In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle Read online

  IN THESE

  GIRLS,

  HOPE IS

  A MUSCLE

  ALSO BY MADELEINE BLAIS

  The Heart Is an Instrument: Portraits in Journalism

  Uphill Walkers: A Memoir of a Family

  To the New Owners

  IN THESE

  GIRLS,

  HOPE IS

  A MUSCLE

  A TRUE STORY OF HOOP DREAMS

  AND ONE VERY SPECIAL TEAM

  With a New Epilogue by the Author

  MADELEINE BLAIS

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copyright © 1995 by Madeleine Blais

  Cover design by Cindy Hernandez Cover photograph © Corbis/VCG/Getty

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  The Boston Globe: for an article by Bruce Schecter, Reprinted courtesy of The Boston Globe. The Daily Hampshire Gazette: for passages from various Gazette articles. Reprinted courtesy of the Daily Hampshire Gazette. A portion of this book originally appeared as an article in The New York Times Magazine. Reprinted by permission.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: January 1995

  First published in paperback by Warner Books, Inc.: January 1996

  First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: July 2017

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2145-5

  eISBN 978-0-8021-9342-1

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  Acknowledgments

  The Hurricanes and their extended families all deserve a special debt of gratitude for allowing me into their lives. For their support of this project, I would also like to express my gratitude to several students and former students at the University of Massachusetts: Lisa Curtis, Luke Erickson, Michele Fanzo, Sam Kennedy, Sarah Levesque, Amy Richards, and especially Julia Richardson. Thanks are also due to Howard Ziff, the chairman of the journalism department, and Lee Edwards, dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, who offered nurturance during a crucial point in the composition of this work. Nick Grabbe of the Amherst Bulletin and E. Douglas Banks and Marty Dobrow of the Daily Hampshire Gazette were most generous about providing files from their papers. The students in Janet Kaye’s fall 1993 writing class at Hampshire College shared insights about their campus, as did Diana Wetherall about her alma mater, Smith College, and Kim Townsend about the Amherst College campus, where he teaches. Susan Snively, also of Amherst College, shared her expertise on the life and work of Emily Dickinson. David Kaplan was an invaluable source of information about the entire coaching scene in Amherst. Others who provided assistance are Sara Eckert and Tom Barr at Cravath, Swaine and Moore. This book grew out of a piece that was originally published in the New York Times Magazine, and I would like to especially thank my editors there, Jack Rosenthal and Margaret Loke, for their initial encouragement.

  Prologue

  The first member of the Amherst Lady Hurricanes that I met in person was Kristin Marvin, the team’s starting center. Our regular sitter couldn’t make it one day, and Kristin was the sub from the bench. We were living in a contemporary house surrounded by our contemporaries on a hill in the northern end of Amherst, Massachusetts, a combination college town and farming community. Kristin lumbered into the house in her big confident way. The confidence came in part from her memory of visiting the site when the house was under construction. Her stepfather is a contractor, and she sometimes accompanied him on the job. She was sure she knew which nails were hers.

  Unlike some of our sitters, who were content concocting homemade Play-Doh or teaching the children how to make bracelets out of yarn or the words to old songs like “If You Wanna Be Happy,” Kristin had a different style. She was tall and ranging, drawn to action and to the outdoors, especially to the communal hoop at the end of our driveway shared by the other five houses in the neighborhood.

  “Hey,” she said to our son, who was about ten at the time, “let’s go shoot some baskets.”

  He gave Kristin the same skeptical look he’d given his pal Timmy’s mother, Kacey Schmitt, who teaches gymnastics and whom we’d begged to do a handstand in our yard one day. After she’d executed the move with perfection, he’d exclaimed with puzzlement, “But moms can’t do that!”

  “What do you mean, moms can’t? I’m a mom, aren’t I?” Kacey shot back.

  But my son, using me as the standard, was, of course, right.

  I grew up pretty much a sports virgin. I did play outdoors, skating on ponds and sledding in the winter, building forts in the nicer weather, but I was never on a team. I was so completely removed from the world of organized competition that to this day there are strange gaps in my vocabulary. When someone says, “Maybe we should just punt” or “You gotta keep your eye on the guy on third,” I often nod and only pretend to understand.

  I used to think my case was extreme because my father had died when I was five and my childhood home was Irish Catholic and woman-heavy. I did not know how to throw or catch a ball, but I did learn women’s lore, knew arcane trivia, such as that the way to revive a stale baguette is to sprinkle it with water and then heat it in an oven, or that a self button is one covered in the same fabric as the garment it adorns. But there was little of the musk of men, nor of that drone of games on the radio that infiltrate one’s consciousness so that after a while, without realizing it, you find yourself knowing about the day in 1951 when Bobby Thompson’s home run was heard around the world or when Alan Ameche scored from the three to win the greatest football game ever played for the Baltimore Colts or how in 1961 Roger Maris hit sixty-one to break Babe Ruth’s single-season home-run record. That whole roiling sweat-filled world of streaks and fabulous finishes, triple plays and incredible shots and touchdown runs, was as unknown to me as the moon plus China.

  But now I recognize that something larger than my individual circumstances was the reason for my sports ignorance. During the fifties gender division was practiced as a kind of apartheid, and the older I got the more I realized my experience was more typical than not. Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether I possessed any native athletic talent, which is doubtful, I acknowledge that there was nothing in my life of a team nature that supported even the free expression of brute energy, of which I have plenty.

  At some Catholic girls’ high schools, you could find nuns who believed in sports, if only as a tonic against hormones. But my parochial school had only one athletic goal: that we, the girls of U
rsuline on Plumtree Road in Springfield, would retain our title as the best marchers in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade held in Holyoke. Starting on a gray lug of a January day, we would spend our gym time outdoors in the parking lot, marching in formation through the slush, so that on the day of the parade we would shine with militaristic precision. In our green gabardine block-pleat skirts, white camp shirts with the collars always outside the gray blazers, nylons, and loafers—and especially with our white gloves and green berets bobby-pinned to our skulls—we would proceed to once again win the very award that no one else seemed to even want.

  Taking huge groups of girls and coordinating their physical movements was also the goal of the athletic program at the College of New Rochelle, which for a certain period of time in the sixties competed favorably with other schools in the somewhat soggy arena of synchronized swimming. We coordinated our frog kicks and our underwater arabesques to themes: the Trojan War when I was a sophomore, the Roaring Twenties during my senior year.

  This recital was known as Swimphony.

  A little marching, a touch of immersion. That was about it.

  If I felt pained by the absence of a certain kind of opportunity in this regard, I was less aware of it than, say, a woman like Kacey, who had enormous natural prowess and finesse. After her acrobatics, Kacey told the admiring children:

  “You don’t know what it was like back when your mom and I were girls.”

  Of course they didn’t; one of the great burdens of childhood is to be held responsible for the felonies of one’s forebears.

  For whatever reason, most likely the fact of that perfect flip of hers distinguishing an otherwise sorry lawn in early spring, the children’s eyes did not glaze over at the prospect of yet another diatribe about the olden days.

  “We didn’t get the encouragement we give you boys. If you were a girl and you liked sports, you could be a cheerleader. If you did play a team sport, it was intramural, and you got to practice only during those times when for whatever reason the boys didn’t need the gym. No one went to your games. Even if you wanted to play hard, you were discouraged by the rules. In basketball you were allowed to dribble only three times. Only one girl, the rover, could play the whole court. That was always me because I had so much excess energy. Our uniforms were—get this—skirts.”

  As for myself, I was a bookish sort and built up my reading muscles, perhaps as a compensation, like the blind person with great hearing.

  For reasons still a bit murky, I determined early in life that I wanted a career in journalism. When I graduated from college in 1969, I was happily oblivious to the fact that most papers still had on staff only a token woman or two, whose job was to write about brides, female criminals, and kitchen news. The women’s departments were often referred to (unofficially, of course) as “Bras and Girdles,” in a tone similar to the one used for calling out an elevator stop.

  The most frequent question I was asked during job interviews was “What does your father do?”

  At first the question threw me off; the hidden meaning was lost on me.

  “Is your father in the business?” the inquisitors would persist.

  I remember the man in personnel at the Boston Globe, where I got my first real job (as opposed to what the college kids I teach today call a “McJob”), who had described the prospects at the paper mostly in sports metaphors.

  “We’re looking for team players,” he said.

  “Oh,” I rushed to assure him, “that’s me.” Having never been a member of a team, I certainly had no evidence to the contrary.

  “We want determination, spunk, the kind of person who’s still there even if the game lasts fifteen innings.”

  Even I knew fifteen was a lot.

  “Someone who writes like a man, the way, what’s her name, Sara Something did before she married that guy and moved to New York.”

  I tried, after I got a part-time assignment in the suburbs, to write mannish sorts of things about the nightly meetings I covered, which are, of course, the bane, the training ground, and often the Waterloo of most young reporters.

  One Friday afternoon in 1972, there was more than the usual commotion at the city desk, in those days an all-male enclave, except for Gwen, a nineteen-year-old news aide known for her dishy eyes.

  The men were poring over the day’s assignment sheet, asking for Gwen’s help, shouting the names of several women reporters, trying to figure out who was where. Gender integration had come to the paper, mostly at the lowest level, my level.

  I could hear them mumbling: Chris, Otile, Cindy, Maria, and then expressing disappointment.

  Everyone was either out on an assignment or off for the day. They were looking for a female reporter to go to Fenway Park and cover the evening’s Red Sox game.

  Was I interested?

  Interested? Of course. Anything was better than covering the bond issue for new sewer pipes in Quincy.

  The editor explained that Diane Shah, a reporter from the National Observer, a since-defunct weekly paper based in Washington, famous for the excellence of its features, had sought a press pass from the management of the Red Sox to cover the game that night. She had not asked for access to the locker room. Her request was merely to walk onto the field, chat with the players who were willing to chat during the pregame warm-ups, and then sit in the press box with the two dozen or so male reporters who were there with their portable Olivettis in tow to record the evening’s proceedings.

  At first the Red Sox said no, changing their mind only after the lawyers from the National Observer threatened to sue. Someone had tipped off the sports department at the Globe about Fenway’s impending “liberation,” which was what we called all acts of precipitous change back in the late sixties and early seventies. My charge that night was to write about Diane Shah writing about the Sox.

  It was almost a quarter of a century ago, a late September day, sunny, lacking the humidity and the bugs of high summer. Having been forewarned of our presence, the Sox, to their credit, treated us pretty much the way they treated the male reporters. Reggie Smith, who preferred to be left alone by all reporters, said it was a matter of utter indifference whether the people he did not speak to were men or women. Yaz (Carl Yastrzemski), a left fielder and local hero, was a little more outgoing, admitting to a couple of pregame rituals, like wearing the same socks on the outside if they’d been worn during a previous winning game. In the clubhouse there was some kind of reception planned for after the game, and I remember seeing lobsters and oysters and shrimp in big bowls filled with chipped ice. The press box was nearby, and during the game it was filled with a lot of men and with Diane and me. I remember one of the guys, a rotund fellow wearing the kind of squashed hat I always associated with robbers in cartoons, a cigar protruding from his mouth, sighing at the sight of us:

  ‘‘You girls are ruining our racket.’’

  My report ran on page 1 the next day. At first I read it flushed with bravura—page 1!!!—a sensation that quickly gave way to queasiness when I realized that the real story of the game, written by a man, was on the sports page and that my piece was a perfect example of what is known in the newspaper business as “breaking fluff.”

  There was one element missing that was so crucial its absence called into question the integrity of the entire enterprise. For some reason, surely the euphoria of the moment, I had forgotten to include the score.

  Years later, decades really, when I tried to summon this anecdote to impress my son and his pals with my one tenuous brush with sports glory, any prideful emotion was gone from the telling, and all I was left with was the silly accolade of being the first woman to cover the first woman who covered the Boston Red Sox.

  “Mom,” my son would say, “you’re stretching.”

  Looking that day out of the living room window at Kristin, watching her face twist in anticipation of the next shot, the sweat ma
tting down the hair that had fallen out of her ponytail at the back of her neck, the determined set of her lips, and especially watching my son record her every move with a kind of shy worship, I realized that progress had been made.

  “She’s good, don’t you think?” I said to my husband.

  “Her shooting needs work, but she’s clearly a terror on the boards.’’

  They came into the house, mopping the sweat off their faces, clanking glasses onto the counter and filling them with Paul Newman’s lemonade. My daughter, who was then six, looked up at Kristin, way up, and said, “Will you teach me how to play?”

  “Sure. I bet you’ll be great.” And then Kristin leaned down and said just to her, “Good enough to beat your brother.”

  The little girl looked up at the older one, her eyes shining with conspiracy.

  In her book In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan of Harvard University writes about how being the mother of anyone is a tricky business, but the nature of the trickiness varies depending on whether you have sons or daughters. Gilligan and many others have identified the final years of latency as the time when some girls will turn in on themselves, lose the drive that earlier made them excel in math and cartwheels and storytelling as if none of that stuff ever really counted, not logarithms, not leaps, not a heroine who saves the day atop her trusty steed. Their grades go down, they stop eating, they welcome nicknames like “Skeleton” and “Toothpick,” hate their hair, legs, teeth, nose, ears, freckles, pinkie finger, mole at the bottom of their back, baby toenail, whatever, define their value in terms of what other people, especially boys, think of them. By the time they get to high school they have, some of them, become pale versions of their former colorful selves. Even those who stay strong and outspoken worry that it won’t matter. I recently attended the Bat Mitzvah of a young woman named Ariana Zukas. As part of the ceremony she was called upon to compose an original prayer. The prayer was precisely what one would expect of a young woman of conscience in her somewhat privileged circumstances.