In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle Read online

  When he was twelve or so, his mother launched a couple of minor business ventures. Her first effort consisted of crocheting bonnets for toilet paper. Her customers had their choice of yarn: They picked the main color, and then a contrasting one for the plastic flower on the brim. When they went out Edna had him trail her with a wagon containing samples in the hope of attracting a clientele. Eventually, as he always put it, Edna had diversified, making similar covers for liquor bottles out of shocking pink yarn in the shape of poodles, which she modeled on Mrs. McClosky’s empties. “I guess you could say Aunt Helen was a silent partner.”

  The most notorious expression had been “The car will get you there.” She herself did not drive, and since she always seemed to get wherever she wished, she was right. The car, which she had no control over, did get her there. But at what price?

  He owed a lot to his brother Bill, sixteen years his senior. His brother was the first person in his family to finish college. Bill had taken him to the dentist for the first time when he was twelve. He had thirteen cavities, and three teeth were pulled, two without Novocain because that cost a dollar extra. It was Bill who’d said that as wrong as his father was to leave, it never would have been right between him and Edna.

  Bill had played basketball with him all the time. For years Ron Moyer labored under the somewhat parochial impression that if you could beat Bill Moyer in basketball, you could beat anyone.

  The playground ball served him well when he was in high school and came under the tutelage of Coach Silcox, who let him know he was a good kid, a hard worker: “You move slow, you can’t jump, but at least you listen.”

  Silcox, a first-team college all-American, had been coached by Harry Litwak, an Austrian-born Hall of Famer who’d coached at Temple University from 1952 to 1973. He had 373 wins, 193 losses, thirteen postseason tournaments, and six NCAA play-offs, with only one losing season. Harry Litwak was famous for doing ‘‘more with less,” for taking teams of little or no promise and helping them find within themselves their hidden superiority. It was one of the profound satisfactions of Ron Moyer’s life, right up there with his marriage and the births of his children, that he had such an august athletic ancestry: “The kids on the Hurricanes might not recognize it, but they’ve been exposed to good genes, coaching-wise.”

  While in college, from 7 to 9 A.M. Monday through Saturday, he had a job in the kitchen washing dishes, earning seventy-five dollars every other week, all of which he set aside for his mother. He would wait for her to call or write, the usual communications with their heavy mix of hypochondria and emergencies and threats: “You’ll miss me when I’m dead.” All his earnings went for her support except the ten-dollar per diem given to members of the basketball team during away games. Instead of going out to dinner with the team, he would eat the leftover box lunches that the other kids had passed on and use the per diem money to cover his own incidental expenses. Although Lafayette had returned the damage deposit, minus twenty dollars levied on everyone in his class for some kind of vandalism during the Lafayette-Lehigh weekend his freshman year, his mother had cashed the check.

  Ron Moyer had met his wife at a summer camp in the Poconos where they both had jobs as counselors. Like him, she was an athlete, and he always described her as someone who’d played three sports in high school back when only three sports were offered to girls: basketball, volleyball, and softball.

  Eventually he’d gotten his master’s in counseling. “When I took Abnormal Psych in college, I thought, this could have been our family history.”

  He was hired first by the public high school in Hadley and later by Amherst as a social studies teacher, guidance counselor, and coach.

  If his life had one organizing principle, it was basketball. He still sometimes snuck a look at a couple of scrapbooks he’d kept during his three years as a starter for Lafayette’s Coach Hal Wissel. The pages bulged with varsity schedules and team photos that would be ageless except for the Beatle hairdos and long sideburns. Yellowing news clips from papers like the Express in Easton, Pennsylvania, were preserved with the most relevant passages underlined in blue ink with a ruler: “Moyer, who had a deadly short range push shot, missed only one of his nine floor shots as he contributed 17 points and 10 rebounds.” On December 6, 1969, he’d gotten to play at Madison Square Garden against Seton Hall; he also saved an old program from that historic event, a slick brochure filled with ads for steak restaurants and several varieties of Scotch and various whiskies as well as a photo of folksinger Judy Collins whose “melodic tones graced The Felt Forum during her recent appearance.” Through it all, the location that felt best to him, most like some kind of ideal home, was the gym. With its high ceilings and stale air, it was familiar, friendly, a flannel-shirt of a place. In college he’d distinguished himself on the court: He was the leader in rebounding for his team three years in a row, and on December 12, 1970 he amassed thirty-three rebounds against Gettysburg, a single game high and a record that still stands today, a tag line he loved to attach to himself, the same way ancient Greeks and Romans always liked to say what town they were from: Hector of Troy, Moyer of thirty-three rebounds. In his office at the high school, in addition to the sign that said THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THIS PLACE AND THE TITANIC IS THEY HAD A BAND, he kept a small red media guide with tiny print attesting to his collegiate exploits. Even more than the row house in Philly where he’d lived through adolescence and the house on the hill in Pelham where he resided as an adult, the gym was the place he was calling from, his true hometown, his deep-down address.

  5

  TEAM,

  Underlined and Capitalized

  The first organizational meeting for the 1992–93 season was held in mid-November.

  Already a dramatic, precipitous pulling-in had taken place all over the valley. Furnaces were checked, windows caulked, chimneys examined for creosote, mittens matched. Wood was stacked, outside, under a tarp as a guard against rain and snow. The Saturday morning farmers’ market on the common closed down on the second Saturday of the month. The roadside stands had all disappeared except Hawthorne’s on South Pleasant, with its hand-lettered note next to the scale: IN GOD WE TRUST, ALL OTHERS PAY CASH. Hawthorne’s planned to hold out until Thanksgiving. “We used to stay open and sell a few Christmas trees,” said the man who operates the stand, a laconic Yankee type of indeterminate years always dressed in his green gabardine work clothes, himself a seasonal landmark. “But there’s no point competing with the Scouts.”

  With the arrival of the cold, eating habits changed. You indulged in your neighbor’s gift of homemade raspberry jam with its unmistakable taste of thrift and sunshine. Root vegetables, pulpy and medicinal, were welcomed at the table—sweet potatoes and celeriac and parsnips and turnips.

  Coming in from outside, stamping their feet, blowing hot air on cold hands, a group of coltish girls (getting these kids in shape, thought Coach Moyer, will have more to do with harnessing their spirit than breaking it) gathered in room 4 at Amherst Regional High School, a large nondescript classroom facing out on the front parking lot and the scene, whenever possible, of the Hurricane team meetings. Coach Moyer believes in tradition and consistency, even down to where the group goes for the ritual pregame pep talk.

  The word was already out. Coach Moyer planned to run a tight ship this year. Dire visions of “suicides,” also known as “gassers” and “back-and-downs,” sprang up in the heads of the Hurricane hopefuls. These were sprints, sometimes meted out as punishment, during which a player had to run up and down every line on the court, bending and touching them at the ends.

  A hierarchy was already in effect. The girls who were certain to make the team—Jen and Jamila and Kristin and Kathleen—were seated up front, talking and giggling, doing their imitations of the killer Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs summoning his dog, “Precious . . . Precious.” They were filled with the ease of the truly confident.

  Those
who were younger or less sure of their athletic abilities cowered in the outskirts, crouched beneath windowsills or hidden in the back row, heads down, pretending to memorize the “Amherst Girls Hoops Candidate Application, 1992–93 season.” Coach Moyer scanned the group to see if there were any surprises. In a town like Amherst you always hope for the ringer, a great athlete who moved here unexpectedly over the summer because one of her parents had an unforeseen opportunity to become chancellor or provost or president of something. But what he saw was a mostly familiar array of eager faces, among whom were a fair share of what he categorized as “quiet kids, no dad in the picture.” Over the years he had often been called on to assume a parent role.

  “Kids have a built-in need to be parented. They take it wherever they can get it, and I accept that role. I tell them that if they have a problem, come to the Big Guy. I’ll try to help.” Applicants to the 1992–93 Hurricanes were asked to give their height and weight and age, to circle the position they hoped to attain (point guard, shooting guard, center, rebounding forward, scoring forward), to list their best hoop skills and the skills that needed working on most, to “please discuss any after school commitments other than Hoop,” and to “list all day/night/weekends not available for practices or scrimmages” including any “travel/vacation/holiday plans.” They also had to give their course schedule, the names of their teachers, and their estimated grade for the first quarter.

  “Be generous with yourselves,” said the coach, in one of his usual gambits. “Nobody else will.”

  A sports participation fee of sixty dollars was required of every student who played a varsity or junior varsity sport.

  “Some of you may be thinking: ‘That’s a lot of money. I don’t know if I can afford to try out.’ When I was a kid, it would have been a lot of money to me too.”

  He said this every year. It was hard to know if they really believed him; even his own kids used to react skeptically to his stories of bringing bundles of old papers to the junkyard, making certain he’d dampened the middle so they would weigh more. Or trailing his mother and her wagon filled with its crocheted hope for betterment. It had been a goal, with his own kids, to make sure they didn’t have to scrape the way he had been forced to do. He didn’t want them to worry about everything from orange juice to tuition. But his antenna for a certain kind of poverty was still sharp, and he could see from their downcast glances that a couple of kids were already worried about the money.

  “You don’t have to pay the fee to try out. And if you make the team, we do have a waiver procedure. No one will lose a place on the team because of financial hardship.

  “I just want to thank all of you for coming today. Some of you are probably wondering what I’m looking for in a member of the Hurricanes. Well, to put it simply, I’m looking for good people with good credentials. From what you told me about yourselves on those forms I had you fill out a couple of weeks ago, some of you are athletes without a portfolio. If you’ve never played on a team before, if this is the first time you’ve tried a sport, I’ve got to be honest with you. That’s tough, that’s hard. But DYB, and we’ll see what happens. Being part of a team is not something your grandparents can buy for you. No one can give this to you as a gift. You have to earn it yourselves.

  “My method of coaching is simple. The accent is on team, TEAM, underlined and capitalized. I don’t want the kind of people I call team-busters. They make snide comments, they count the syllables in the newspaper to see who’s getting more attention than someone else. They’re filled with a lot of looks and stares that try to put people down. Attitude is every bit as important as athleticism. During the tryouts, show us your best attitude.

  “To win at games I need dependable people. If you can’t remember to bring a paper that gets you into tryouts, how can I expect you to remember our plays, which are a lot more complicated than that?

  “You have to get your priorities straight in terms of your life. Your first obligation is to your family, and then to your schoolwork, and then to basketball. Now that I’ve said that, you should recognize that basketball is such a huge commitment that you should try out only if you can meet your obligations to the first two, because my role is to see that you don’t cheat the team.

  “I have a friend, the coach over in Agawam, Lou Conte, who always tells his players, ‘Little eyes are watching you.’ I want you to be role models on the court, off the court, and in the locker room.

  “This is a winter sport. We play over Christmas vacation and vacation week in February. Don’t come up to me and tell me you have to take an emergency trip to Florida. First of all, I’d like to know how you come up with those tickets in the middle of winter.

  “Last year we lost far too much time waiting to start practices. Either be serious about being on a winning team or don’t come out. There are two kinds of players: Those that are on the bus or not on the bus. The bus rolls at two-thirty every week­day. It’s been five years since we’ve had a winning junior varsity team. It’s been six years since we’ve had a winning junior high team. It’s been a lot longer since we’ve won a Western Massachusetts regional final. This year we’re going to change all three of those things.”

  Later that night, he passed the white trailer across the street from his house, up the steep driveway, glancing to the right beyond the above-ground pool with its winter cover that dominated the front yard to see if the lights were on in the house next door, occupied by his wife’s parents. (Whenever people asked him if it was hard to live next door to his mother-in-law, whom he called “Hurricane Marge” because of her tendency to pop in unexpectedly and sweep through the house, he would reply, “Not a bit. Besides, we’re getting an invisible electric fence.”) He realized how eager he was to get this year’s team in place. People often wanted to know if his daughters—Kristin, a freshman at the high school, and Courtney, a senior day student at Deerfield Academy—played basketball. They had both chosen swimming instead, and together they had set seven records in the individual medley, freestyle, and relay events in the town of Amherst.

  Coach Moyer sat in the small family room with the comfortable armchair across from the TV set and pored over the forms. Jamila wanted to be point guard; no surprises there. This would be her sixth year in the job; she had started out in this position in the seventh grade at four and a half feet tall and weighing eighty pounds. Whenever people asked him how long he’d been coaching Jamila he would answer, “Oh, about one foot.”

  She listed “court sense, passing, and the ‘J’” as her best court skills. She felt she needed to work on “defense (passing lanes), learning when to take shots, setting a pace appropriate for a game according to our strengths and losses.”

  In the space provided for “after school commitments other than Hoop” she wrote in the largest letters possible: “NONE.”

  Jen Pariseau said she wanted to be a shooting guard and a scoring forward and the water girl. She had made that same joke every year since the eighth grade, and she felt compelled to jot it down now, if only for sentiment’s sake. She listed as her “travel/vacation/holiday plans” a “trip to Vermont around New Year’s.” This was partly a nostalgic reference to the shared family vacations of the Pariseaus and the Moyers when the children were younger, before athletic commitments took up most of their free time, and it was also a joke. Jen hated skiing and bore a grudge against one evil slope where, on the last run during spring skiing, she’d broken her leg. Jen, who loved to laugh, never did whenever people pointed out that if she’d broken her leg, of course it was the last run. Coach Moyer read the notation and thought it was a good sign, an acknowledgment of the closeness between the two families.

  Courtney Moyer and Jen had been close friends since they were three and part of a play group Betsy Moyer had organized. During grade school they’d walked on a path in the woods back to the Moyers’ house every day. They played constantly. One Halloween they dressed up as basketball p
layers. Now that they were older, they liked to tease their parents with tales of their miscreant pastimes: how they’d tied nooses around Kristin Moyer’s pound puppy, set traps by digging holes in the yard and filling them with leaves, run rummage sales at which the Pariseaus and the Moyers were forced to buy back their own belongings, made a miniature golf course out of an old croquet set and charged admission.

  The two families consulted freely with each other on that peculiar surliness that can infect a child especially during early adolescence. The Moyers went through it when Courtney was in the ninth grade: “I don’t know why I acted the way I did. I love my parents. But I wouldn’t talk to them. I would say: ‘Yes.’ ‘No.’ No emotion. If they asked me if I had a good day at school, I said: ‘I guess.’ At the age of fifteen Jen was similarly hard on her stepmother, but Betsy Moyer, in her usual direct and enthusiastic manner, told Tracy Osbahr, “If she won’t talk to you, that’s good. It means she accepts you.’’

  Jen’s acceptance of her stepmother eventually took on many forms, including the birthday and Mother’s Day cards whose purchase and inscription she would labor over. “TRACY,” said one, in huge letters in honor of her fortieth birthday, “I am using big writing because I heard that when you’re forty your sight goes.” Inside Jen offered to buy her a beige band for her watch; she had the money but she just needed Tracy to take her shopping. An older Jen thanked Tracy for helping her pick out a dress (“I couldn’t have done it myself”) and for teaching her the difference between “there, their and they’re.’’ It was her stepmother who had carefully stored Jen’s school papers over the years, including the xeroxed literary magazine published at Pelham Elementary. Jen and her brother, Chris, often spent weekends with their mother in nearby Belchertown, but in recent times, with the heavy commitment to sports, Jen most often saw her mother, Terry Coty, in the bleachers, where she was an increasingly faithful presence.