Someone in administration called me in to let me know that there would be no more rugby. “You realize you’re here on a basketball scholarship, Miss Meyers? That means you’re here to play basketball.”
I understood. Few cared if I scuffed my knees in the high jump pit or bruised my hand playing volleyball. With rugby, I could really get hurt and nobody wanted that—especially the women’s basketball coach, Kenny Washington.
Coach Washington was a tall black man from Buford, South Carolina, with a deep, elegant voice and a passion for the game. He taught us the fundamentals of basketball, which he felt mirrored the fundamentals of life. It was exactly what he’d learned from Coach Wooden. In Coach Wooden’s eyes, the basketball player had thirty lives a year, one for each game. Every game had its ups and downs, thrills, joys, pain, and challenges, and each ultimately ended in victory or defeat. But it was always how you played the game, the character you showed, that mattered to both men.
Kenny had played for Coach Wooden as a sixth player on his first two championship teams in ’64 and ’65, so he knew how to come off the bench and still play with heart. He learned that you could want something with every fiber of your being without allowing that desire to consume you and affect your better judgment.
But just as Kenny Washington wasn’t a starter for Papa Wooden, he wasn’t about to let me, a freshman, start for him now. “I’m thinking of bringing you off the bench as a sixth player, Annie,” Coach Kenny said at the start of the season.
“What? Why?” I was shocked. He knew I’d played on the USA Team, that I was the first woman to ever get a full ride to UCLA, and that I was his best player by a mile. But that didn’t matter to Coach Kenny. As frustrated as he knew I was, there was no way I’d get special treatment. I’d have to earn it.
The first big game was at Long Beach. I was #15. I hated coming off the bench, but I was still playing my heart out. I was pretty fast and an aggressive defender, good at positioning. I saw myself as a smaller version of David, capable of playing with great intensity on both ends of the floor. That night, however, the official kept calling fouls on me for reaching. They were phantom calls, in my opinion, but it didn’t matter. She was calling what she thought she saw.
The official’s name was Rosie Adams, and I knew her very well. In fact, my whole family knew Rosie, and loved her. She’d played AAU with Patty and me, and she hadn’t been long out of Cal State Fullerton herself where she had played college ball with Patty. But none of that mattered to me now.
At a pivotal point towards the end of the game, I’d collected four fouls. I was playing defense, and the offensive player with the ball beat me getting to the basket. I reached around to knock the ball away and was called for my fifth foul. Angry and frustrated, I was a pressure-cooker about to blow now that the chef had cranked the setting too high. The ball happened to come back to me. As Rosie lifted her hands to call a foul on #15, I rifled the ball at her gut, knocking the wind straight out of her. She couldn’t have been more than five feet away. I was like a bull seeing red, and all I could see were black and white pinstripes, not our friend Rosie.
She doubled over and tried to say something, but couldn’t.
From the stands I heard my mom’s voice echoing against the one already yelling inside my head. “Annie, what did you do?”
Even though I was still incredibly angry, I looked up, searching for my mom’s face, hoping I could telegraph my regret, hoping she’d let me know, instantly, that she understood, as she had so many times before when I’d broken something expensive horsing around at home or accidentally kicked someone while going for a punt. Instead what I saw was a combination of confusion and embarrassment.
With my fifth foul and a technical, I sat out the rest of the game and watched as we lost. At least I was down on the courts and not up in the stands. Many knew the Meyers name, and there was little doubt Mom, Patty, and the rest of my family were fielding more than a few sneers.
When the game finally ended, Coach Kenny came over to the bench and sat down next to me. “As great as you are, Annie, you can be better.”
“But she kept calling me for fouls. For reaching, when I wasn’t.”
“You’re gifted. But you lack discipline.”
Discipline? Was I really hearing this? Was he really accusing me—one of eleven siblings who shared a bathroom with five sisters and always waited her turn without complaining undisciplined? “They were reaching all night and she never called a foul on them once. We should have won.”
“First you have to learn to control your competitive nature, learn to harness the power that comes from that fire rather than dilute it through tantrums. Then we’ll win.” And with that, he got up from the bench, leaving me there to stew alone.
So that was it. There was no doubt I was competitive. I was fiercely and passionately competitive. A desire to win coursed through my veins, and I was glad for it. It was my life’s blood. I had never considered that drive might need to be bridled, that a vein might burst. Coach Washington had begun his lessons. Today’s was teaching me the first thing that every great athlete must learn; to control the mind and emotions, as well as the body. Papa’s way of putting it was simple: “Don’t whine, don’t complain, don’t make excuses.”
Coach Kenny understood me because he’d been an explosive player himself, and he’d learned from the best how to control it. Now he’d make sure that I, too, would learn to manage my temper and still play with the same passion that I had from as far back as I could remember. I continued to get in the faces of teammates who slacked off. I still yelled at them on the courts and tried to fire them up, “Come On!” I’d scream. And while I can’t say I never threw a ball again, that was the last time I ever threw one at a ref.
At San Diego State I kicked the ball into the bleachers after I got called for a foul, and Kenny put me on the bench next to him. At a game in San Louis Obispo, we were up by a lot when, after a fast break, I threw a behind-the-back pass and we scored. Kenny pulled me out of the game to sit on the bench. “The bench is a coach’s best friend,” Papa liked to say.
Coach Kenny and I butted heads all the time. I still had it in my thick skull that nobody could really teach me the game. Nobody could really know it or love it more than I did—well, no one except Coach Wooden. But the guys got Papa. I got one of Papa’s protégé’s. Though I cried plenty that year, Coach Kenny ended up teaching me a lot about basketball, and even more about myself. There would be no passing from behind, no tricky moves that dazzled the kids, and none of the fancy footwork that put the Harlem Globetrotters on the map. Mastering the fundamentals had been Papa’s approach, and Coach Kenny would make sure that we mastered them, too. Everything we did was going to be by the rules.
Though I didn’t start in the beginning of the season, I was moved up to start with Venita Griffey, Judy LeWinter, Leslie Trapnell, and Karen Nash. Karen’s nickname was Mama Nash, and she was a brilliant young woman who would go on to become an oral surgeon. There were several seniors on the team during my freshman year who didn’t start, but if they weren’t as clever with a basketball, they were far cleverer when it came to books. They were the likes of Kathy Fitzgerald, Jane Wortman, and Jane Cohen, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa.
Fitz, Wart, and Coke, as we called them, were as tight as a well-woven rug. Nothing and no one could penetrate those bonds. Normally, we’d drive back from the games in two vans, but during a tournament in Santa Barbara we stayed in a hotel, four-to-a-room.
I was put in with the three best friends. No problem, I thought…until I woke up the next morning strapped into my bed with the sheets tucked in around me, and the mattress standing vertically against the wall. It was a good-natured hazing.
“You might be starting on the varsity team, but you’re still just a freshman,” one of them told me. I didn’t care. I was happy to be in the same van with them. And based on how many times they passed me the ball, they seemed happy to be on the same court with me—even when they got h
it in their exceptionally bright heads by one of my bullet passes.
By the end of the season the three seniors had been accidentally hit in the back of the head enough times that they had to step up their game. The drive to excel, so intrinsic to the Wooden Era at UCLA, was finally starting to permeate its women’s basketball program. But I had no high cause. I simply wanted to win a championship for the school like David had.
It wouldn’t happen in basketball, not that year anyway. But there were other sports. Toward the end of my freshman season, I made it onto the track team as a walk-on.
I loved competing in track and field, especially running the Mt. SAC relays. Mt. SAC was located in Walnut, about an hour southeast of UCLA, and I’d competed there as a child on the club team. With its history, Mt. SAC was sacred ground as far as I was concerned. And yet, so many world records were still to be set by people like Carl Lewis and fellow Bruin Jackie Joyner Kersee.
It was at Mt. SAC that I first met Wilt.
“Annie?” His voice was deep. Everyone knew Wilt from his days with the L.A. Lakers, from which he’d just recently retired. But how could Wilt Chamberlain know me? I had noticed him watching me for quite a while. When he finally came over to the high-jump pit and introduced himself, I was thrilled, nervous, honored and, as usual, tongue-tied. Wilt was a great high jumper himself and quickly put me at ease talking about the girls track team he sponsored. “It’s called Wilt’s Wonder Women,” he said, “I’d like you to see them.”
Wilt Chamberlain had grown up with many sisters, so he was always very supportive of women’s sports. He loved volleyball but, like me, his first true love was track and field. In fact, as a younger man he thought basketball was a sissie sport. But at 7’1”, The Big Dipper—so named by the way he’d dip his head before passing through a doorway—realized his height sealed his fate. He played for the Globetrotters his first year out of Kansas and, in time, developed a deep love of the game.
Wilt was born to play basketball. One of the greatest players of all time, he is still the only person to score 100 points in one game—a record neither Michael Jordan nor Kobe Bryant came close to busting. He was gifted, tall, and always smiling and talking.
Since he lived so close to UCLA, the two of us played a few pick-up games at Pauley Pavilion. But it was at the campus handball courts, near the men’s athletic department, where we spent most of our time together. We played racquetball at least once or twice a week and if anything got my fire going, it was that. Wilt would hit corner shots that were impossible to return, which would make me terribly angry. Every time I missed one of those shots he would just toss his big head back and laugh, causing me to become all the more furious and to want to beat him even more.
Like Coach Kenny, Wilt helped me to understand and control my competitive nature. He also worked with me on my high jump technique. Track and field was one place my temper couldn’t get me into foul trouble. I would become part of a championship team after all during my freshman year, as the women’s track team ended up winning. But I still desperately wanted to win a basketball championship for the Bruin women just as David had for the men. If he could do it, so would I.
7
UCLA & That Old Nemesis: Change
“Talent is God-given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful.”
~ Coach John Wooden
The December, 1975 issue of People magazine featured a photo spread and story on David and me. There was a full-page photo of me trying to block one of David’s shots on a court near our home in La Habra—all four feet, knee-high in the air.
“I’m working for women, I guess,” I told them in response to a question about the women’s movement. “But I’m working for myself just as much—I’m doing it for me.”
My freshman season I was the leading scorer and rebounder, shooting .528 from the field and .767 from the foul line, with 125 assists, 119 steals (#1 in freshman history), and twenty-five blocked shots, earning All American honors. I was part of a Bruin team that led with an 18-4 overall record and a first-place finish (9-1) out of six teams in the Southern California Women’s Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. But in the conference championship game at Riverside, we lost to the Cal State Fullerton Titans by one point. I was not a happy camper. Still, I figured we had three more shots.
During my free time, I continued to watch David’s practices and was consumed by David and the men’s team during my freshman year. I was like a kid in a candy shop watching the guys practice under Coach Wooden. They’d lost the previous year with players Jamaal Wilkes and Bill Walton, to David Thompsons’ NC State team.
“Goodness Gracious Sake’s alive!” was all Coach Wooden said, showing his displeasure. That was the extent of his cursing, but I can attest to the fact that whenever the guys heard, “Goodness Gracious Sake’s alive,” they knew they were in trouble. Wooden’s UCLA team had won the championships in ’64 and ’65, and again from ’67 to ’73. They were expected to win in ’74, but they only made it as far as the Final Four. In ’75, Wilkes and Walton were gone, and no one expected them to do well. They had Marques Johnson as a freshman, and David was the captain. David was one of their top scorers, rebounders, and defensive players, and his determination and passion on the courts was always so intense that later, in the NBA, he would be called for a technical just because of the look he’d given a ref.
Now David and the team were playing in the Final Four, and the whole family had traveled to San Diego to watch. Even though David was hurt, he played solid. The first game was against Louisville, whose coach, Denny Crum, had not only played for Papa, but also became his assistant coach. It was a close game between rivals who were mirror images of each other. The crowd went wild when UCLA won by two on a last-second shot in overtime.
Coach Wooden seldom went into the locker room after a game, but he went in that night. When he told the guys it had been a great game and a shame that someone had to lose, they immediately sensed something was up. “I want you boys to know I’m bowing out. You’ll be the last team I’ll ever coach, and I’ve never been prouder.”
They were flabbergasted. No one had any idea that the greatest coach to have ever lived had decided to hang up his whistle—not the press, not the players, not even UCLA’s administration. I don’t even know if he’d told his wife, Nellie. He let the players know before anyone. It was the night before the championship.
The game was against Kentucky who’d beat out Syracuse in the other semi-final. The Bruin men went onto that court and fought hard. None of them wanted the man they all loved and respected to go. But if he had to go, it would be on a high note. On March 31, 1975, Coach Wooden’s team took him to his 10th championship in twelve years, and David helped lead the way with 24 points and 11 rebounds.
Afterward, the Meyers’s celebrated at the home of Fon and Audrie Johnson in San Diego. Fon had played basketball with my father, and the Johnsons had been like second parents to me. We loved them and they loved us. But at the party, I noticed my father was standoffish. He kept to himself in a corner. My parents had come to every game of David’s that last year, along with the rest of the Meyers because we were all so proud of our brother’s remarkable college career. But in San Diego, the cracks in my parents’ marriage were starting to show.
“He’s angry that I won’t let him rep me. He never wants to speak to me again.” The Lakers had chosen David as NBA first round, second draft pick (behind David Thompson) after coming off his senior year playing in Coach Wooden’s 10th and final championship. My brother’s professional career was about to begin, and my dad was unhappy David hadn’t asked him to be his agent. The party in San Diego had been just the tip of the iceberg.
“Well, what does Mark think?” I asked. Our older brother, Mark, who helped negotiate my Pacers contract, had been out of the house for several years and was a father himself. Mark had experienced his own run-in with Dad several years earlier when he and Frannie decided to get married and lea
ve for Berkeley on a football scholarship.
I still remember my father’s words. “I’m telling you now, Mark, you’re too young. I won’t let you throw your life away.”
He felt Mark had what it took to go pro. Now, eight years later and graduated from both Berkeley and law school, Mark was proving to be every bit the businessman my father was. And every bit his own man.
David had already spoken to Mark about the problem. “Mark agrees with me. Says it’s beyond his own scope, let alone Dad’s.”
David had asked Mark to rep him, but Mark knew he’d be a disservice now that David was about to play with the big boys. It wasn’t Mark’s expertise. Instead, Mark helped David find the best agent possible. David was picked by the Lakers and then ultimately traded with four other players to the Milwaukee Bucks for Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
My parents had both grown up in Milwaukee, where my dad was eventually drafted by their pro team, The Shooting Stars, after playing as starting point guard and captain for Marquette. He’d also been offered the coaching job at Marquette, but my mom’s father talked him out of it because coaching didn’t pay well in those days, and he had a growing family to support.
Dad had always prided himself on his business sense and had studied business law for a while in college. In his mind, he was as groomed as anyone to handle David’s career, more so since he was family. Additionally, given the Meyers’s history of lousy luck when it came to the big leagues, Dad felt he was entitled. After all, “shoulda, coulda, woulda” was in his blood.
My father’s father had been named Majorowski, but he changed it to Meyers after being offered a contract to try out for the Chicago White Sox back in the 30s. But fate stuck out its foot and tripped things up when the war broke out. If my dad felt circumstances had put the kibosh on his own father’s chance at success, he may have also believed that marrying young had prevented him from achieving greatness as well. In his mind, he’d tried to prevent Mark from making the same mistake. Now David was breaking the streak, and I suppose it was natural that Dad wanted to play some part in helping David grab the brass ring, which had proved so elusive to the Meyers men up to that point.
You Let Some Girl Beat You? Page 7
