipped in a teammate’s miss.
“Did you see that?” whispered Connie. “I’ve never seen a girl do that.”
None of us had. To get above the rim and tip in a missed shot was routine for taller boys, but for a 16-year-old girl? Never. And we tried not to stare.
Joyner was averaging 18 points and 17 rebounds per game while her team averaged 85 points and allowed their opponents just 35. They were good. They were very good. But Coach Earl was not worried. Yes, they were big, and they were skilled. But their starting lineup, he thought, was not as deep as ours, and their big girls could not match Peggy’s outside shooting. But there was still the matter of defending Joyner. Every major school in the country was already recruiting her as a two-sport athlete, and Coach Earl was rightfully concerned about her.
As he walked onto the court, he stopped to say hello to his parents sitting above the tunnel leading from the dressing rooms and heard a booming voice from above. Looking up, he saw a large man leaning over the railing.
“Hey, Coach!” the man yelled. “I sure hope you like losing.”
Earl gave the man his trademark crooked smile and didn’t say a word.
A record girls’ state basketball tournament crowd of 6,832 was in attendance, at least half of which seemed to be from our high school. Sure, many of them had jumped on the proverbial bandwagon, but it was still cool seeing the sea of red that greeted us as we took the floor. Our parents were all there, sitting together in a section not far above the court, but this was no time for a pregame wave.
Connie was so revved up as we took a 10–2 lead in the first two and a half minutes of play that she began to hyperventilate and motioned to the bench that she had to come out. East St. Louis took the lead at 16–15 midway through the second quarter as Joyner went to work, but the Tigerettes rushed their shots and seemed to was
te their talent in ways we couldn’t understand from the bench. Their guards would break our press easily, for example, only to come to a jump stop just past midcourt and stall their offense.
Coach Earl nearly outcoached himself upon Connie’s return when he called for us to go to a man defense with Connie on Joyner just to keep East St. Louis off-balance. Instead, on three subsequent trips up the floor, Joyner posted her up, scoring on turnaround jumpers until Earl abandoned his strategy and went back to our 1-3-1 zone. We quickly regrouped and, like our two previous opponents and most that season, the Tigerettes wilted under our defensive pressure with Connie and Barb keying steal after steal, and Peggy and Holly converting on the other end to build the lead back to seven at the half.
In the locker room, someone passed around cut-up oranges as Coach Earl began his halftime speech. “Peggy!” he hollered. “You’ve got to box out Joyner.”
“I am boxing out!” Peggy yelled back. “They’re not calling over-the-back.”
Trying to both make his point and, perhaps, express his frustration at Peg’s stubbornness at the same time, Earl, who was holding a towel in his hand, went to slap it against his other hand and brushed it against Peggy instead. It didn’t seem like anything to us, but Peggy flinched and recoiled, then reflexively threw the orange she was holding into Earl’s face.
We all froze for a second.
“That’s it, Japely!” Coach Earl shouted. “You’re not starting the second half.”
None of us knew what to make of Peggy’s reaction, nor did Peggy. All she knew was that a man’s hand was coming toward her, and her natural reaction was to defend herself. If her childhood had taught her anything, it was that.
We wondered what Earl would do. There wasn’t much precedent on our team of throwing oranges at the coach. Would he really bench her to start the second half? We jogged back out uneasily, the most important 16 minutes of our lives beginning with uncertainty we did not need.
East St. Louis did not warm up at all before the start of the second half, their coach’s speech presumably taking up the entire intermission, unless, of course, they had an orange-throwing incident in their locker room as well.
Coach Earl let the incident pass and Peggy started, as did Becky in place of Tina, who had twisted her ankle in the first half. A couple of nervous turnovers by Becky against the press narrowed the gap to five and threatened to give East St. Louis some much-needed momentum. On the sideline, Earl, like most coaches, shouted first for his players on the floor to calm down and then, for good measure, turned and yelled at our bench to watch the turnovers, as if we could do anything about them.
On the court, neither team could take control. Within the first four minutes of the third quarter, East St. Louis crept back to within two. But Connie pushed the ball upcourt following the rebound of a Tigerette miss, and Peggy quickly responded with a jumper to push the lead back to seven. Minutes later, six unanswered points for the Tigerettes closed the gap again, this time to two at 33–31, but once more our defense responded. A 7–0 run triggered by four straight steals followed as we took a 40–31 lead. East St. Louis would surge back to within five off a pretty jumper by Deborah Thurston.
But they would never get closer.
We led 44–37 to start the fourth quarter and opened it up to 14 at 51–37 on baskets by Barb and Holly, sandwiched around Peg’s monster block of Thurston.
With just under a minute to play and the game in hand, Coach Earl started to empty his bench, and I suddenly found myself on the court. I slid into place in our zone defense and tried to absorb the reality that we were about to close out a state title—the state title—while also seeing if I could actually work up a game-related sweat in less than a minute. With 23 seconds left, the clock stopped with an East St. Louis turnover, and the WGN telecast went momentarily silent in anticipation.
“I’ll tell ya, if he takes Connie Erickson out,” said play-by-play man Tom Kelly, “you’ll hear a roar that will rock the Assembly Hall.”
“Here she comes,” said Buffalo Grove coach Ann Penstone, doing the color commentary.
“Connie Erickson is coming out,” said Kelly. “Connie Erickson.”
The coronation had already begun for arguably the greatest girls’ basketball player in the state, but as she walked off a high school court for the final time, it seemed to hit all 5-foot-5 of her at once. On the floor, Connie was often a blur, her body in a half tuck as she darted through traffic on the fast break, her expression one of complete focus and intensity as she crouched in her defensive stance. Not once had she allowed herself to stand out, to celebrate her own success or ours prematurely. But this was her moment, and as her right index finger shot high above her head, a smile spread across her face, an expression of complete and utter satisfaction as she walked into the waiting arms of our coach.
“She’s getting a standing ovation from this entire crowd, Tom,” Penstone said.
“They ought to carry her out on their shoulders,” Kelly responded.
Connie had finished with a relatively modest 14 points in her final game, and 45 in three, but set a state record with a phenomenal 28 assists. As she walked to the end of our bench, leaning over with her hands on her knees as if to let it all sink in, Kelly announced Niles West’s parade plans for the following day. And our crowd began its brand-new cheer.
This time, we could hear it clearly. All in sync. And thunderously loud.
“We are,” they chanted, “state champs.”
CHAPTER 23
April Fools
SOMEHOW I GRABBED the final errant rebound as the buzzer sounded on our 63–47 victory, but I didn’t hang on to the ball. Instead, I flung it skyward, raced toward Peggy, and leaped into her arms, a sight we somehow knew was absurd even as it was unfolding, and we laughed hysterically as she called me a lummox. Connie hugged anyone and everyone she could find, beginning with one special person in the stands. Her boyfriend, Bob, was grinning widely as she came rushing toward him up the steps, only to be nearly bowled over as she brushed past him and into the embrace of Shirley.
In her dorm room at Brigham Young, Diana Hintz received a phone call telling her that her sister Pam was a state champion. And at Southern Illinois that night, Bridget Berglund learned the news that we had won from her sister Michelle, who was in the stands. In Skokie, Billy Schnurr snapped off his television with satisfaction and went to bed with a smile on his face. And in Champaign, lost in the mob of Niles West fans in Assembly Hall, her infant son on her lap and her two girls seated on either side of her, Arlene Mulder cried for all of us.
State champs.
Niles West principal Nicholas Mannos, one-time IHSA president and now an executive board member, the guy who stood at the podium with the other mustard-colored blazers and grimly handed out the championship trophies to other schools year after year, presented us with gold medallions hanging on red, white, and blue ribbons like Olympic gold medals. They may as well have been.
Dr. Mannos wore a smile we had never before witnessed on our principal, and we swelled with pride at bestowing on him this wonderful gift. “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s indeed a singular honor for me to present to my school the first-place trophy,” Mannos said. He praised our fans and congratulated our coach. Not a word, of course, about the role he played in winning us the right to be standing there at all. He asked Connie, as our captain, to step forward, and in typical form, she insisted all of us accept the monstrous first-place trophy together.
Next were the postgame interviews, and Earl was up first, with Floyd Brown asking him to what he attributed our victory. “Three things,” Coach Earl began. “Outstanding talent. A great deal of determination by the kids. Hard work.” And then with a wink and his famous southern Illinois drawl, he added, “And we shoot the ball pretty good, too.”
It was actually four things, but who was counting other than all of us, giggling at our coach as was our custom.
Dancing off the court and into the locker room, we instinc
tively braced ourselves for more hilarity as Coach Earl launched immediately into a speech. “This is tree-mendous!” he shouted. “And it all started a long time ago with you girls. And it started just last November with me. No, not last November. It started last August when they said, ‘This job is officially yours.’”
Sprawled around him on benches and the floor, we sat transfixed as our coach paced and gestured as befitted the floor show it was. “This is tremendous,” he said again as we windmilled our arms for him to get on with it. “It’s the greatest thing that has happened to me, but I hope it’s not the greatest thing that happens to you people in athletics. I hope it’s one of the best. But I hope you have a lot of things like this that happen to you. I hope it gets greater and greater and greater.”
He could have stopped there, probably should have, but clearly he was just getting warmed up. “I sort of feel like this old bum that took his hound to the dog show,” he said.
“Is this punchline going to have the village idiot in it?” Connie asked, referencing one of Earl’s recurring favorites, and we all broke up. By now, we were howling with laughter and pleading with him to stop, but that wasn’t going to happen.
“It was where these rich people bring their purebred dogs, and one of them said to him, ‘What are you doing? You don’t expect to win any prizes, do you?’ And he said, ‘No, but I sure did get to meet an awful lot of nice people.’
“The best thing about this whole season is that I sure have met an awful lot of nice people,” he continued. “Gang, it’s tremendous. It’s tree-mendous. You made it all come true for yourselves. I didn’t know it was going to end like this. I hoped and I prayed and I knew we had an extremely good chance. But you made it all come true.
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