A Kind of Grace (17 page)

It was a miserable experience, even when you were in top condition. That day, my lungs and stomach started burning after about ten minutes. I couldn't get enough oxygen, no matter how much I panted. My legs felt like lead and began to sting at the joints. My sides ached. My whole body became as hot as if I were running inside a 100-degree oven. Sweat dripped from every pore, into my eyes and ears and down my neck, back, arms and legs. I felt as if I were ready to collapse. And at that point I wasn't even halfway done.

Coach Moore's words were muffled by the sound of my own labored breathing and the groaning all around me. One girl threw up. After cleaning herself up, she got back in line, knowing she'd have to make up the drills she missed at the end. The rest of us kept going despite the pain and waves of nausea. Each time we slowed down and exceeded the time limit, Coach Moore added on more time.

When it was finally over, we instinctively stooped over and grabbed our knees. Then we dropped to the gym floor, our bodies heaving furiously. Once our breathing returned to normal, we picked ourselves up and dragged our bodies off to the locker room showers.

Coach Moore wasn't always the implacable drill sergeant, though. She checked in with me periodically after practice, offering a heartfelt “How's it going?” or “Everything okay?” and a comforting smile. One day, after I'd been back for several weeks, she called me into her office and I saw her wearing a look of concern. “I'm glad to have you back, don't get me wrong,” she said. “But I'm worried about you. I didn't see you cry at the funeral and I haven't seen you cry since you've been back. When something like this happens, a shocking, traumatic event, you have to unload the grief in order to put it behind you. That's why I thought you needed to take some time off.”

“I'm fine. Everything's okay,” I said quickly, hoping to bring a fast end to the conversation. Coach Moore didn't look convinced. But thankfully, she didn't press the issue.

“Okay, fine, if you say so. But if you ever need to talk about anything, I'm here.”

I thanked her and left. Della, Joyce and Marcella had said much the same thing to me about letting everything out. They called once a week, as did my mother's brother, Uncle John, who also sent me money a couple of times during the semester. Everyone wanted to know how I was feeling, whether I needed anything, whether I wanted to talk about anything. They tried and tried to get me to open up. But I wouldn't do it. I
couldn't.

Shortly after my mother's death, while I was still at home, I had horrifying nightmares about her. Every night for about a week, I woke up in the middle of the night and saw her walking toward me. The visions terrified me so much I couldn't get back to sleep. It got to the point where I was afraid to go to bed. I stayed up late one night and talked to Marcella about it.

“You probably are seeing Mary,” she said. “But you shouldn't be afraid of her. She loved you; she wouldn't hurt you. She probably just wants to say good-bye.”

After that conversation, I stopped having nightmares. But my lonely agony didn't end. I'd never allowed myself to express my profound sadness over my mother's death. From the moment I said good-bye to her that day at the hospital and walked out of her room, through her funeral and burial, I shut down emotionally. I blocked out as much of that awful day at the hospital as I could. For years I didn't know the exact date she died. I never cared to know, because I didn't want to focus on her death. Even now, I carry some of the sorrow with me. The mere thought of her death still brings tears to my eyes.

With so many people falling apart around me, I had to be strong for everyone else and to lend them my shoulder. My sisters especially needed me for that. At one point during the funeral, Angie got up and ran screaming out of the church. She ran all the way to our house on Piggott Avenue and refused to leave.

The wound Momma's death left was still raw when I returned to UCLA. But no matter how much it ached, I just couldn't let myself dwell on it. The thought of letting my guard down and confronting those emotions scared me. Yet I could feel an ocean of sorrow welling up inside me. It weighed on me more and more, day after day. I was still in deep mourning.

I tried to keep the feelings dammed. If I let even one drop seep out, I knew the gates would burst and I wouldn't be able to stop the flood of tears and pain. I was afraid it would drown me. I kept my feelings pent up for the entire spring semester and during the summer back at home. But I couldn't block out the pain forever.

Back at school for my sophomore year, toward the end of the quarter in December, I was sitting at the pregame meal in a restaurant with my teammates. We were playing a game on the road, our last one before Christmas. The conversation turned to what everyone was getting and giving as presents. One girl started talking about the presents she was giving her parents. She was laughing and smiling. Everyone was happy. But a wave of sorrow surged through me. I realized I didn't have a mother to buy presents for anymore and that there would be no more Christmases with her.

Before I could catch myself, tears filled my eyes. My throat tightened. My heart actually hurt. The sadness just overwhelmed me. I began to sob and moan out loud. There was no use trying to fight back the tears, they were pouring out of me. My whole body was shaking. I couldn't get myself to stop crying. My teammates all jumped up and rushed to comfort me. I continued to sob for several minutes, my face buried in my hands.

I was finally crying over Momma. All of the talk about the holidays and parents had been the trigger. I remembered how just a year ago I'd wanted to be with her for the holidays but money and geography kept us apart. Now, a year later, I couldn't be with her because she was gone. The longing and sense of loss finally became unbearable.

Coach Moore and Necie led me into the bathroom. Coach Moore said she was relieved. She'd been waiting for me to break down for almost a year. Now that I had faced my grief and given in to it, I felt like my burden had been lifted. I was finally ready to move on.

13

College Life

A
lthough I excelled in two sports at UCLA, I didn't have any trouble juggling academics and athletics. I took my classwork seriously and achieved my goal of completing my education, graduating with a degree in history in 1986, after taking the 1983–84 academic year off to train for the Olympics.

I went to class until about 2:30 every day. Then I headed to study hall, where I received tutoring at a room inside the athletic complex. I preferred individual tutoring to the group sessions. As far as I was concerned, the group meetings were a waste of time. The other athletes who participated talked and made wisecracks. I got much more accomplished in one-on-one sessions.

The basketball team practiced every afternoon from 4:00 to 6:30. Following practice and dinner, I returned to mandatory study hall from 7:30 to 9:30. I also spent Saturday mornings in the library studying, even on mornings before our games.

Attending lecture classes at UCLA was like going to the movies or a play. They were conducted in auditoriums that held 300 people. The first time I went to one as a freshman—it was either a history or political science class—and saw so many people, I thought I'd taken a wrong turn. Lincoln High had over 1,000 students, but there weren't more than forty people in any one class at a time. And I knew all my classmates and teachers. At UCLA that was impossible. It was completely anonymous and impersonal. Not that it really mattered. No one took attendance in those big lectures, or called on us in classes. The professors talked. We took notes. That was the drill. On exam sheets we printed our names, but the most significant item, besides our answers, was our student identification numbers. The ID number was the only way to find my test score when the pages full of numbers were posted outside the professor's door.

I didn't mind being just another number. I really didn't want the teachers to know too much about me. My older teammates warned me not to advertise the fact that I was an athlete. Don't wear your sweats to class, they told me. And whatever you do, they said, don't tell the teaching assistants—who met with small groups of students twice a week to review in detail the topics covered in lectures—that you're a basketball player. My teammates said some teachers resented athletes and gave them a harder time in class because they expected us to be lazy dummies looking for special treatment and passing grades.

Their warnings scared me so much, I was jittery in my classes the first couple of weeks. I sat there in my jeans and logo-less shirts and sweaters, trying to be inconspicuous, furiously taking down every word the professor said. My teammates had also scared me into studying hard. That's one reason I spent so much time in the library and with the tutors. Coach Moore scheduled most of the games requiring extended travel on holidays and quarter breaks so that we didn't miss much class. Still, with daily practices and games twice a week, I wanted to stay on top of my studies and not get behind. Above all, I didn't want to flunk out of school and have to go back home and face those people who told me I couldn't make it at UCLA.

As time went on during freshman year, it was harder to maintain my anonymity. Even though I was a first-year player, I was a starter and I played very well. After the Delta State game, I got back into the groove. I played my best games of the season over the next month. Against San Diego State, I scored 15 points and had 8 rebounds; I piled up 14 points and 7 rebounds in the game with Arizona, and collected 18 points and 7 rebounds when we played Arizona State. Increasingly, my name was mentioned and my picture appeared in stories about the women's team in the campus paper, the
Daily Bruin.
Also, six of our games during the season were doubleheaders with the men's team. We played first, and their games followed. Attendance for our games was higher than usual on those occasions, and more students saw me. I was a Freshman All-America in basketball and received the All-University Athlete Award, given to UCLA's top all-around athlete, as a sophomore in 1982 and as a junior in 1983. Upon returning to campus for the 1984–85 school term to finish my degree requirements after the Olympics, I was voted All-University Athlete for a third time and won the Broderick Cup as the nation's best female collegiate athlete. With all of that publicity, more and more people recognized me. But I didn't suffer because of it. Quite the contrary. During those years, as I walked from one building to another or when I entered a classroom, a few students said, “Nice game,” “Congratulations,” or “Hi, Jackie.”

Despite what my teammates told me, I didn't think being recognized was so bad. No one said a negative word to me—at least not to my face. And I didn't feel that teachers singled me out or treated me any differently in class. I had great relationships with many of my history and speech professors. I earned As, Bs and a few Cs and graduated with a B average.

It was shaping up as an exciting time to be a basketball player at UCLA. The women's team was young and strong and we expected to be one of the best teams in the country for the next four years. We ended my freshman year with a 29–7 record that put us second in the Western Collegiate Athletic Conference, just one game behind Cal State–Long Beach. In the post-season national women's collegiate tournament, we surprised everyone by coming within a game of making the Final Four.

The men's team had gone to the Final Four the season before I got there and lost in the final game to Louisville. People were expecting great things from the team and coach Larry Brown in the coming years. (The team's name was subsequently deleted from the official tournament record for that year because several players were involved in NCAA rules violations.)

The guys on the team were great players and great fun to be around. When we played doubleheaders against the University of Southern California and the two Arizona schools, the men's and women's squads traveled together. We got to know each other pretty well. I felt like I was a part of one big team.

We were regarded as equals by the athletic department. We weren't treated like stepchildren, the way some women's teams at other schools were during that time. The women's team had the same privileges and used the same facilities the men's team did. We lifted weights in the same room. Our locker rooms were the same size and just as nicely appointed. We stayed in the same first-rate hotels the men did. On the road, we ate in the same restaurants, rather than in diners and fast-food joints. And, like the men, we could order anything we wanted. There were no spending limits. Money was not an issue for the basketball program. It was a far cry from my junior high school days with the Railers when I had to scrounge for nickels and dimes to afford a McDonald's hamburger. And it was light years away from the political battles at Lincoln High over practice time in the gym.

I later found out, when I joined the track team in the spring, how different being on the basketball team was from being on other UCLA teams. Basketball was a big, big deal in Westwood. Because of the winning tradition established during John Wooden's coaching tenure, a period during which the Bruins won ten NCAA Championships over twelve years, including seven consecutive titles between 1967 and 1973, the basketball teams received generous alumni and athletic department support. At most big universities, football is king. But at UCLA, football and basketball shared the throne. And because of Title IX, which required university athletic departments to give women's teams the same things they gave the men, my teammates and I shared in the riches equally.

I believe our high self-esteem contributed to our success. We had winning seasons each year I played with the Bruins. We never duplicated the success we had during my freshman year, but I believe that was mostly because both Long Beach and USC, our conference rivals, had some of the finest players in the country. LaTaunya Pollard of Long Beach set a single-season scoring record in 1983, an amazing 907 points. Cheryl Miller, the most heavily recruited female high school basketball player in the nation, joined the USC squad in 1983 and dominated on both ends of the court.