You Let Some Girl Beat You? (5 page)

“You're braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”
~ Christopher Robin to Pooh

I was born in San Diego in 1955 with two X chromosomes. Things might have been a lot easier had that not been the case. Then again, if I'd been born a boy, I suppose someone else would have become the first woman to do a lot of things. So, as with everything in my life, I thank God for all of it—exactly as it was.

I may have been born in San Diego, but the hospital room was where my tour of the seaside city began and ended. Other than a short stint in Philadelphia, I grew up in the Catholic school system outside of Chicago in Wheaton, Illinois before moving to Orange County, California, where I attended public school at Arbolita Elementary because all the Catholic Schools were full.

Gone was the camouflage of the Catholic school uniform. Suddenly, individuality was inescapable—not so great for girls like me who had little taste or interest in fashion. Skirts and dresses were still required for girls back then, but I made sure I wore shorts underneath so I could play the kind of basketball and football with the boys that I was used to playing with my brothers and their friends. I wanted all my bases—and everything else—covered, since I was always the new kid.

I hated change as a kid, and each time I started a new school it began with my being pried from my mother's leg like a vine from a tree. It was a natural course of events, since my dad worked as District Manager for Sears. We'd moved so much, that by the fourth grade I'd grown accustomed to the stares of my classmates. I'd played the fish-out-of-water character so many times at so many schools that it finally stopped hurting. It was like aversion therapy for the meek and shy.

Now if I wanted to play basketball, I didn't wait for someone's invitation. Instead, when the recess bell rang, I concentrated on being first to the ball bin where the basketballs were kept, which meant the boys
had
to share the courts with me. One recess, Jim, the class jock, came up and challenged me to a 100-yard race to the fence at the other end of the field.

“You think you can beat me?”

Yeah. Probably
. Students nearby gathered around as Jim and I lined up on the edge of the grass. Someone yelled, “Ready, set, go!” and we took off for the fence with a dozen or so kids cheering.
This will make them like me
was my boneheaded, ten-year-old, thinking as I reached the chain-linked fence ahead of him and waited for him to catch up. But when Jim got to the fence, he turned around and started back, yelling, “We're going the other way, too!”

The little sneak had a jump on me, so I tore out, caught up, then passed him to reach our starting point with everyone screaming and cheering, while Jim pulled up behind me.

“We tied! Didn't we, Annie? It was a tie.” He stood there panting, looking me square in the eyes, daring me to say otherwise.

We both knew I'd beat him, so why should I pretend I hadn't? I didn't lose to my brothers unless they beat me fair and square, and even then, I hated it. But here, I was the new kid and more than anything, I just wanted to be accepted. I looked at Jim, who was still huffing and puffing like he'd just finished a marathon instead of a 100-yard dash, and then looked down at the ground, weighing my options. I finally kicked the dirt and just walked away.

In that moment, I'd broken some unspoken Meyers code of ethics that said you
never
gave less than your all. You
never
gave up, and you
never
spoke anything but the truth. It felt rotten, like I was the one who'd cheated. But it was either that or break a much greater, universal rule—the cardinal rule of school playgrounds everywhere—the one that said girls don't beat boys.

It was a rule among my teachers, too. It wasn't uncommon to hear, “Annie, you know you're not supposed to be playing with the boys,” whenever one caught me on the field during lunch with a football safely tucked between my left ribcage and arm, going in for a touchdown like my life depended on it. And then, in a pained way, as if I'd committed some unspeakable profanity, she'd add, “It's not ladylike.”

I wanted to scream. W
ho am I hurting? What's the point of being ladylike on a playground?
Having been raised to be respectful, I said nothing. But her rebuke elicited a powerful sensation of shame.
“Not ladylike” means she's thinks I'm acting like a boy. But why are jumping, running, competing, winning, and all of those fun things, strictly allowed for boys?
I wouldn't dare ask. Instead, I lowered the ball, along with my head, and simply walked away. It had become my custom.

That same year, I learned that not all teachers were alike and that maybe I wasn't so unusual after all, when one of them suggested I do my fourth grade book report on Babe Didrikson Zaharias. At last, here was a girl who could beat the boys just like I could and she didn't care whether it was lady-like or not. That pb&j- stained paper-back became as much a staple in my hands at night as a basketball was during the day, further solidifying my dreams. If she could become an Olympic athlete, so could I. I also learned from Babe's brashness.
Who cared if not everyone at school understood my love of sports? Everyone at home sure did.

Athletic competition was a staple in our family, like one of the four food groups, or the 11
^th
commandment: Thou Shalt Honor Thy Desire to Compete. My father had played basketball for Marquette, and my mother wasn't only athletic, but she was quite possibly the original soccer mom. “Hurry up, we're gonna be late,” was her battle cry on the way to a game, which was no small feat with eleven children, all involved in sports. My guess is she put 100,000 miles on that brown-paneled station wagon every two or three years. It was simply the way our family worked.

Patricia Burke Meyers was patient to the point of saintliness, but make a bad call during a game, or block one of her kids' shots, and she'd scream loud and long enough to rattle the bleachers and frighten every bird out of every tree within a half-mile radius. And if you think the birds were freaked out, you should have seen the faces on those refs and other parents.

Mom was our greatest fan. Somehow she managed to be at Patty's softball games, Mark and Tom's football games, Cathy's swim meets, David's basketball games, Jeff's Little League games, Susie's singing recitals, Kelly's basketball games, Coleen's soccer games, Bobby's tennis matches, and my track-meets—all in the same week, and sometimes several in one day.

And at each event, every official knew who Mrs. Meyers was. “Mrs. Meyers, are we going to have a good game today?” the refs would ask gingerly.

“I don't know,” she'd respond, arching one eyebrow. Then she'd look them straight in the face with her Irish-Catholic laser-beam focus that could pierce steel and say, “You tell
me
.”

She never complained about having to drive a half-hour each way to get me to my West Covina AAU track team, where I was setting Southern California high jumping records. The team would enter me into every possible event just to rack up as many points as possible. I'd compete against girls three, four, even five years older, but I loved it. My parents knew I'd dreamed of competing in the Olympics as a track athlete, just like Babe. They allowed David and me to teach ourselves to high jump in the entry way and living room by pulling down pillows and mattresses, where we would jump over strategically placed chairs onto the stuffing below. Then I would run the stairs and jump rope with ankle weights, and do slides for lateral quickness—anything to make my legs stronger.

My parents were aware that I hoped to compete in other sports on other teams, but the problem was there were no organized after school sports programs for kids in the 60s and 70s. When one was finally developed for boys, my parents went through some elaborate measures to clear my playing with the school district. Coaxing, threatening, pleading, signing endless releases of liability, filling out endless reams of paperwork, whatever it took, Pat and Bob Meyers weren't above it. Yet as busy as they were, not only did they never complain, but they never even let me know that it took any bureaucratic arm-wrestling. In fifth and sixth grade I became the first girl to play on the all-boys after school sports team. And if anyone had a problem with a girl playing on a boys' team, well they knew better than to let any of the Meyers get wind of it.

Around this same time, it became clear that we were actually, finally, staying put, which allowed for some routine to seep its way into our lives. Every Sunday it was the same routine; first we'd attend Mass, then my mother would make a huge brunch of pancakes, eggs, bacon, sausage, muffins, the works—all of it, tirelessly homespun from scratch. Like so many other Sundays, I changed out of my dress and patent leathers into David's hand-me-down jeans so I could tag along with him and his friends, who were riding their bikes to the park to play basketball.

But this time, David said something I'd never forget. “Why do you always have to follow me?”

David realized how much I idolized him, even when he was making fun of me for shooting hoops with two hands. I knew he didn't mean anything by it. I wore my blond hair short because it made it easier to play sports, but it also sort of made me look like him, and he seemed to think that was cute. He never minded me tagging along before.

“You're a girl, Annie! Act like one!” He hopped back on his bike and raced to catch up to his friends. I watched and waited for him to turn around, but he never did. The dust stung my eyes as he tore off. At least that's what I told my mom when she asked if I'd been crying. With so many children and a husband who was often on the road, she didn't need anything extra to worry about. She didn't need to know that those seven words coming from David hit the bull's-eye, where thousands of similar words from others had only skirted along the target's border. I didn't want her fretting about my feelings, and maybe I was also a little embarrassed by what David had said. But I shouldn't have been. Not in front of my own mother. When it came to the larger issue of how a daughter should behave, it took more than a wardrobe choice to concern Pat Meyers.

A girl in jeans with short hair who preferred playing basketball with the boys may have worried other moms, but not mine. There was never any assumption in our family that a girl who wanted to play sports was anything other than athletic.

While some folks in our neighborhood may have thought my clothes and behavior odd, conversation in our family never stooped to speculation about what others thought. How could it when we were so busy talking about things that really mattered: sports, politics, or being busy doing homework and chores? While everyone knew how girls were
supposed
to behave, I knew that I wasn't the same as most girls. I was a tomboy, and that was just fine with me. What I couldn't stand was that all of a sudden it might
not
be okay with David.

But if I wasn't playing basketball with my older brother and his friends as much, I was playing even more of it with the sixth grade boys' team at school.

“Ann Meyers emerges the unlikely leader to bring home the championship in the La Habra City School District basketball tournament,” read the headline in one of the local papers above a photo of me holding a trophy surrounded by my all-male teammates.

Less than three months later, national headlines would bring the country to its knees.

It was June of 1968, and Bobby Kennedy was at the Ambassador Hotel where he'd opened his speech by congratulating his friend, Don Drysdale, whose shut-out streak was capturing the attention of Angelinos everywhere. “I hope to have the same success with my campaign here in California.” Hours later, he was dead.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, earlier that same day, the 6'6”, thirty-one-year-old, Don Drysdale was pitching his sixth straight shut-out game for the Los Angeles Dodgers, ultimately beating the Pirates 5-0. Radios across the southland were tuned in to the game.

No pitcher had ever gone fifty-eight innings without giving up a run. The closest anyone had come was Walter Johnson, who pitched fifty-five shutout innings back in 1913. Certainly, I had an idea who Drysdale and Koufax were, since we'd been living in Southern California for a few years now and the Brooklyn Dodgers had become the Los Angeles Dodgers nearly a decade earlier. But I was more of a Giants fan because that's who my brothers followed. I especially liked Willie Mays and Willie McCovey. We collected baseball cards for the bubble gum. But even with that, the players' stats were a lot less exciting to us than the sound the cards made against the spokes on our bikes. Baseball just wasn't as important to me as some of the other sports I played.

Now the game was over and it was another Dodger triumph. Southern Californians celebrated with no inkling of the tragedy that would take place later that evening, just as at 13, I couldn't know that I would grow up to marry Donnie, or that he would carry around in his back pocket a tape recording of Robert Kennedy's address that evening for several years to come.

While I grasped the importance of a no-hitter on the one hand, and was saddened by the assassination of someone who appeared to be a great man on the other, I really couldn't think much beyond my own dreams of making the Olympics someday. Until then, I would simply continue navigating my way through puberty—tricky for a girl like me who could still beat the boys.

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best,
night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
~ E.E. Cummings

Junior high was when everything started changing. I continued to compete at sports, but now I did it wearing blue eye shadow. I also let my hair grow. I wanted to look pretty like my older sister, Cathy, but it was David's comment that set the transformation in motion. I wanted to be like others girls and have boys start noticing me for more than just the way I hit my jumper, went long for a pass, or because I had set a High Jump record at the Junior Olympics.

While making the Olympics in the High Jump event was still my dream, I liked the idea of playing just one sport as much as Liz Taylor liked the idea of marrying just one man. So once I turned thirteen and became old enough, I joined the same AAU Basketball team that my oldest sister, Patty, was on. By my freshman year in high school I was also playing volleyball, softball, field hockey, tennis, and badminton.

Whenever I couldn't find anyone to practice with, I practiced alone. Because I was so shy growing up, my imagination helped me a lot. When I was by myself shooting hoops, in my head I was always taking the last shot with the clock winding down. I was playing against the NBA greats of the day, and swish!
Meyers makes the winning shot.
Or I would step up to the free-throw line, down one, and I had to make two free-throws to win the game.

When I ran around a track, I pretended to be racing against someone like Wilma Rudolph. If I was hitting the tennis ball against the garage door, my imagination had me volleying against Billie Jean King before a crowd of thousands.

There simply weren't enough hours in the day to compete at all the sports I loved, and there was no way to devote the necessary time to tennis when the demands from the various teams I belonged to were becoming even more intense. My coaches allowed me to miss practice in one sport, knowing I had a match in another, but missing practices in tennis will only take you so far. I never got better than becoming the #2 player, and by now I was used to being #1. It was a painful lesson in focus and the necessary reduction that comes at a certain point in almost every athlete's life. I loved tennis, but not enough to give up the other sports I loved, especially since my high school was known for its basketball program.

While I was a freshman at Sonora High, David was a senior—but not just any senior. He was the star 6'6” starting forward. Since I played just about every sport the school offered, I was in the paper a lot. But each article about me would start, “Ann Meyers, sister of David Meyers…”It was great that my oldest sister, Patty, had been a star basketball player and championship winner at Cal State Fullerton, and my older brother, Mark, had been a star football player at UC Berkeley, but David was there at Sonora
with me
, so there was no degree of separation. The idea of being in high school with the brother I still idolized had sounded great, but the reality was something different.

The high school star, the MVP, the team captain, the CIF Champion was my brother. It was like having to stand next to a giant, and I felt small and inconsequential, certain that the only reason anyone bothered to speak to me at Sonora was because I was David Meyers's little sister. So when Darlene May, the PE coach at Cornelia Connelly, an all-girl Catholic High School in Anaheim, asked me to transfer my sophomore year, I gave it some serious thought.

Darlene had played sports with my sister, Patty, and was the first woman to officiate a men's international game. She didn't stop there; she also became the first female to officiate an Olympic women's basketball game when she refereed at the '84 Olympics in Los Angeles. Dar not only extended the invitation to me, but convinced another girl, Nancy Dunkle, to transfer along with me. Nancy and I had known each other from junior high where we'd both played on the same sports teams. She had the prettiest skyhook you've ever seen, very akin to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's hook shot, and eventually made a name for herself in the world of women's basketball. Nancy and I were like two peas in a pod in that we both played every sport available, though Nancy towered over me at about 6'1”.

“Now we've got the makings for a basketball dynasty,” Dar said once we both transferred. Sure enough, the Connelly Cadettes quickly dominated the high school girls' basketball landscape, raking up the honors. Suddenly female cagers weren't unusual at all.

Suddenly we were cool.

“Women's lib being what it is, it should be noted that the most successful high school basketball team in CIF was an all-girl school from Orange County,” the
Los Angeles Times
wrote about us in April of '72. Of course, Nancy and I didn't even know what women's lib meant, we were just happy every time our names were mentioned in the newspapers. We were the two star players and thick as thieves—thieves who could steal the ball as well as any guy we knew, and
better
than some.

I should have been over the moon. Yet every day, after carpooling to and from Connelly in my twice handed-down '66 VW Bug that sputtered like a cranky mule, I'd cry once I got home. But it wasn't because of basketball, or Nancy, or my car. I loved that car. It was because I was also on the Volleyball team at Connelly where the coach just happened to be my sister, Patty.

“Don't feel well? Too bad. Sprained ankle? Go tell someone who cares.” Patty was like Vince Lombardi; she only knew one way to get things done, and that was to play all-out, or go home. She seemed especially tough where I was concerned, maybe so no one could accuse her of favoritism. I'd end up crying to my mom daily (something I rarely did when my brothers were rough on me), and then she would come down hard on Patty, calling her up on the phone, yelling, “Why are you picking on Annie?”

Eight years older than I, Patty was the firstborn, and she'd always been stubborn and strong as a bull. But that was because she had to be tough. It was women like Patty who laid the groundwork for me and others like me. Patty knew what she wanted and went after it from the get-go, and made things happen through sheer will. If Patty said she was going to play pro softball some day, you knew she'd do it. Patty could do everything.

Later, in college and AAU ball, she'd come home after playing twenty-inning games in shorts, sporting huge raw raspberries on her thighs and calves from sliding into bases. She'd crawl into bed, exhausted. The next morning, the sheets and mattress were covered with blood and puss, but she never complained. She saw how quickly labels were affixed to women who complained: moody, crybaby, can't handle the heat, just not
cut out
for the task. Not Patty. There were no excuses with her. One time she came home from a game with one of her eyes popped out of its socket and my mom had to pop it back in. All Patty could say was “Hurry up, I gotta go play.”

I admired her—how could I not? She was the kind of woman who could change her own tire and believed that other women should be able to do the same in case something happened. In fact, while Patty was coaching volleyball at Connelly, she was also teaching Driver's Ed, so she would have her students go out to the parking lot and change the tires of her car. Darlene, my basketball coach and Patty's good friend, thought it was kind of silly, but Patty wanted them to be self-sufficient.

As luck would have it, some of Patty's students were driving on the freeway and who did they spy on the side of the road with a flat tire? Dar. The girls pulled over. To Patty's credit, there was no gloating, no smug smile, just happy to help.

“See girls,” Patty told her Driver's Ed students, “this is exactly the type of situation I'm trying to spare you.”

That was in 1972 when the word “feminist” was wielded around by everyone from stars to athletes to show they were current with the changing times. President Nixon had signed the bill enacting Title IX into law, which gave female students equal public funding. And presto! A full-fledged women's movement was under way. But Patty Meyers couldn't have cared less. She wouldn't have called herself a feminist or a groundbreaker. She wouldn't have called herself anything. She was just who she was; the oldest, toughest, brashest, most passionate, and most athletically talented of all the Meyers.

Unfortunately, Patty had been born too early. Doors that had been closed to her were suddenly opening for me, and I wanted to walk through every one. But to brave any new world, first you have to leave the comfort of the one you've grown accustomed to. I didn't know it then, but that's why Patty was so hard on me. Connelly had been great, but Patty knew it was time for me to spread my wings.

The Connelly Cagers had won twenty-five straight games, many by over forty points, to become the only undefeated team in the Southland, and we'd claimed five titles to become the most successful high school team in CIF. In addition to taking the top honors, Nancy and I were singled out in every bit of news coverage.

“Ann Meyers can handle the ball as well as any boy,” Dar told the press. “And she can jump right out of the gym.”

Her words were prophetic. I jumped right out of Connelly's gym and straight back into the one at Sonora. Who wanted to make the long trek to high school when Sonora was right around the corner? That was the reason I gave, but David's graduating from Sonora was closer to the truth because I finally felt I could be my own person. And there was something else. I wanted that quality competition that any athlete wants. I wanted to push myself to become better, and for me that meant playing against the guys. It had become the yardstick by which I measured my ability. I still wanted to see if I could beat the boys. Even the ones I thought were cute.

Luckily, my high school education didn't resemble the rotating membership program that had defined my elementary school career (it was more like the revolving door program), but it was still tough on a social scale. I'd been very popular at Connelly, even being named Christmas Sophomore Princess. But I sensed the girls at Sonora didn't like me because I was liked by the guys. What they didn't realize is the guys liked me solely because I was an athlete. Once I liked a guy back, he got scared. At night, I'd lie in bed and think about how to balance my desire to compete (both for certain boys' attention, and at sports) with my desire to be liked (both by the guys and the girls).

While I competed on a top level against the guys, I'd look in the mirror and like what I saw. My first love was to up the ante where athletic competition was involved, but I still wanted to be attractive, which was no different than any other girl my age when our hormones were ratcheting themselves up and ricocheting around inside us. In that, I stood pretty resolute, even if I wanted the boys' attention in a very different way lately. Just because my heart melted over a guy, it didn't mean I'd give up my sports. Softball, field hockey, badminton, track, volleyball, basketball, and tennis—I played them all.

Ultimately, I would win thirteen MVP awards and lead the girls' basketball team to an 80-5 record. Being on all these teams was like slack-lining before a partially hostile audience. It's great to be liked by your teachers, but everybody wants to be part of the “in” crowd. Looking back, it's still easy to remember how I'd hoped to fit in. That goal became harder to balance when I made up my mind to go out for the Sonora High Boys' Summer League basketball team.

“Coach, I'd like to talk to you.”

“Annie, I'm late,” Coach Kahn said, stepping up his pace, probably hoping I'd leave him alone.

“I want to try out for the summer team.”

“They won't like it.”

“But the girls don't play during the summer.”

“And that's my fault?”

“No, of course not. It's just that I want to play, and I think I could help the team.”

When he heard that he stopped and looked straight at me, squinting slightly, like he was trying to read me. I waited, watching the wheels turning in his head, no doubt screaming,
Is she nuts?
Or hopefully concluding,
What the heck, she's a great athlete.

Finally, he broke the silence. “Okay. But only if you cut your hair.”

The day of the try-outs, the Sonora High gym was filled with the parents of junior and senior boys hoping to make the team. During the scrimmage, I went for an easy lay-up, then stole the ball in the inbounds and scored again.

One of the moms jumped up and yelled out from the stands, “You gonna just let some
GIRL
do that?”

I brushed it off. I had always played hard. You bet I was intense, and I wasn't going to apologize for that, even if there were people who resented it. But it was hard not to feel like it was me against the world. When you grow up in a big family, it's easy to get lost in the shuffle, especially if you're the middle kid. Sports was the one place where I wouldn't allow myself to be invisible, where I could make myself stand out. I didn't have time to worry about other people for fear of losing my focus. But each time I got aggressive, there was another comment from another parent.

“You're letting some GIRL beat you?”

Their jeers might have inspired me a few years earlier, but not now. I was just as attuned to what others thought and said about me as every other teenager on the planet. There were questions from the parents about where I'd shower, which bathrooms I'd use, where I'd change.

But the questions were smoke screens. I'd use the girls' bathroom and wait until I got home to shower. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out. The truth was that they simply didn't want a girl on the boys' team, and Coach Kahn didn't do much to help. How could he? “It was a new situation for all of us,” he'd later admit.

The week of tryouts continued, and so did the sideshow.