State

by Melissa Isaacson

  Diane Defrancesco (DD)

  FOR DIANE DEFRANCESCO’S 20th high school reunion in 2000, she went into her attic, got her varsity letter N, and sewed it on a cotton letterman-style jacket she bought for the occasion.

  “I saw Barb there, and someone was taking a panoramic picture and told me, ‘Go get in the middle.’ But I didn’t feel like I belonged in the middle,” she said.

  They never entirely leave us, the regrets of high school. Those things we should have done or should have said and those we shouldn’t have. Diane—it turns out she hated the nickname “DD”—had enough of those to fill her attic, but as she looked back, she did not make excuses or cast blame.

  “When you guys won [state],” she told me, “I felt left out, and I remember telling my daughter Hailey, ‘You don’t want to ever feel like that. I should’ve been a part of that and I messed it up.’ As soon as you try to tell your kids something, they’ll say, ‘But you did it.’ But I don’t deny it. I’m upfront. I let them know I regret certain things.”

  At age 20, Diane survived a near-fatal car accident. She married young, had two daughters, divorced, and went back to school to finish her bachelor’s degree and to take graduate courses in special education, ultimately going on to work with kids with learning disabilities and behavioral problems.

  “I wanted to get into counseling because you want to go back and fix some aspects of your life, and my way of doing it was helping kids like me who nobody could reach,” she explained. “I had plenty of people trying to help me, but you think you know it all. I couldn’t physically go back to high school, nor would I ever want to, but if you want to fix something, helping others is the best way to do it.”

  Diane lived in Florida when we talked the first time for the book in 2005, not far from her sister and her parents, who were celebrating their 51st wedding anniversary, and she still sounded exactly as I remembered her. I told Peggy we had spoken, and she said, “God, I can still picture her coming into the gym …”

  I finished her sentence, “… sliding in on her socks, no sign of her shoes.”

  We laughed.

  “But God she was great,” Peg said.

  Peggy Japely

  AFTER HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION, Peggy Japely met Al King at a pub in downtown Chicago, the first time she had seen her biological father since junior high. She wanted to tell him that she had made it, that she had earned a full ride to DePaul University, that she was a success. Maybe, she allowed herself to dream, they would even make amends.

  Peggy had begun drinking several months before, when a few drinks at parties had escalated quickly into a dependency. She told her father she played basketball, that she was a state champion, and that she had accepted a major college basketball scholarship. “Where will that get you?” she remembered him railing at her. “There’s no girls’ pro teams.

  “Did your mom ever tell you that you were nothing but a mistake?”

  Peggy assumed she had inherited a predisposition to alcoholism from her father. It was no great mystery where her self-esteem had begun to unravel. And from there, the girl with the steady jump shot, tenacious defense, and heart of a champion unraveled as well.

  Things started promisingly enough. Peg played well at DePaul for two seasons until it became obvious she could not flourish under the brash, aggressive style of her coach Ron Feiereisel, the father of JoAnn, our nemesis at St. Scholastica. She transferred to Fresno State, but there, she blamed an emphasis on maintaining a certain weight, and a coach’s badgering on the subject, for the start of a battle with anorexia that continued for years.

  After college, a friend introduced her to a modeling agency, which would put her to work at trade shows until another prospective modeling job led her to quit the business altogether when the photographer asked her to pose topless. But the heavy drinking continued, and soon, her mother told her she could not live at home any longer.

  She kept in touch with Jerry Sloan, her hero and then head coach of the Utah Jazz, and he would write her back telling her that he was proud of her, to hang in there, that she should come visit him and his family on his farm in downstate Illinois. But she was too embarrassed. She and I drifted apart, mostly because I lived out of state, and when I did see her, she was careful to be sober or at least act like it, and she always appeared as if everything were normal.

  But the alcohol caught up with her.

  In her late 20s, Peggy barely survived a long stay in intensive care with pancreatitis due to her drinking. Doctors told her she would certainly die if she continued.

  There were two broken engagements and one abusive marriage. She had already been taking Dilantin for withdrawal-induced seizures after the pancreatitis, and the doctor from the clinic told her to stop immediately after it was learned she was pregnant. She stopped the medication cold turkey, and in her fifth month of pregnancy, she had a grand mal seizure. She was given Dilantin again to save her life, and it went straight to the baby.

  Clint was five pounds, 11 ounces, at birth, and doctors told Peggy that he would probably be autistic and that he might never walk or talk. One day when Clint was still an infant, Peggy’s husband didn’t come home. After some digging, Peg found out that “Tom” had lost his job the day he had left, that he had seven DUIs, and that he was married to another woman. By the time he called months later, Clint had begun to take his first steps. “Screw the doctors,” thought Peggy, “he’s going to be fine.”

  A one-time reunion with Tom ended with him breaking her nose and ribs, and with Peg escaping with the baby into the night. Determined not to keep running from her husband as she had from her father, Peggy opted to prosecute. She and Clint went to a women’s shelter in Michigan, and Tom went to jail for 90 days.

  Two months later, Peg’s mother brought her daughter and grandson home to Morton Grove. Eventually, Tom called Peg again, sobbing into the phone that he couldn’t go on living without her and Clint. “I told him, ‘You had your chance. I can’t trust you. You almost killed us, and I’m not going to put me and my child’s life in jeopardy just because you wouldn’t go to therapy,’” Peggy recalled.

  They hung up. And early the next morning, in a small port city in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Tom died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. A suicide note told Peggy that he would be watching over her and Clint, and that he was sorry.

  Peggy harbored suicidal thoughts of her own and begged God to let her get through each day. She stopped eating for two weeks, subsisting on screwdrivers until her mother once again intervened. Not knowing where else to turn, her mother wrote to Jerry Sloan, who responded immediately with a long letter of encouragement, a two-hour phone call, and offers to put Peggy into treatment.

  Two weeks later, Peggy was put on a plane, and when she got off, an ambulance was waiting to take her to a rehab facility, paid for by her mother with help from friends and relatives. After rehab, Peggy stayed sober for two years. She held a job as a receptionist and got her own apartment in suburban Glenview. But eventually, she began drinking again. She called herself a “functional drinker,” like that uncle whom her grandmother referred to as “the finest drunk around.”

  “I thought, ‘I’m not an alcoholic,’ then slowly but surely it catches up with you,” she said.

  Trying to regain her sobriety on her own, Peg decided she needed to start her life anew. So she packed some basics, what little savings she had, and drove with Clint to California where she didn’t know a soul. She changed her first name to Maggie. “I honestly didn’t know where I was going,” she said. “I don’t know if I had a lot of strength or a lot of stupidity.”

  Though developmentally delayed, Clint was progressing at a quicker pace than predicted. But at four years old, he began the habit of hitting his head with his hand as if his head hurt. Mary Japely flew to California and took her daughter and grandson to a specialist she had read about in San Francisco. There they found a tumor roughly the size of an egg in Clint’s brain. The 12-hour surgery that follow
ed was termed “experimental,” and doctors told Peggy the risks. He could be a football running back or he could end up paralyzed.

  Clint recovered, but the surgery set him back more. He would have limitations, but not to Peggy. She continued working, controlled her drinking, and moved north to Dana Point, California, where she had heard about a special education program reputed to be among the best in the country. She enrolled Clint in swimming and horseback riding lessons, where he flourished, and she looked for a Catholic church to join. A priest she trusted and who ultimately deceived her was another major setback. Resisting alcohol as an old familiar crutch but still desperately needing control over her life, Peggy found herself retreating to anorexia, a problem she had been fighting most of her adult life.

  Our 25th state championship reunion was scheduled for February of 2004 and for months, no one could track Peggy down, and no one could remember having heard from her in several years. Gene Earl sent out an email telling us who was coming to the reunion and concluded, in his own inimitable way, that he was very sorry to say, “We’ve lost Peg.”

  Our team manager wrote back a group email saying how sorry she was to hear that Peggy had passed away and asking if any of us knew the circumstances.

  Peg cracked up at that one. “Great investigative reporting there,” she tore into me shortly after answering the phone at her home in California, where I “found” her months later. “Half the creditors in the world can find me and you can’t? Did you think of, I don’t know, calling my mother?”

  Same old Peg. Except that when she came home the next Christmas and attended a party at my house where she saw many of our teammates for the first time in nearly 20 years, she weighed barely over 100 pounds. She was not the same Peg at all.

  She had had about 150 grand mal seizures in her life, usually after she tried to stop drinking cold turkey, she told me. She said she was chronically anemic, requiring regular blood transfusions and looking so weak I could not imagine how she was going to get back on the plane with Clint by herself for the trip home.

  But she did. And every time we talked, she sounded a little stronger, a little more determined to beat the demons back down. We talked mostly about the adults in our lives, especially her mother, Mary, who, despite her circumstances, was a brilliant example of strength and resilience and love, sending all three of her children to college on full or partial scholarships.

  We also recalled the laughs we had had, the lessons we had learned, and the strength we had gained that she still possessed. “I remember all that stuff they told us about setting goals and not letting each other down,” she told me. “I remember the nurturing of Mrs. Mulder and her telling us, ‘Who cares if you’re a girl? You can do it.’ I still have the book she gave us, The Prophet, and I remember her telling us that we’d understand it more when we got older.

  “That experience has allowed me to handle what I handle today. If I wasn’t an athlete, I’d be in the gutter drinking or dead. I’m sure of it.”

  Instead, she searched for strength and found it in her faith. Nearly every morning while Clint was growing up, they went to church. And every night, she and her son knelt on the wooden floor of their kitchen, beneath the crucifix on the wall, and prayed. They’d give thanks to all the important people in their life, and then they’d pray for all those who had no one to pray for them—the poor, the lonely, the depressed, the homeless. Then they’d ask, “Who can help Mommy stay sober?” and pray to Matt Talbot, considered by some in the Catholic Church to be the saint of addictions, and conclude by reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

  In 2018, at age 27, Clint was diagnosed with advanced testicular cancer, and with a strength he clearly inherited from his mother, he endured two major surgeries and debilitating chemotherapy treatments, Peggy nursing him through it all and, as always, staying tough.

  If she is nothing else after all she has experienced, she is, remarkably, thankful. And she is, in her heart and in her soul, a survivor. A warrior. A jock. There is a voice that still speaks to her and motivates her, she said. A voice that will never leave her.

  “Basketball made us better, stronger people,” she told me. “All those wind sprints, all those times up and down the stairs in the gym hallway. We never stopped. It empowered us to push beyond our limits. It gave us a sense of belonging and confidence. I know it gave that to me. I thank God it gave that to me.”

  Me

  WHEN OUR DAUGHTER, Amanda, was five years old and playing park district soccer, her team wore deep-purple satin shorts and an emerald-green-and-purple striped satin jersey with her number on the back.

  I loved that uniform.

  Amanda was more concerned with accessorizing and could not possibly appreciate how lucky she was. Or how jealous it made me. The uniform, to me, was always the most tangible barrier to sports equality. And like this project, it was a process.

  Although the telling of our story has evolved over the course of five decades, it has been more than a dozen years since the conception of this book. First there was my Chicago Tribune column on our 25th reunion. And after that, a column following the death of our principal Nicholas Mannos in 2008, the story of an ordinary man who did extraordinary things and the best friend we girls never knew we had—an obit that wound up on the front page of a newspaper that did not typically do such things.

  That same year, I wrote a Chicago Tribune magazine story on my parents’ parallel experience with, and 25-year decline from, Alzheimer’s. It was a rare departure from sports for me and a foray, as well, into writing about myself.

  We are taught, or at least my generation of journalists was taught, that we are not the story. And so I questioned myself, mostly about what my parents would think of me writing about their final years in such a public way. But it also made me remember just how important my high school years were in one of the last cogent phases of their lives.

  Those memories helped revive and reshape this project while helping ease my flagging confidence after being laid off from the Tribune in 2009 after 19 years with the paper. It kept me going through nine years with ESPN, and it continued to be a part of my life as I entered my new career, teaching journalism at Northwestern University.

  The book has experienced much tweaking and outright revisions, going from a basketball story to a people story, from a young adult focus to a tale, in many ways, of my own mortality and the frightening realization that my brothers and sister and I could well fall victim to the same disease that our parents did.

  We joke about it because that is what we do, our memory lapses mocked and laughed about so that, I guess, we do not become obsessed with the possibilities. But as a writer and the daughter of one of the best storytellers I have ever known in my mother, Francine, I have been acutely aware that I needed to get this story down on paper before it fades away completely.

  In that respect, I am so glad I began this research a dozen years ago, when my memories and those of my teammates and, remarkably, our coaches, some older than us by 20 years or more, were that much sharper.

  In 2016, I sent my teammates a group email both apologizing for hanging on to their scrapbooks for so long and assuring them that the book really was still happening and not an imaginary hobby. Many of them responded by telling me it was OK, that they trusted me to tell our story, however long it took, and that it was a worthwhile story to tell.

  As more time passes, I am that much more certain of this, not that it’s any more worthy of being told than any other story, but simply that it is important and valuable and that I want it to be shared.

  I am struck by and feel bad about some of the characterizations in these pages—our irrational fear of traveling to Waukegan East; our narrow-mindedness about the perceived connection among girls, sports, and homosexuality; our impatience with woman officials. But that’s how it was, and so that’s how it is in the book, and I can only hope we are not judged now for some of those feelings.

  When I entered that state championship game against Eas
t St. Louis with less than a minute to play, it was admittedly a weird feeling. I remember the thrill of just running onto the Assembly Hall court (without tripping), of being in the title game even though the celebration had already begun on the bench and in the stands. I remember trying to affect a swagger as if it wasn’t the first time I had entered the game and the outcome hadn’t already been decided. The alternative—not playing at all—would have been far worse.

  And it was with unadulterated and genuine joy that when that final buzzer sounded, I jumped into Peggy’s waiting arms and sobbed with my teammates. At that moment, there were no starters or benchwarmers, seniors or freshmen, only the collective feeling of satisfaction and gratitude and love for each other.

  I looked up in the stands and saw my parents waving down at me, and I can still see them now, so happy and present, a look I know I detected, however briefly, in my mother’s eyes 25 years later.

  I have two children now with my husband, Rick. Amanda never did become a jock but has always been a great team player who attacks every goal she sets—becoming a nationally recognized public speaker in high school and a gifted writer—and is now pursuing her master’s degree in nursing. After ruining baseball for our son, Alec, by over-coaching his throw, I watched with Rick from the sideline as he played soccer and became the editor of his high school newspaper. But he found his true passion in music, and with a self-discipline I envy, he is studying tuba performance at Northwestern, dreaming of a professional career with a symphony orchestra.

  My kids laugh at me when I talk about our glory days. I tell them if they visited Niles West now, there would surely be a shrine to our state championship trophy and maybe even a velvet rope around my old locker, to which they respond with some predictable eye-rolling and restrained acknowledgment of my flickering displays of athleticism.