In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle Read online

  Over the years, Jen had come to refer to Betsy Moyer as her third mother. With her soothing voice, double pierced ears, and short sandy brown hair in an easy but stylish cut, Betsy Moyer remained in her forties a strong athlete. She liked step classes, downhill skiing, and especially tennis. Her signature shot was so powerful that even Jen had to hustle to return it.

  The Moyers and Jen’s father and stepmother socialized often, sharing prime season’s seats next to each other at the U Mass men’s basketball games.

  Coach Moyer could see that it had been hard for Jen to sit by and witness Jamila’s growing prominence, partly because she was so close to being just as good. She was right to be miffed at him; he had been all over her, as he put it, like white on rice all last season. And he would be this year too if need be. With Jen, this season, it would be a matter of getting her to believe in herself all the time, every minute, especially on the floor. She couldn’t tune in and tune out. It had to be constant.

  Kristin Marvin, no longer wearing a McDonald’s uniform and on time despite the mood swings of that brown VW Rabbit, wrote that she was trying out for center, and she gave as her best skills rebounding, defense, and heart. He liked that. It wasn’t a brag; it was the truth. He was glad to have Kristin on board. You worried with Kristin that she might roar off into the sunset on a Harley Davidson, but if she didn’t, what an ally.

  Kathleen Poe, her legs feeling stronger and harder than they ever had from all that running in the summer, all that stepping at the stadium, wrote that she wanted to work on dribbling and shooting while pressured. She gave as her height five feet, ten inches followed by a written sigh, “Well . . . ALMOST.”

  As the number three player, Kathleen Poe was the depth the team needed, that extra layer of offense that could make the Hurricanes impenetrable at the top. She had the makings of a great natural athlete. She was tall and strong and a glorious runner.

  She had a straight back, and she possessed what used to be called a wonderful carriage. Thanks in part to a beauty mark on her right cheek, she radiated elegance, although she of course complained (“I have no nose, no nose!”). She embodied that old lost virtue of instinctive graciousness, the type of kid who at someone’s beach house will help put away the groceries while everyone else is changing into a suit and racing to the beach, and she’ll also, as a vegetarian, bring her own can of tofu hot dogs. Her calm, neat appearance inspired her teammate Kim Warner to observe that on the court, when everyone else had degenerated into “a mass of damp hair and a human sweat ball,” Kathleen somehow managed to appear less disarranged.

  As Coach Moyer told an aging gym rat that fall, “I have the two best guards in the state and probably the nation, but it will all depend on the girls up front. There’s an old saying: ‘Guards win games, but forwards win championships.’”

  There was no way around it: Kathleen was the key. The problem with Kathleen was that her reflexes on the basketball court were exactly the same as in her personal life. She was too nice. She had a tendency to stop dead whenever an opponent fell down, to offer her hand and apologize even if she had nothing to do with the tumble.

  As a former boys’ coach, Ron Moyer knew what he would have done if Kathleen had been a guy: He would have yelled and screamed and strutted and carried on, and it probably would have worked. But with Kathleen, as with most of the girls he had coached, that kind of fireworks usually didn’t work. You had to be gentle, constructive. The more he coached, the more he believed boys could benefit just as much from a positive approach. He’d once read about a study where some players were shown videos of foul shots that they’d made and others were shown videos of foul shots that they’d missed. Across the board, male and female, the players bombarded with the positive model improved their percentages, which did not surprise him: “Whenever you fill your mind with a lot of don’ts, the don’ts dominate your thinking. You’re programming yourself to do it wrong.”

  This season marked Ron Moyer’s ninth year of coaching the Lady Hurricanes. At Hopkins Academy, the public school in Hadley, he’d coached the boys from 1971 to 1977, and in 1975 they’d won a league title. He had also coached coed youth soccer for eight years, and Lassie League softball for four. His camps on summer mornings, run through Leisure Services in the town of Amherst, were often the first introduction to organized sports for the children in Amherst. He kept a Rolodex in his head of former players who’d gone on to join college teams: Rhonda Jackson at Virginia Commonwealth, Jody Fink at Harvard, Melissa Osborn at Williams, Heather Richards at Columbia, Tom Witkos at U Mass. Whenever he learned that one of them, like Rhonda Jackson (who had inspired Jen and Jamila when they were little), had been made captain, it suddenly all seemed worth it—all those bus rides, all that time spent waiting for the last kid to be picked up, the frowns and the smiles feigned by way of displeasure or encouragement, the repetitious lectures, the laborious drills.

  In October, as a way of psyching himself for the season, he and coaching friend Mike Thomas had attended a seminar in which he got to hear Al McGuire, the former coach of the Marquette University basketball team back when it had won the 1977 national championship.

  Coach Moyer loved his comments.

  Don’t ever have any vendettas in basketball, just love affairs.

  Don’t lie to your kids. Lies can break up a battalion.

  Every season has at least seven or eight crises. Sprained ankles, games canceled due to the weather, infuriated parents, kids who fade away in the middle of the season. A certain amount is normal, but when you get fifteen or twenty, it grinds you down to just surviving. Anticipate the crises and work with them, but don’t let them throw you off course.

  If you want to win, get your players to love the game. Coach your personality.

  No coach wins a game by what he or she knows; you win by what your players have learned.

  A coach who starts out listening to the fans ends up sitting next to them.

  Coach Moyer glanced at the rest of the forms. Under skills that needed work: “outside shots,” “low post moves,” “comprehension of plays,” “confidence.” There was one good laugh. Someone had written, under best hoop skills:

  “Lucky shots.”

  6

  You Can All Clap Now

  It rained on Thanksgiving. The Amherst high school football team played its second annual holiday match against Minnechaug in a sparsely attended away game. The day after Thanksgiving, notorious as the most popular shopping day in most of America, was, as always, according to Captain Scherpa, the quietest day of the year in Amherst.

  “It’s dead, and we love it.”

  Kim Warner, frustrated that it was too cold and too wet to play hoop outside at Crocker Farm, spent much of the weekend at her job at A. J. Hastings Newsdealer in the center of town, the closest equivalent in Amherst to a common meeting place. The venerable old store sells Amherst College T-shirts, tobacco and ink, newspapers and periodicals and stationery. Stodgy and cluttered, with its original wood floors in the back, it was here that townspeople came to rely on Kim as a sort of personal radio, asking her about the upcoming season and inquiring if everyone’s ankles and knees and elbows were doing all right.

  In a place filled with transients, Kim represented a certain continuity to the Hurricanes, a bridge that extended from the old-time settlers and farming community to the interloping newcomers. Her mother had graduated from Amherst Regional High School in 1968, and her mother’s parents still lived in the house over by the high school where her mother had grown up. Her father’s folks lived in Pelham.

  “So,” her customers would ask, “when are tryouts?”

  “This Monday. They are always on the Monday after Thanksgiving break.”

  “That’s soon.”

  “Not soon enough. I can’t wait.”

  Kim had one of those wide yet timid smiles that invite consoling remarks.

 
“Oh, you don’t have to worry. You’re a senior. Of course you’ll make it.”

  Kim always tried to respond with a look of confidence. In the ninth and tenth grades she’d been moved up in the postseason, and in her junior year she was on varsity. But she took nothing for granted. She forced herself to react positively to her customers.

  “Of course!” Smile. “That’s right!” Smile. “No problem!” Smile.

  “The first rule of tryouts is don’t hurt the Big Guy.”

  About sixty girls stood side by side.

  “Okay, please organize yourself into some layup lines, and let’s see what you can do.”

  The girls divided into small groups, and stationing themselves at the six baskets throughout the gym, they pounded the ball against the floor.

  “That’s right,” shouted the coach. “Dribble in. Don’t travel. If you travel, you’ll lose the ball to Agawam.” Whenever he spun a scenario of doom, it was always against the Brownies of Agawam or the Blue Devils of Northampton, the Hurricanes’ chief competitors. He never said Chicopee Comp or West Side, schools with weaker teams.

  “Don’t be afraid to mess up. Basketball is a game of mistakes. Assume you’re going to make some mistakes, and don’t start kicking yourself until about the fifth one. My rule is that the only mistake that’s going to get you off the floor is not hustling.”

  Jen and Jamila passed the ball back and forth to each other with great verve; they even fooled around with some fancy behind-the-back stuff. Kathleen looked as if she didn’t know how not to make a basket, and Kristin chugged away, strapping and steady.

  Coach Moyer had his eye on Gumby, a junior, as his fifth starter.

  Her playing style most reminded him of his own in his heyday: the way she stuck to it, posted herself beneath the basket, prevented buckets for the other guy, and fed her teammates plenty of opportunities to look good.

  She wasn’t as quick as some of the kids, but she had soul and she had staying power.

  With her dark ponytail and face filled with circles, beginning with the huge round dark eyes, Gumby made layup after layup. What shyness she felt about being linked to the seniors (Kathleen had been her idol ever since she could remember) vanished on the floor.

  Gumby was born strong.

  She had been the biggest baby in the nursery: nine pounds, nine and one-fourth ounces. She was able to whale a whiffle ball out of the yard by the age of two. She’d always loved games—card games, board games, athletic pursuits. At six, she’d joined her first soccer team.

  Her father, Stan, a professor of chemistry at Springfield College, recalled “how Emmie used to laugh on every exhale. She eagerly played offense and defense, but her favorite position was what she called ‘the goldie.’”

  Now when she gave people directions to her house, she told them to go down Southeast, turn onto Mechanic, and then proceed to Chapel Road: “The house is this disgusting blue-green, I think my mother got the paint free or something, and surprise! There’s a basketball hoop.”

  All summer she had worked out, first at Hampshire Fitness Club, a sunlit haven in puritanical Amherst famous for its hot tub, where in the winter pasty patrons steep in the steam and cheerfully offer their solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. Gumby’s bailiwick was the weight room, where she trained every other day. She would often leave the club and wander over to one of several of Amherst’s weather-ravaged outdoor basketball courts, insinuating herself into a game with a group of guys whose initial reluctance would change to grudging admiration, especially after she drained a shot in their faces.

  Gumby and Jonesbones, the other Emily, both wanted to be sports doctors or orthopedic surgeons. Sometimes they spoke with glee about how much fun it would be to crunch up someone’s knees or decrunch them, as the case may be.

  “But, you have to,” one always reminded the other, “give up, like, your twenties.”

  “As long as I’m not the kind of doctor that sticks needles into little kids,” Gumby always said with great emphasis. She’d had enough of that kind when she was eleven and had to be hospitalized for two months in Boston. She remembered the great feeling of finally being allowed to go home. “I’ll never forget. I came home on December eighth. Or maybe it was the seventh. It was the same day some big military thing happened.”

  Gumby’s parents were loyal fixtures in the stands, and although they had been divorced for several years, they often sat side by side. They were interesting opposites. He was dark and a scientist, keen on quantifiable inquiry, and she was light and one of those New Age therapists. Sally Shore was “Singingtree,” whose flyers fluttered from the bulletin boards in town: “Have you ever experienced a time during which you felt an inner harmony and a luminous awareness of being precisely where you needed to be in your life in order to more fully live from your essence? . . . If so, you have felt the melody and beauty of your song. My work honors the deep reservoirs of transformational energy that exist within each of us.”

  Seeing their daughter play with such strength stirred up memories of other, more vulnerable times.

  She’d gotten sick as a child, something to do with excess acid, a condition called reflux esophagitis. Her father explained, “It seems to happen more with people like Emmie who have type O blood.”

  She’d taken medication, slept with her head on an incline, and mostly soldiered on. Starting in the fourth grade, she played on a coed basketball team at her school under the supervision of Coach Noel Kurtz.

  In the beginning of sixth grade there’d been a sudden weakness, some vomiting, a lethargy that wouldn’t go away. Ten separate visits to the doctor all yielded the same false surmise: “It must be a particularly virulent strain of the flu.” What made her so mad was that she’d intended to be captain of her elementary school basketball team that year.

  She had been vomiting so much that one day Stan Shore took an exact measure of both her liquid intake and what she’d spit up; the two were the same. No nourishment was getting through.

  They sought the help of a specialist in Boston.

  During the two-hour drive, she’d grown more and more pale and kept nodding off.

  Her mother would lean over and tug at her arm:

  “Wake up, Emily, wake up. Oh, look, over there, isn’t that the place we stopped and had lunch the time. . . . Emily, please, honey, open your eyes.”

  The child had arrived at Mass General, dozing in her seat, with a barely discernible pulse.

  The intake staff reacted by grabbing a gurney, barking orders, rushing the slumped form of the child to the intensive care unit. Eventually she’d been diagnosed as having a serious ulcer. The acid in her body was eating out her duodenum.

  Medication was dripped onto the ulcer through tubes for ten weeks, but it refused to heal. The parents had tag-teamed each other up and down the Mass Pike for twenty-four-hour shifts at her side. Someone (Stan Shore was vague about who it had been), had taken over his labs at the school, and a neighbor they knew from the South Congregational Church took care of Emily’s younger brother every day after school.

  Nothing was healing. Surgery was the only option. There was a children’s surgeon at Mass General named Hardie Hendron who was so good and so steady and so single-minded that his nickname was Hardly Human. Emily was scheduled to go to him.

  A day or two before that appointment they’d given her a day out. Her father had lifted her into his car. She didn’t have much strength. The large eyes of the father and the daughter and the darkness of their hair resembled each other in a way that was amiable, almost comic. Together, they’d driven around, including a stop at Fenway, where he bought her a shirt, a Red Sox shirt, the best, a replica of the actual shirt the team wears when it plays. It was a man’s size small, and of course it was too big for her. He just wanted to do something. They’d driven into a parking lot, where he wanted to make a turn, but then he saw a c
op and he didn’t want to make a mistake in front of a cop, so he said, “Is it okay to make a right turn?” The cop had looked at Stan Shore, at his pale, ailing daughter, and said softly, ‘‘You can do whatever you want.”

  The doctors told them the surgery would last three or four hours. “‘You never know beforehand exactly what you’re going to find. You make judgments at the scene.’

  “She was in surgery for, I don’t know, it must have been seven or eight hours. When they finally brought her into the recovery room, she had a big tube in her mouth, and she was very drugged up and in pain, but the recovery progressed quickly. She could have played the role of an invalid and gone on being delicate. That’s a very powerful role. But, no, she wanted to come home as soon as she could. All fall, even when she was the most sick, all she could talk about was basketball, basketball, basketball, and how sad she was to miss the opening of the season because this year, as a sixth grader, she wanted to be captain of the team. Well, it was too late to be captain, but her coach let her back on the team in January.”

  January 6, to be exact, she’d started playing again.

  “Something was driving me. I’ve always loved sports. Mr. Kurtz encouraged everyone to play, girls especially.”

  Unlike others in his family, Stan Shore did not think of himself as religious in a formal sense. He did not believe in a personal human-type God. But he did have spiritual thoughts and he did believe in small miracles.

  The memory of his daughter’s illness would fade away, but never completely. If she were hurt or not feeling well, the terror resurfaced.