You Let Some Girl Beat You? (20 page)

“We need people who can dream of things that never were.”
~ John F. Kennedy

Once the Olympics ended, I flew to Cooperstown with Donnie to watch him be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. We'd found out while playing in the All American, a golf tournament put on by Lee Iacocca. The MC, Don's good friend, Howard Cosell, had announced it when Don came up to the first tee. Sandy Koufax was at the same tournament and was pleased to hear that his pitching partner, who'd been passed over a few times, was now going to join him in the Hall of Fame.

It was exciting being in Cooperstown with Donnie, but being anywhere with him was always exciting because he knew so many celebrities from his playing days with the Dodgers.

Just like Pauley Pavilion during the Coach Wooden Era, Dodger stadium was
the
place to be during the 60s, and 70s. Hollywood and baseball were very much intertwined back then, and it wasn't at all unusual to see the likes of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Doris Day, Cary Grant and Dyan Cannon, Frank Sinatra, Charlton Heston, and Tom Selleck. Afterward, Donnie would join some of them for a night on the town.

Donnie had played golf with Frank in the Bing Crosby at Pebble Beach, and was there to tee off when Frank started the Frank Sinatra Celebrity Golf Tournament. It was pretty cool when Donnie introduced me to him, and so many others. He would take me to hear Frank sing before going backstage to say hello. One time Donnie brought me to a gathering at Frank and Barbara's house in the desert, where I met Clint Eastwood, Chuck Conners, Robert Wagner, and Gregory Peck. Even though I didn't run around in the same crowd, I'd competed at the Olympics, and had done enough commercials, and had my face plastered across enough billboards, that they seemed to know who I was. More to the point, they understood and appreciated what I'd accomplished in women's basketball. It was impossible not to be flattered.

They always wanted to know what it was like to compete in the Olympics and wanted to hear my side about my Pacers tryout. I'd tell them it probably wasn't too different from how they felt when they went on stage to perform in front of tens of thousands. Athletes and entertainers have a few things in common; we always want to give our best, we get butterflies before a performance, and we want a suitable platform on which to perform.

For athletes, that means worthy competitors, which is one reason why the first Goodwill Games was so successful. The absence of the elite Soviet and Eastern Block athletes had impacted the level of competition at the ‘84 Olympics, so Ted Turner created the Goodwill Games in part to provide that level of competition that everybody hungered for—athletes and spectators alike.

In 1985, I was one of seven Olympians chosen as Goodwill Ambassadors to travel throughout Europe promoting TBS and the Goodwill Games, which were to take place the following year. I'd be doing double duty because I was also broadcasting the Goodwill women's basketball games. I was grateful to get another high profile, prestigious gig because I'd had to hustle to sell myself again as a broadcaster after coming off the Olympics. Oddly it was always the same thing, “You just worked for ABC doing the Olympics, we can't afford you.” For an entire year, all I'd wanted was a job, and now they were telling me I was over-qualified? But with the Goodwill Games, I finally had that job. But it also meant I'd be spending a lot of time away from Donnie.

Carol Lewis, Terry Shroeder, Teder Bitmore, Rowdy Gaines, Nancy Hogshead, and Willie Banks were the other Goodwill Ambassadors chosen, and together we traveled to Spain, Germany, France, Italy, and England, covering five countries in ten days. We'd fly into Rome, stay two days, then fly into Madrid for dinner, get up the next morning to do a press conference, then leave without spending a second night because Juan Bautista was heading up a revolution. As Goodwill Ambassadors, we didn't want to get in the middle of that mess.

And that wasn't the only hotbed of political uncertainty. NATO missiles were being set up in Western Europe and used as bargaining chips by Reagan during arms talks with the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. It wasn't the greatest time to be traveling abroad, and I was glad when the press tour was over. However, I returned to devastating news.

One of my business managers, told me that the $250,000 I'd earned from the
Superstars,
the ´84 Olympics, and the contracts with Fuji and Buick, was gone.

“I'm so sorry, Annie, I don't know what to tell you. Everyone's been wiped out,” he said, breaking the news as gently as possible.

Donnie and I, and about 900 other athletes, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen, many from the Palm Springs area, had invested in a company that only a few years before seemed to be a sure thing.

Technical Equities board of Directors read like a who's who of the day. Robert Campbell, CEO of Newsweek, and astronaut Eugene Cernan, were among them. High profile players in the world of finance were so certain of TE's return that they happily sunk large sums into the company. When prominent doctors and athletes we knew in the desert did the same, we followed suit. Now word on the street was that the company was filing bankruptcy.

The Bernie Madoff of his day, Harry C. Stern was the founding partner and manager of Technical Equities. Jurors would find that every tax return from 1969 to 1986 had been false—nothing more than one big Ponzi scheme.

My quarter of a million dollars had gone up in smoke. It was a clobbering unlike anything I'd ever experienced as an athlete. If I'd lost a game because we'd been outplayed, or came in second in an event because of an injury, at least there was some sense to it. This was inexplicable. Like a car accident, it came from out of nowhere, causing instant destruction.

I'm young. I can recoup. I've still got my broadcasting career ahead of me,
I told myself. I was still living with Mom when I was in California, so I didn't have the expenses and responsibilities compared to those whose finances had been decimated and feared they couldn't possibly
ever
get that money back (Many years later 60% of investors' funds were returned). I thought about older couples and people who were raising families, like Raiders player, Pete Banaszak, who according to
Sports Illustrated
had lost nearly twice what I had, and was counting on that money to put his kids through college. I felt terrible not just for me, but for them.

Money and I had already established a sketchy track record. I'd botched my $150,000 deal with the Pacers by canceling the contract and then sat out the second year with the WBL waiting to get paid for the first year, not realizing the organization would fold in its third year. I was starting to think maybe I didn't have a green thumb, or a green anything else.
Was this just par for the course?
I'd worked hard to earn what I'd made, but I wondered if fate had decided that money and I simply weren't meant to be together.

However far and wide the Technical Equities' financial meltdown was felt in the world of American athletes, that February, a global meltdown with far more serious and greater reaching repercussions was about to take place in a part of the world I was preparing to visit.

On April 26
^th
, 1986, the Ukraine's Chernobyl Nuclear Power plant's reactor #4 melted down, spewing large quantities of radioactive contamination into the atmosphere. The plume drifted over much of the Western Soviet Union and Europe. Thirty-one deaths were directly attributed to the accident, but everyone was aware of the potential threat the toxic air posed for those living in the region. I had turned thirty-one the month before, and now I was heading to Moscow to broadcast the Goodwill Games for TNT. Like everybody else who found themselves heading to that part of the world, I wondered how my own health would be affected.

When I arrived in Moscow, the first thing I decided was that I wouldn't eat the local food, fearing contamination. There was a microwave in the hotel, so I existed on popcorn and orange drinks bottled somewhere else. I steered clear of milk, vegetables, fruit, and meat. I'd always been able to eat whatever I wanted and not gain a pound. Now I wondered how long I'd last. I missed American food. Heck, I missed food! I also missed home and Donnie, and I wondered when I'd wake up and start missing that $250,000. I wasn't in the greatest of places in my head. But then, the earth wasn't in the greatest of conditions in the universe.

The 1986 Goodwill Games were designed to accomplish something very noble, but because of the nuclear disaster and the escalating arms race, they were playing out against a dark backdrop. Those first few days, I could never have guessed how everything would end up. It had been eleven years since the two countries' athletes had competed on such a world stage—eleven years since the Soviet women had shredded us by thirty-five points.

I was announcing with my old pal Rick Barry and 1956 Gold Medal Olympian and Boston Celtic great, Bill Russell. Like Rick, Bill was also a friend. As basketball greats, they were very familiar with the Soviet women's global domination on the court. But having never lost to the Soviet women themselves, they weren't quite as invested in seeing the U.S. Women's team succeed like I was. That year, 6'8” Anne Donovan was playing for the U.S., and she would negate the size of the Russian giantess, Semjonova. On July 11, under Coach Kay Yow, Donovan, Katrina McClain Johnson, Denise Curry, Cheryl Miller, and Teresa Edwards trounced the world champions 83 to 60, breaking their 152-game winning streak that had lasted twenty-eight years.

I was through the roof and over the moon, and nearly unable to keep my emotions in check. It was a historic day and a long time coming. I had always worn my patriotism on my sleeve, but probably never more than that day. There was a changing of the guard, and it was palpable. I began to tear up at the end, knowing that not only had the U.S. women's team finally beat them, but we'd done it on their home turf. It may have been a game of goodwill, but we were still archrivals, and the competition in Moscow in '86 was as fierce as it had ever been.

Before I did the interview with Anne Donovan, I put on my highest heels so that the cameraman could get us together in the shot, but she still towered over me. I was so proud of her and her teammates. Some thought the Goodwill Games may have even helped pave the way for peace, as Turner had hoped. Months later, Reagan would make his famous speech in West Berlin urging the Russian leader to open the gate and “Tear down this wall.” Eventually Reagan and Gorbachev would sign a pact to reduce nuclear arsenals and eliminate intermediate and shorter-range nuclear missiles—an atomic-age first.

But for now, the U.S. would simply be happy with our showing in Moscow. Among the 142 Gold medal U.S. winners, was Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who broke the heptathlon record with a score of 7,148 points. She would later write in her autobiography that she had decided to attend UCLA after seeing me play on the UCLA Championship Team on TV and after seeing Evelyn Ashford run track and field for the Bruins. Watching two women who had both already become Olympians, each wearing the UCLA jerseys, sold her. I was happy and proud of Jackie, just as I was elated for the US women's basketball team, but more than anything I was glad to be returning home. I was looking forward to some good old American meat, bread, potatoes, and milk. Mostly I was looking forward to seeing Donnie.

Our long phone conversations weren't possible while I'd been traveling. There was no Skype, email, or cell phones. We had both been so busy, and the time difference made it near impossible to connect, so I wrote him letters. The flight home was long. I thought about how I had missed him, how he had asked me so many times to marry him over the years and how I had always said, “just quit asking me.” Even after his divorce, I said no. It was largely because I worried about what he would tell his parents and his daughter, and I didn't think it was a good idea to rush from one marriage straight into another. It had been six years since we had first met, and a tiny part of me wondered whether he would ever ask again.

After the plane touched ground, I made my way through the international terminal to Customs, and there he was, with that great smile and disarming manner that made everyone want to be his friend. We hugged, and all I could think of was how much I had missed him. After we collected my luggage, we drove to a hotel nearby LAX. On the way, I told Donnie about how I'd been surviving on microwave popcorn since the Chernobyl disaster had scared me away from trying anything grown in the region. I told him about the press conferences, the games, how the U.S. women did us proud.

Even with all the traveling I'd done playing basketball, I'd never been to all of the places I'd seen in just the last year. Rome, Paris, London, all of the most romantic places in the world, and at each stop, all I could think was how I had wished Don were there with me. But I'd never missed him more than I had in Moscow.

Finally, we were together after what had seemed like forever. About a half a mile from the hotel, with his left hand gripping the wheel, he reached into his pocket with his right hand and pulled out a little box and handed it to me.

“What do you think?” he said, letting a little grin play out on his face. My mind took a mental picture of how the street lights illuminated the small dimple on either side of his cheeks and the tiny cleft in his chin, and the bits of grey in his full head of hair shimmering.

“What are you asking me?” Of course I knew what he was asking me, but I wanted to hear it again. I wanted to make sure this was really happening, and that this time I was actually, completely ready.

“Will you marry me?”

Hearing those words now, I knew it was right. I knew I couldn't have been more ready. I was so excited that I reached over and gave him the biggest hug and kiss I could muster, almost swerving us right off the road.