You Let Some Girl Beat You? (15 page)

“If you quell your own anger, your real enemy will be slain.”
~ Nagarjuna

In January, 1980, we played a home game against the Iowa Cornets. Molly Bolin was one of the best shooters in the league, scoring an average 34 points per game, and this particular night she was on fire. It was going down to the wire with about a minute and thirty seconds left in the game when I went in for a lay-up and got knocked down hard. I'd been labeled the WBL's best, so many of the other players felt compelled to knock me clean off the floor and into the next zip code. I'd get double-teamed and fouled on nearly every single shot and end up with a 35% shooting rate for the season.

My nose started to bleed. Howie called a timeout, and helped me up. “Annie, I'm sorry but you got to come out.”

“Get away from me.”

“But Annie…”

“Get away from me, Howie. I get paid to
play!
”

I let our trainer, Ron Linfonte, clean me up and pack my nose with gauze to stem the blood flow before running back onto the court. I was painfully conscious of what it was costing the Gems to sign me, and I never wanted to let them down, especially after that first press conference debacle. The front of my jersey was stained pink, but I'd had my nose broken plenty of times, and I didn't think it was broken now. We won that game. Afterward, I apologized to Howie. I wasn't looking for absolution, I just needed him to know that he deserved better.

“Honey, you don't have to be sorry. You're one hell of a competitor.” Even though we had our differences, Howie had this great Philly accent and kind face, which made him such a likeable guy. He was like a Jewish father calling us all “honey” and wanting to protect us. He never went by Howard, it was always Howie. He was also a terrific coach—he was the only coach to bring Trenton Community College to two men's championships before coaching the Gems. As a tough player himself, Howie broke every record in the small Philadelphia school he attended, and his jersey was the first to go up in the rafters of the gym.

Ultimately, Howie and I both just wanted the same thing—to win. Later, the N.J. Gems would fire him when he refused to let a player continue to play after suffering a concussion. Howie wanted to win, but not at the expense of his team's health. The WBL, which was often criticized for firing coaches at breakneck speed, saw things differently. They needed return visitors, happy spectators, paying customers, and if it meant allowing those customers to watch the aftermath of a deadly crash, so be it. Soon, the league and I would be on a collision course of our own.

But first the Gems were scheduled to play in California in February, and that was a ray of hope. I would finally see my family. The game was in San Francisco, and everyone drove up to see the game. We all went to dinner afterwards, and then my older sister, Cathy, walked me back to my hotel.

“You've really changed.” The look on her face made it painfully clear this wasn't meant as a compliment.

I suddenly felt exposed. I'd been looking forward to seeing my family for weeks, but her observation made me fearful that my frustration with the Gems was seeping out through every pore and coming across…as what? A sense of entitlement? Was I suddenly acting too big for my britches? Cathy seemed to think so, and I worried that it was true. After all, we weren't raised to think that way. I tried explaining that I was just aggravated by the level of some of the talent in the league and it was affecting me because, almost overnight, I'd gone from anticipating a career in the NBA to playing in the WBL.

Cathy's comment made me think. Yes, the adjustment had been tough. I felt like I'd packed for Harvard and ended up at Podunk U, and now I was acting like a spoiled brat because of it. Maybe I resented the fact that I wasn't playing with the Pacers. I tried not to rehash it, but every now and then I thought about Slick and what I considered to be a raw deal. Whether I belonged with the Pacers or not, whether Slick was right or whether I was right, I had to face facts that it was what it was, and there was nothing to gain by dwelling on it—or acting like a little horror.

I was playing for the Gems now. And every time I went out there I felt I needed to demonstrate to the world exactly why I'd been asked to try out for the Pacers, to prove that I was capable of playing as well as some of the NBA players, to dispel any suspicions that my bid was just a publicity stunt.

I was upset with myself. Nothing had changed from that kid on the playground who spent her youth trying to prove that she could play with the big boys.

But just as with every other situation in my life, God had closed a door only to open a window. Don appeared at our next game.

We were playing at the convention center in Long Beach. I'm not sure if it was because Don was there, or Cathy's comment weighed heavily on my mind, or the fact that my family had followed us down from San Francisco, but I wasn't having a good game. I got a technical and picked up three quick fouls in the first two minutes.

Mt. Vesuvius was threatening to blow again, and I took my frustration out on the official. “Cripes! That was a clean play. What do you need glasses?” I kicked my chair, growing hotter and hotter by the second. Ironically enough, we had been in Long Beach when Coach Kenny had first warned me about my temper and the importance of controlling it. I tried to contain myself outwardly. Inside, I seethed.

When the game ended, everyone went to my brother, Mark, and sister-in-law, Frannie's, house for a party, including Don. The moment I stepped through the door, I felt the tension melt away, and I started to relax. Here I was among my clan, feeling right at home, as though New Jersey were some distant planet.

Some of the guests' behavior around Don surprised me. My family wasn't easily impressed, having been around their share of famous people, so I hadn't expected the guests' sense of awe. Many seemed stunned that Don would come to one of my games, let alone show up at the after-party. I wasn't sure what the big deal was. I still didn't comprehend the impact the Dodgers' legacy had on Southern Californians, and maybe Don found my naiveté refreshing. I was too young to appreciate what he'd accomplished in baseball. Had he been a basketball player, it would have been a whole different story.

I enjoyed his company and felt comfortable around him because he seemed so entirely comfortable around me. At UCLA, if a guy actually worked up the nerve to ask me out on date, I got the sense he was behaving a certain way because I was David Meyers's little sister. Later, when I asked Marques Johnson why he or any of the other guys never asked me out in college, he said, “Because Dave would have beat us up.”

Don was so comfortable in his own skin and that put me at ease. He knew who he was as a person, and he didn't care what anybody else thought. I got the sense he never felt the need to prove himself to anyone, while I'd been trying to prove myself worthy from day one. Oddly, I didn't feel like I needed to prove anything to Don. The confidence he exuded seemed to spill out onto everyone around him, and now it was spilling over onto me.

The sheer size of my family and their exuberance could be overwhelming, but I figured he should get a picture of what I'm all about—that family means everything to me. When the party ended, I thanked him for coming and we went our separate ways—he, back to ABC and broadcasting for the Angels, and I, back to the East Coast to play for the Gems, where my frustrations with the WBL continued.

One of those frustrations was the high number of technical fouls and their resulting fines. The coaches were going to end up being bled dry if the players weren't careful. While the fine for a technical in the NBA and WBL was the same, $75.00, the WBL coaches were paid roughly $10,000 a year, and the NBA coaches were getting closer to $250,000. The owners didn't seem to care too much about requests to reduce the amount of the fines, so nearly half of the WBL's coaches would end up being suspended at one time or another for unpaid technicals.

Those were the kinds of rules which seemed to lack common sense. In all likelihood, the high fines in the WBL were the result of a lack of understanding of the costs associated with running a national operation. They hadn't considered how expensive it was to rent NBA stadiums, pay salaries, and accrue travel expenses. We'd be traveling during the mid-season, and a game would suddenly get canceled. It was like the movie
Leatherheads
.

To highlight the point, we had one incident where we flew to New Orleans to play at Tulane University. The flight got in around 1:00 p.m. for a 7:00 p.m. game. After the game, we'd turn around and fly back to Jersey. The problem was what to do with us in those hours before the game started. We weren't about to spend six hours on the streets of New Orleans.

“What do you mean you don't have rooms for us?”

Our owners had nowhere for the twelve of us to hang out in until the game started. So I went to the other players and told them I'd pay for two rooms so we'd have somewhere to put our feet up…and mentioned that I'd take any contributions. Everyone started pulling fives and tens out of their pockets and duffle bags. Of course, this made the Gems management look foolish, so they eventually coughed up the money for two rooms at the Holiday Inn, which came to about $100.

Another time we were playing in Houston and didn't have time to shower after the game. They told us to throw on our sweats over our uniforms and to hightail it out to a bus, which had been assigned a police escort to the airport so we could catch the last flight out of Newark. The point was that it saved the Gems from spending money on hotel rooms. As female athletes, we were used to being treated like second class citizens, but the lack of organization and forethought within the WBL was hard to take, especially after spending time with the Pacers and seeing how things were done in the front office.

In retrospect, I think those involved on the financial end simply didn't understand the concept of a national women's professional basketball league let alone calculating the costs. It didn't take long before teams started folding, and more and more salaries went unpaid. It signaled the beginning of the end, and they were only their second year into it.

Not all my memories with the Gems were bad, however. Some of my teammates became good friends. Donna Geils, from Queens college, went on to become Donna Orender, the president of the WNBA for six years. She and I were a lot alike in that she could spend hours shooting hoops if something was bothering her, using that time to work things out in her head. Faye and Kaye Young were close to my heart because I'd played against them my senior year at UCLA and always thought they were nice and good players. They played for Hall of Fame coach, Kay Yow, at N.C. State. The Young Twins had a national commercial for Dannon Yogurt and became known as the Dannon Yogurt Twins. Their national exposure was helpful in promoting the WBL, which had little, if any, advertising budget.

The WBL loved it when any of its players received national exposure because it helped generate interest in the league. They used the model-like Young twins to its advantage, just as they had capitalized on two extremely attractive players, Molly Bollin and Jane Fincher. Unfortunately, even that became problematic for the league, as Kara Porter chronicled in her book
Mad Seasons
. The perception that attractive blondes were heavily favored in the WBL was becoming widespread, and cries of racism from within the ranks came up all the time, especially with regard to marketing. So it probably didn't help that I had done the 7-Up campaign with Magic Johnson, Sugar Ray Leonard, and some other big sports names, along with a Fuji Film campaign, which had my face on billboards across the country.

Various team owners had publicly commented that the promotion was a way to generate ticket sales, along with trying to counteract female athlete stereotypes at a time when engaging in aggressively competitive endeavors was still considered “unfeminine.” Putting too much stock in my looks always seemed like an investment with diminishing returns. I was a basketball player, and I couldn't fathom that being sexy was part of the job description. Professional women's basketball, like professional men's basketball, may have been about putting fans in the seats, but I wanted to do it with my talent.

As for the preconception that female athletes were, by and large, gay, that's still something that most women's sports have to contend with. In team sports, whether volleyball, basketball, softball, or soccer, there's a bond among the players which is no different than the men. They all just want to win. Sports, and especially team sports, creates a camaraderie, a tight-knit group of young athletes. Everyone may have his or her own role, but together they have a common goal. They are eating together, showering together, traveling on the road together, and I don't know whether this camaraderie leads to a
misperception
of same sex relationships, or whether it, in fact, engenders same-sex relationships. What I do know is the presumption that many female athletes were gay was never extended to male athletes in the 60s and 70s. If anything, it was just the opposite—male athletes were considered prototypes of masculinity.

If anyone had any questions about my sexuality during my time with the Gems, they were probably answered the first time Don showed up at a game in Jersey when he and Bob Uecker were sent to the East Coast to lay down voice-overs for ABC.

Ever since the party at Mark and Frannie's, Don and I had been talking on the phone at night after games or practice. It had been nice to have someone to share my frustrations with, to laugh with. Every day I looked forward to hearing his voice. It was even more thrilling to see him here, in the flesh, and the Gems had won, to boot.

It was nearly midnight by the time I got out of the gym. I'd showered and let my adrenaline simmer down so I could finally eat. Adrenaline is a great thing, and every player gets amped before a game. But knowing Donnie was there kicked my adrenaline into high gear. In addition to that, I had a routine of not eating four hours before a game, so by now I was starved. The only place open at that late hour was Howard Johnsons, so the three of us shared a brown plastic-upholstered booth and Formica table, ordered, and waited for our meals.