A Kind of Grace (11 page)

When the long-jump competition began and I stepped up to the line, the crowd was buzzing. “Aw, she's gonna do it, you watch,” someone shouted. “Here she goes!” someone else yelled out as he pointed to me on the field. Then I heard the familiar, “Jaaaaaaaackieeeeeeee!”

I got the signal and I took off. I pumped as hard as I could, running faster, faster, faster, down the runway. I took the last three steps, slammed my right foot down on the board and leaped. As I extended my arms and legs through the air, I knew I'd popped a big one. I'd never been in the air so long. I was floating. I came down in the dry, undisturbed part of the sand pit, far down from the section they'd raked and watered after everyone else's jumps.

In unison the crowd roared. Everyone was standing as I landed. I got up, looked back at the pit to see how far down I was and stepped out. I smiled and dusted myself off. The whole place was buzzing again, in anticipation.

“She got it! She got it,” said a man who was not my father.

The officials were still measuring as I walked back to our camp and put on my sweatpants. I'd set a state record in the qualifying round with a jump of 19′ 9¼″. And though I'd never experienced a 20-foot leap, this one felt like it was way past 20. I'd never landed that far down the pit before.

When they raised the three standards—one at a time—to show my mark and the first number was a 2, the crowd exploded. I'd set a new record. The only mystery was how far I'd gone. Next came a 0, then a 7½. It was 20′ 7½″. The moment was as electric as the instant the 0.00 flashed on the scoreboard in Montreal during the 1976 Olympic gymnastics competition, signifying that Nadia Comaneci had received a perfect score on the uneven parallel bars. People who were there still talk about that afternoon at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston and the feeling they got watching that jump and seeing the numbers.

“Jaaaaaaaackieeeeeeee! That's my girl! Jaaaaaaaackieeeeeeee!” Daddy was beside himself.

I smiled modestly, raised my hand as far as my forehead, and gave a little wave in the direction of the stadium.

With that leap, I became one of the best long jumpers in the nation in both the junior and senior divisions. It was the best jump in Illinois by a high school girl and the second longest among female junior-division competitors in the country that year. I ranked eighth among all female long jumpers in the nation at the end of that year. For the second consecutive year, I was named the Illinois Girl Athlete of the Year by the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat.
I was also named a Prep All-America by
Illinois Track & Field News.
I repeated as the Girl Athlete of the Year the following season, and as a Prep All-America.

I thought I'd reached the height of celebrity in November 1979 when a big picture of me long jumping during the AAU Junior Olympics appeared on the cover of
Women's Varsity Sports
magazine. When I saw my picture, all I could do was grin. I couldn't believe it was me on the cover of a magazine.

With two state track championship trophies already in the case at school, I returned to Lincoln the following fall with one goal—winning the state basketball championship and adding that trophy to the case. It was senior year, the last chance for Deborah Thurston, Barbara Gilmore, Devlin Stamps and me to make history by being the first squad to win a girls' basketball title at Lincoln, and to see all our work during the previous years pay off.

We'd gotten close enough to taste it the year before, losing the championship game to Skokie-Niles West. As the team's cocaptain, I took it upon myself to keep everyone focused and motivated. Whenever our enthusiasm or energy level sagged in practice, I yelled out to my teammates, “Remember how it felt to lose in the finals and to watch that other team get the championship trophy, cut down the nets and celebrate? If you don't want to go through that again, we have to keep working!”

We went undefeated that season. Our only close game was against Marshall, the perennial powerhouse team from Chicago. It was late in the season and we were playing them on their home court in Chicago. Marshall's mascot is the Commando and they were in command of this game. We hadn't lost all season but we were trailing 59–61 with just a few seconds left. My teammates and I refused to believe we'd lose to any team that season. We didn't feel desperate or despondent. In the huddle at the bench during the last timeout, we told each other we'd find a way to win the game. Still, things looked bleak. Marshall had the ball and the clock was running down.

Justine Moore, our quick point guard, stole the ball and scored: 61–61. Marshall brought the ball upcourt again. All they had to do was hold it and let the clock run out. We had to make something happen. I saw the point guard's eyes shift and I anticipated a pass. As she turned to throw the ball, I jumped out and intercepted it. My heart was in my throat as I dribbled downcourt to our basket. The rushing footsteps behind me sounded like a stampede. The pro-Marshall crowd was screaming. I focused on making the shot. I put it up and watched it fall in. A millisecond later, the buzzer sounded. Lincoln 63, Marshall 61. My ecstatic teammates rushed me and I whooped. We tumbled to the floor, giddy and relieved. We didn't come close to losing again en route to the finals where our opponent was none other than Chicago Marshall. A rematch.

“They'll want revenge,” I told my teammates in the locker room before the game. I was standing in front of them, my game face decorated with braided pigtails and an orange sweatband. “We can't let them have it. We've worked too hard to get it. We have to
want
this tie more than they do to win.”

The game was played inside Assembly Hall on the University of Illinois campus. The place holds 11,000, but only 4,000 seats were filled, most of them by fans from East St. Louis. They had carpooled or ridden in one of the school buses as part of the caravan that arrived in Champaign-Urbana on Thursday night for the Friday-Saturday tournament. Our team bus, an air-conditioned charter, had led the caravan. With so many fans in the stands, it felt like a home game at Lincoln High gym.

We were up by just six points in the third quarter when Deborah Thurston jumped up for a rebound and came down on the side of her ankle, twisting it. Gut check time. We all knew we had to play with more intensity to compensate for Deborah's absence under the boards. Debra Powell replaced her and started hitting shots from everywhere on the court. I banged the boards and snatched every rebound I could. We applied a full-court press that finally wore Marshall down. We pulled away and won 64–47. We now had a gold medal to go with the silver one each of us had received the previous year.

We mobbed each other at center court. Then we got a ladder, walked over to our basket and cut down the net, which we draped across the championship trophy. On the bus ride back home, we sang our theme song, the Kenny Loggins tune “This Is It.” We were delirious. When Deborah Thurston and I helped the track team win a third straight track championship, it was the perfect way to finish our high school careers.

9

My Feminine Mystique

T
here was no jealousy or animosity between the boys' and girls' squads at Lincoln. The boys respected our talents and always congratulated us after we won a meet or a basketball game. During our first basketball season at Lincoln, while the girls' and boys' coaches bickered over which squad would practice first in the gym after school, the boys on the team volunteered to let us start first, at 3:30, so that we could get home before dark.

A few of the male long jumpers treated me as a rival, albeit a friendly one. Even though I rarely jumped farther than they did, they kept close track, as a matter of pride. They didn't mind being beaten by other boys, but they were determined not to be outjumped by a girl. At joint meets, they wandered over during the competition and stood beside the pit to watch my jumps. At school, on Mondays following weekend meets out of town, they rushed to me in the hall to ask about my performance. They always looked relieved when I told them. “Oh, that's good,” they said. “As long as we can still beat you we're happy.”

The backhanded compliment rolled right off my back. Their insecurity and grudging respect was amusing to me. I wasn't interested in competing with or comparing myself to boys. But they certainly were worried about me.

Although no one came right out and said it, I sensed that the idea of my playing sports didn't sit well with my parents at first. Partly, they were concerned for my safety. They wanted to know the names of all the adults involved before they allowed me to run track. However, once they heard the names Ward and Fennoy—men they knew and trusted—they gave me permission to join the Railers.

Daddy wasn't troubled by the idea that I'd be running and jumping in track and field events. But he and my mother were skeptical about the basketball team. When I first broached the idea, Momma and Daddy looked at each other uneasily and said, “We'll have to think about it.”

It was such a touchy subject, they didn't discuss it in front of me. They went into the bedroom and when they came out, they told me they didn't think it was a good idea. The reason: With track, my studies and my household chores, I was already spread too thin.

But the truth is, while they were comfortable with the notion of girls' track, they associated basketball with men and boys and didn't think girls should be playing it. It was a new concept and they hadn't accepted it yet. Unlike other school districts around the country, East St. Louis had never before offered competitive basketball for girls.

I'm embarrassed to admit it, but my parents thought if I played basketball, I'd become a lesbian. Along with most of the other people in the community, they were unenlightened. Sports were fine for other girls, but not
their
girls. When Mr. Foster, the gym teacher at John Robinson Elementary, decided to start girls' sports teams at the school, he recruited girls from another school! Then the coach had the audacity to ask me and the other cheerleaders to cheer for them.

“Cheer? Why can't we be on the team?” I asked him.

“I didn't know you wanted to play; I thought you all just wanted to cheer,” he said.

“I love being a cheerleader, but I want to play.”

I was annoyed and I didn't care if I got in trouble for talking back. I wasn't going to stand on the sidelines cheering while people kept me from doing something I knew I could do well. However, I didn't play on a girls' basketball team until I was in junior high, when the school district began to sanction the teams and games. The school's supervision of the activities reassured my parents.

The usual hobbies for girls in my hometown at the time were cheerleading, baton twirling, dancing, cooking and sewing, and dating. The most esteemed extracurricular activity was making a debut. The debutante cotillions were the social events of the year in East St. Louis. My classmates talked of nothing else between November and January. But by the time I was old enough to be involved, I was interested solely in athletics. So while we sweated inside the practice gym at Lincoln High in shorts and T-shirts, the debs were either in St. Louis department stores, trying on expensive, beautiful dresses, or sitting at home addressing fancy, printed invitations to their balls.

Afterward, the pictures of the girls in their white gloves, upswept hairdos and fancy ball gowns shared space with news of the latest Lincoln High Tigerette basketball victory and pictures of us in our braids, sweatbands and basketball uniforms, jumping for rebounds and dribbling.

Lesbianism became more than an abstract idea the day a girl on our high school basketball team received a fan letter from a woman that was very explicit. My teammate was freaked out by it. She pulled me aside after practice one day and showed me the note. The letter was shocking. We'd heard stories about women liking other women, instead of men, but none of us had personal experience with it. My shaken teammate asked me if the letter meant she was a lesbian. I told her no and urged her to give it to our coach. We never heard any more about it and I never heard about any other teammate being approached in that way.

I have never felt—I have a hard time even saying the word—
unfeminine
while playing sports. Mr. Fennoy convinced us there was nothing unfeminine about it. “People will try to tell you otherwise, but playing sports won't change your sexual orientation,” he said. “We're trying to give you experiences that will broaden your horizons. You should use sports as a springboard, the way whites do. Through athletics, you can get a scholarship to college, which will propel you into a career and allow you to be whatever you want to be.”

He told us stories about famous female athletes including Wilma Rudolph, a great lady and Olympian. Through his stories, I discovered that Wilma and I had much in common. Like me, Wilma came from a poor background. She was one of twenty-two children. She had scarlet fever and polio as a child and couldn't walk for many years. When she was growing up, the other kids made fun of her and didn't include her in activities because she wore braces on her legs. But she used sports as motivation. She was determined to walk, and eventually Wilma not only walked, she ran—very fast. She played basketball and ran track and was a member of the champion Tigerbelles track team at Tennessee State University. She also won three gold medals in sprint events at the 1960 Olympics in Rome. Eventually, Wilma married and had four children.

The day Mr. Fennoy told me about Wilma, I went directly to the library and found a book about her. At home that night, I sat on my bed and devoured every word. Wilma became my role model that night and has been ever since. She was a superb athlete and a great lady who carried herself with dignity.

The community's reaction to our athletic activities confused and frustrated me. Initially, some parents told their daughters not to get involved in sports and a lot of girls with athletic talent dropped sports altogether in the face of such strong peer and parental pressure. But when our basketball and track teams became successful, those same parents showed up at every competition and cheered their lungs out. I initially thought it meant we were proving that we could run, jump and sweat, then go home, shower, dress up and be treated like the rest of the girls. But attitudes didn't change much.