Everything They Had

by David Halberstam

  As Mleczko’s strength began to increase significantly, so did her athletic ability. If anything, she now became slightly embarrassed about the hockey player she had only so recently been, someone who because of a lack of leg strength had too often skated straight up, instead of bent over, simply because she was not in good enough shape. “I used to think that I skated that way because that was the way I skated, but then when we started doing weights I realized that it had been because I had so little leg strength—that you skate straight up when you’re tired, but that you can skate bent over for a long time if you have the leg strength.”

  If it is true that adversity breeds strength, then this group of young women was unusually strong, not just from Boyle’s weight training but from the inner resolve required to follow a dream against such odds for so many years. From the beginning, people had tried to keep them from playing because of their gender. They had been challenged in numerous ways, by officials who did not want them on teams and by boys who tested them with cheap shots in order to show that hockey was a masculine sport.

  Many of these women were in their mid-twenties and were delaying career decisions in order to try out for the Olympic team. Lisa Brown-Miller turned 31 in the fall. She had been the head coach at Princeton and had tried to recruit Mleczko several years before. But now they were teammates, for Brown-Miller resigned the Princeton job to try out. Or, as Sandra Whyte, 27, a former Harvard captain who left her job as a lab research assistant to train with the team and who lived with her family to save money, says, “Part of my competitive instinct is the need to survive against considerable odds and to prove to myself that I can do this [play hockey] despite all the various people who for so much of my life kept telling me that I couldn’t.”

  Even at this level of accomplishment the economics are hard: The subsidies the women receive from the American Olympic organization are infinitesimal, somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000 a year from USA Hockey to be used against living expenses (those who were members of the last national team, which came in second to the Canadians at the world championships, get an additional sum). Not everyone accepted the subsidies; Mleczko turned down both of them in order to retain eligibility for her final year at Harvard. A teammate told her she was crazy—she obviously needed the money, and going back to Harvard and playing after the Olympics would be a step down. “Well, that may be true,” she answered, “but I love playing for Harvard, and I can’t imagine being there and not playing for them. It’s been a great school for me, and I’ve loved going, and I think I owe them something—like playing one more year. Besides, we’ve never done things for money in my family anyway.” She comes from a family of modest means: Until his retirement in 1996, A.J.’s father, Tom, was a teacher at a private day school in New Canaan, Connecticut; he is also a skilled charter fisherman in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Her mother, Priscilla (known as Bambi), runs a small clothes shop. Mleczko attends Harvard on scholarships and loans, which means that she will need to carry her debt that much longer.

  The women’s game, it should be said, is very different from the men’s. There is no checking, or at least no legal checking. That means speed is of the essence. It places a premium on skating well and fast, and on passing. It is, says Ben Smith, “a purist’s game—it is all about skill.” When he and the other coaches he has assembled to work with this team, many of them men, talk about the quality of the women’s game at this level, they talk about it as a reflection of the way hockey used to be before the hard checking and fighting became (with the encouragement of television) so much more important. Smith believes the good women’s teams bring back memories of the famous 1972 Russian national team, one that absolutely delighted hockey aficionados with its passing and speed.

  This is the pioneer generation of women’s hockey. These women all began as rebels, astonishing their friends and families when they were young by preferring to play hockey with boys rather than follow the gentler track of figure skating, as they were supposed to do. “I just don’t know what to do with her,” defense-man Vicki Movsessian’s father, Larry, once said when his daughter was about 6. “She’s supposed to be a little girl, but she likes hockey better than figure skating, and even when she’s doing her figure skating, she refuses to wear her figure skates and she wears hockey skates.” Hockey, Vicki thought from the start, was much more fun. It was a real, live, honest-to-God game. There were more kids playing. Besides, figure skating was not only lonelier, it was not really fun. Instead, it was filled with the terrible tension that came from constantly being judged and critiqued, and at the ages of 6 and 7 Movsessian did not like being critiqued. When she was about 8, her father tried to sharpen her figure skates himself and somehow managed to grind down the distinguishing toe picks at the front. He was distraught, sure that he had ruined an expensive pair of skates. She immediately comforted him: “Don’t worry. Figure skating’s over for me anyway. I’m a hockey player.”

  Some of them had brothers who were hockey players. Cammi Granato, perhaps the best known of the women players, has several brothers who have played hockey at the elite levels, including one, Tony, who’s now an All-Star with the San Jose Sharks in the NHL. (Ironically, of the two, only Cammi is going to Nagano.) Meaghan Sittler’s father, Darryl, played in the NHL for the Toronto Maple Leafs, and her brother, Ryan, was a high draft choice a few years ago. A.J.’s father was the hockey coach at the day school where he taught. It turned out that he had always loved the idea of her becoming a hockey player.

  A.J.’s entrance into the world of skating was somewhat draconian. She was 2 years old when Tom Mleczko took her out to the center of the frozen pond by their house, put skates on her and walked off the ice. It was, she later learned, exactly what he had done with her older sister, who had quickly fallen in love with skating. (The skates, it should be noted, were not double runners.) It was fall, crawl or skate, and the first time she tried, A.J. fell and broke into tears. Then she crawled across the pond, absolutely convinced that her father didn’t love her. At least her mother had prepared hot chocolate for her in case she made it to shore, a sign of some parental love.

  But soon afterward, perhaps the third time she tried, she began to skate, awkwardly but doggedly. She quickly decided that she had accomplished something important and, moreover, that she liked skating. She was not as innately talented as her older sister, Wink: Wink skated gracefully; A.J. skated forcefully. When A.J. was 6 and Wink was already passionately involved with her figure skating, A.J. came home one day and announced that she wanted to be a hockey player. It was a moment of complete innocence: She had no idea that there was such a thing as a gender barrier in hockey or in life. “Hockey looked like fun. There were all these kids, and they were playing together. I didn’t notice that they were all boys.”

  The gene pool in the Mleczko family is formidable. Tom was a good schoolboy athlete and played several sports at Bowdoin College. He is to this day a skilled outdoorsman; during the crunch of summer, he can take three separate charter fishing parties out during a day and never seem to tire. His sister, Sarah, was a star athlete at Harvard and won 12 varsity letters there. A.J.’s mother, the former Bambi Gifford, was a club champion tennis player and part of a large Nantucket clan whose members tended to be tall, powerful and athletic.

  Tom Mleczko would later say that the day his daughter announced her intention to be a hockey player was the greatest day of his life. He immediately went to a meeting of the organization that ran the local boys’ hockey leagues and said that his daughter wanted to play. No one could see anything wrong with his suggestion, and so the league heads decided that she could play. Tom then went to the lost-and-found at the New Canaan Country School and gathered up various stray pieces of equipment for her, including, A.J. remembers with some amusement, a cup.

  Tom is a talented coach, a man who could easily have succeeded at a much higher level if he had been so inclined. He is also a man of relentless enthusiasm, who believes that talent should not be wasted. He
was not a Little League dad, and he did not demand too much of either daughter, but he treated their athletic aspirations as he would a son’s—that is, he took them very seriously. If he did not pressure them to excel, he quite skillfully convinced them that the pursuit of excellence was fun, as well as something they were doing of their own volition.

  When A.J. first started playing, there was an undertow of protest from some of the boys and their parents, who presumably believed the intrusion of a girl on this particularly physical sport would make hockey just a little less macho. From the beginning A.J. played with boys, largely because women’s (and girls’) hockey as an organized sport did not really exist. For many of those years she was the only girl on her team, and often the only girl in the league.

  In suburban Connecticut at that time, there were all kinds of leagues—the Mite (ages 7 to 8), the Squirt (9 to 10), the Pee Wee (11 to 12) and the Bantam (13 to 14). Things began to get reasonably serious when she wanted to play at the Squirt level (the Mite team did not travel, whereas the Squirts did). There were tryouts for the Squirt team. No girl had ever tried out for it before. A.J. was very nervous, not at all sure that she was playing or skating well. After her workout, Bill Emmons, the local coach, told her she would hear about the results in a few days. Never had she wanted anything so badly, and those few days seemed to last forever. When Emmons finally called, a little unsure of the path ahead and a little nervous, he spoke to her mother. “Are you sure you want her to do this?” he asked Bambi Mleczko.

  “Is she good enough?” Bambi asked, wanting no special treatment either way.

  “Ability-wise she’s right up there at the top,” Emmons said, “but it is a boys’ game.”

  “Well if she’s good enough and she wants to play on the team, we want her to play on the team,” Bambi answered.

  A.J. thought hockey was the right sport for her. She loved to skate, and she was by nature aggressive and competitive on the ice. That competitive spirit probably stemmed in part from a natural rivalry with an older, talented sister who seemed to do all things gracefully and easily. And in part it was probably orchestrated by her father, who sensed from the start that his second daughter was an uncommon athlete with an uncommon commitment. In those days the Mleczko home had two avid young athletes: Wink, preoccupied with figure skating, who rose early in the morning for long jaunts to distant rinks for lessons, and A.J., by no means a natural skater but most assuredly a natural competitor, who had hockey all to herself. The sport fit her personality. She might have looked like the girl next door, someone just off a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover, except perhaps a little bigger and stronger, but she was a natural-born tomboy, and there was a certain toughness and resilience to her personality.

  In those years hockey became something more than her sport, something equally important, a critical part of her identity. It was not just the local boys who were on occasion irritated by her commitment: The mother of her best friend, a girl her own age, was quite irate when A.J. missed going to the friend’s birthday party in order to play in a scheduled hockey game. “How can you let her do this?” the mother asked Bambi Mleczko, both puzzled and angry. A.J. herself had made the decision, Bambi answered. “We don’t make decisions like that for her.”

  On occasion there was the smell of gender bias or gender prejudice. Sometimes she would skate onto the ice and hear someone from the other side asking who the guy with the long hair was (even though she had cut her hair quite short in those days), and then someone else would shout out, the secret revealed, Oh-my-God-it’s-agiiirrrll! Most people handled this sports breakthrough, small though it was, relatively well. Her teammates were usually good about it: This may not have been what they wanted, but she was a pretty good player and she never asked for special treatment. If there was an occasional problem with one or two of her teammates, it was probably because they were being teased by other boys for playing with a girl.

  There was no checking in the lower leagues, but when A.J. graduated to the higher ones, where checking was permitted, some adults were concerned about how she would fare. In her last prechecking game against the Darien team, an opponent (a boy who had played with her on her day-school team and who had been bad-mouthing her for months—a rare, fully developed child male chauvinist) skated over and gave her a hard check. It was completely gratuitous. Without breaking stride, she wheeled around and whacked him as hard as she could, knocking him absolutely flat on the ice. Hers was an illegal hit, but she had answered the question of whether she would be able to play at the next level.

  But it was also an early warning that because A.J. was moving to a league where checking was permitted, she might become a target. From time to time that happened. In a club game against Central Connecticut when she was 13, she brought the puck across the center line, passed it off and was holding her position along the boards when a player from the other team skated halfway across the ice from behind her and blindsided her, nailing her against the boards, full force, a shattering hit with his elbow to her face. She was very lucky; if her face had hit the boards, she might have sustained serious injury. “That’s not a hit—that’s a mugging,” Tom Mleczko shouted. The boy was thrown out of the game. A.J. missed just one shift and never once complained.

  She later viewed those years as a series of tests. At first it was some of her teammates who were wary. Then as she passed muster with them, it was the parents of opposing players who complained that she was not good enough. Things got a little more complicated as she and her teammates began to enter adolescence. She knew she had finally been accepted when she was sitting on a bench in the dressing room before a game, already in uniform herself. One of her teammates looked up, saw that the door was open and asked her to close it because there were some girls outside. “Hey,” she said, “I’m a girl, too.” “Yeah,” he said, “I know you’re a girl, but you’re … you’re A.J.”

  When she was 14, she played on an all-girls’ team for the first time. Of course, the team—the Connecticut Polar Bears—had to play boys’ teams. Suddenly there was a change in her game. In the past she had always played defense, but now she was a much better skater than most of her peers, and she played center and forward, handling the puck much of the time. That was helpful: It improved her puck-carrying skills, passing and sense of the play. Recognizing that the boys were becoming stronger, she took lessons on the weekends to improve her speed and strength.

  In the tenth grade she went off to the Taft School, a prominent Connecticut boarding school with a good hockey program. There, she played with and against only women, and her ability propelled her to a higher plane. Instead of fighting her physical limitations against bigger male opponents, she found that she was stronger and more gifted than most of the other players. Taft had a very strong women’s team, yet she was clearly better than her teammates. In the finals for the New England championship against Holderness in her sophomore year, she scored all four of Taft’s goals in a victorious game that was decided in overtime. During her three varsity years, Taft was the New England prep school champion.

  By now there were clear signs of the player she was to become. She had marvelously soft hands, which meant that when she controlled the puck, her teammates were likely to get it not only at the right place at the right time but also in a way that they could handle. Most important, she had great rink vision and an uncommon ability to sense where different players would be as the play developed. “Her athletic vision is almost unique—it’s a gift. Some of it may be physiological, coming from great peripheral vision,” says her prep school coach Patsy Odden, “but some of it I think is a thing that great athletes are born with, a wonderful anticipatory instinct for the game. Because she was not the flashiest player on the ice or the best skater, she was not always the player that a lot of ordinary fans noticed. But she was always the one that the other coaches and the real hockey fans noticed—the player who made other players better.”

  If there was a flaw here, it was a
tendency to be too self-sacrificing and a willingness to pass up shots that she probably should have taken. It was an odd personal signature for a player who obviously loved the game and was fiercely competitive. In this one way she tended to hold back, as if not wanting to call attention to herself and become too big a star. It was, some friends thought, the most natural by-product of her own unusual road to stardom. Enough attention had been paid to her early on, and for all the wrong reasons. Now even as she played among girls, she wanted to do nothing more that might set her apart from her teammates. Her modesty turned into a desire to set up other players. In her senior year Taft made two trips abroad, where it played against the Russian women’s national team and the German national team and won every game but one. “It was fascinating—everywhere she went the other coaches picked up on her and her sense of the game. Who is that girl? they would ask, singling her out,” notes Patsy Odden. In St. Petersburg the coach of the Russian national team asked Tom Mleczko, who had gone along as an assistant coach, if his daughter would entertain the idea of staying on in that historic city and playing with the Russian team. The coach reasoned that it would be a great cultural exchange for her.

  A.J. was heavily recruited for college, and finally decided on Harvard over Princeton although the latter seemed to have the stronger hockey program. Among those who worked to get her to Harvard was her sister, Wink. Two years ahead of A.J. and, at six feet, too tall for figure skating, Wink was beginning to surface as a quality hockey player in her own right. “If it’s a choice between playing with A.J. or against her, I’d much rather play with her,” she once noted. In time she chose Harvard, which was not yet a powerhouse in women’s hockey, and where the recruiting was somewhat low-key, based on a certain Cambridge-based presumptuousness that anyone with the chance would want to go to Harvard. On the school’s largely mediocre team, A.J. quickly emerged as a great star. As a freshman she was Ivy League and Eastern College Athletic Conference Rookie of the Year. From then on she made the All–Ivy League team every year, and by the end of her third year she was already the leading scorer in Harvard history. But trying out for the Olympic team was going to demand a stronger commitment than ever before.