Authors: Ginny Gilder
The good of my past was there, burrowed deep inside, well beneath the expectations and the “shoulds,” smothered by the buck-ups and shut-ups. Yet not lost; rather, I now realize, waiting for an invitation and a warm welcome.
Those good memories swell within me as I stand with my daughter. Here they come, like water from a stream finally undammed, a spigot finally unblocked; a dribble at first, and then I'm drinking from a fire hose â¦
Mom's piano tickle game, her goodnight kisses after a fancy night out, her perfume wafting sweetly while she gently pulled my thumb out of my mouth; Swedish meatballs with creamy gravy, mounds of thin pancakes, happy homes for butter and syrup; Christmas Eve parties rich with company, center-pieced with a groaning smorgasbord, stockings filled with silly gifts from Mrs. Claus; all those East Hampton summer days on Briar Patch Road, filled with days at the beach playing in the waves, sunbathing, building sandcastles; camping under the stars and waking up beneath dew-soaked blankets; swinging in the hammock with Dad; our underwater somersault contests; the penny doctor, invented by Dad to soothe a stubbed toe or salve a skinned knee; playing box ball, hand ball, and running bases on the city's sidewalks; my first-ever run around the reservoir, hot sun, barefoot, a long mile and five-eighths, inspired by Dad's patience and cheerleading to make it all the way without stopping, even though I was dead slow.
I remember that October day when I was sixteen and miserable, standing on the banks of the Charles, seeing those string-bean-slim boats for the first time. I remember falling in love with the oars splashing, the sunlight dancing, the synchronicity, and the power and control. I remember wanting to make it all mine.
Inside me, the river runs deep and clear now.
Standing by the shores of Lake Casitas, the desert sun reflecting off the shiny silver medal newly around my neck, I raise my head and see my family in the crowd, waving and cheering wildly. I feel the tug of my teammates' hands as we thrust our arms high above our heads. We did it. I did it.
“Let it run.” Finish your stroke, let your hands come out of the bow in the first part of the recovery; pause on your slide, lower your oar handles into your lap so that the flat blades glide high above the water. Sit still as long as you can, balancing to prevent any oars from slapping the water. The boat will slow like a magnificent crane skimming over the water, until it finally comes to rest of its own accord.
Epilogue
Diana Taurasi, the undisputed star of the Phoenix Mercury in the Women's National Basketball Association, has just hit a trademark twenty-two-foot three-point shot on the run and is strutting down the court, tugging the upper corners of her jersey front in the classic “ain't I grand” gesture of athlete show-offs, smiling gleefully as the crowd roars its adulation and approval. I want to strangle her for gloating before the end of a game, rubbing in the drubbing.
But it's hard to dispute the facts: 3:21 left on the clock and we are down by 12, a big margin for a team that's far from home, playing in the Arizona desert. I'm not in the lineup myself. After all, basketball is a far cry from rowing, not to mention that I'm in my fifties now, but I am sitting in the visiting owners' seats, watching the action closely and willing my players to pull off a miracle.
There's no sniff of desperation from my Seattle Storm players. They look focused as they switch to offense. Swin Cash starts the Storm's comeback attempt by hitting an eight-foot running bank shot, drawing a foul by DeWanna Bonner, and making her free throw. Taurasi misses her next three-point attempt, Lauren Jackson's jump shot from nine feet out swishes in, and our defense kicks in, forcing a pair of turnovers, including a steal by Camille Little, which culminates with her being fouled and going to the line for two, which go in. Down by five now. Another couple of Mercury misses (suddenly Taurasi has gone stone cold, oh sweet!), sandwiched by another Jackson bucket
and one, courtesy of another Mercury foul. With thirty-two seconds left, Swin ties the score at 88 with an effortless lay-up, but it's the Mercury's ball and they call a time-out.
I watch my team huddling with their coaches by the visitors' bench, the WNBA franchise I purchased with three other women two-and-a-half years earlier when the then new owner of Seattle's men's and women's professional basketball franchises, the Seattle Supersonics and Storm, respectively, decided to move his teams to Oklahoma. While our group could do nothing to avert the loss of the men's team, we succeeded in keeping the women's team in the city. It wasn't like any of us had dreamed of owning a professional sports team, but this opportunity offered so much upside that pursuing the purchase proved irresistible: contributing to our community by keeping one of its gems safe and sound at home; helping to build the nation's only women's professional team sports league; showcasing top women athletes as leaders and role models; and promoting the concept of women as successful leaders in any business domain. Prior to the WNBA's inception, only two women had bought majority stakes in professional sports teams instead of inheriting them. (Joan Payson was founder of the New York Mets in 1961; Marge Schott purchased a minority share of the Cincinnati Reds in 1981 and assumed majority ownership in 1984.) Who wouldn't relish the idea of helping to bust the glass ceiling of professional sports team ownership? What better use of our dollars than to assume the financial risk for a business endeavor that married our shared love of sports with our commitment to social justice?
We were playing for the Western Conference title. One step outside the arena, the weather, cloudless blue sky, 107 degrees, made me grateful that basketball was not an outdoor sport. The arena was cool and dark, but the players sweated visibly nonetheless.
The year? 2010. The players on the court were all born at least ten years after Title IX's passage. They grew up shooting hoops, earned full rides to play in college, and now were living their dream: playing basketball for a living. As for me and my co-ownersâwho grew up in the decade preceding Title IX and pioneered the legislation's application to force the first changes in college sports venuesâviews on girls' participation in sports had differed from community to community,
college scholarships for female athletes didn't exist, and the idea of playing sports for a living was a pipe dream for women. Now, sitting courtside at a game televised live by ESPN, our ownership group was in the hunt to claim the first championship in professional sports history by a franchise that was not just owned, but purchased by women.
Time out over, the Mercury set up and Temeka Johnson attempts a jumper, which our star point guard, Sue Bird, blocks. She then grabs the rebound and signals another time-out. The clock shows 23.7 seconds left.
I haven't always known where to steer, but I've consistently pursued ways to express the passion that emerged from my years as a top athlete, increasing access to opportunity for marginalized populations. I probably wouldn't have used that fancy phrase to explain my decision to participate in the Yale Women's Crew strip-in or to rationalize my drive to make an Olympic team despite my shorter stature, but my wake offers proof of the course I've taken over the decades.
My favorite occupation is to incite people not just to dream, and dream big, but to shrink the divide between imagination and reality to their point of convergence, setback by setback, step by step. My efforts focus on removing the barriersâcultural, situational, and financialâthat narrow the route to a meaningful life, and I've dedicated myself to addressing those in the realm of sports. I didn't exactly follow a straight line from my involvement in the sports world as an athlete to that of a business woman. I worked in a variety of domains on both the nonprofit and for-profit sides of the business aisle, usually as an entrepreneur, before I found my way home to sports. But that's another story for another day. What's important is that I landed where I belong.
I own the Storm not because it's a basketball team, but because it's a professional sports team that offers the best female basketball players in the world the opportunity to do what they love as a career. Far from the college campus and Joni Barnett's office where I stood with my teammates nearly forty years ago, our backs stained with Yale blue ink, now I stand with different partners, engaged in another sport, promoting the same ideal on a different stage: male or female, people deserve the same chance to reach for greatness.
Fair or not, access to opportunity is never given freely. I am one of the lucky ones and one of the determined ones. I was in the right
place at the right time to help challenge the status quo that relegated women athletes to secondary status, and I have chosen to set my course on realizing the ideal of parity between the sexes in sports. Perhaps this dream is fantastic and will always remain beyond our reach. Miracles do happen, however, although never by accident and never without extreme effort.
Tanisha Wright receives the inbound pass that ends the Storm's time-out, dribbles deliberately to reduce the time on the clock and ensure that the Storm's last shot attempt will be the game's last shot ⦠under twenty seconds to go, now under ten. She passes to Sue, who catches the ball outside the three-point arc and puts it up immediately, not a hint of hesitation, but an instant's evidence of the beauty that comes from being in the zone. Mercury players jump to deflect the ball, arms reaching high and flailing. As the ball swishes through the net, there are 2.8 seconds left. Phoenix calls one more, now desperate, time-out, and Taurasi takes the last shot, her third miss in a row. Game over in a whoosh of poetic justice. One of my partners, Lisa Brummel, envelops me in a gigantic bear hug. Damn, after all these years, winning still feels incredible; there's nothing else like it.
I strive to keep on course, still applying the life lessons that started accruing the first day I stepped into a rowing shell. My Storm players may have learned their lessons on a basketball court, my daughter on a soccer field, but, no matter what sport, the take-aways are fundamentally the same: never give in to your fear or up on your dream, go the extra mile, planning and hard work consistently pay off, and the power of teamwork is tough to beat. Simple phrases, trite off the tongue, yet tough to traverse in real time.
Ready all, row.
Acknowledgments
This endeavor's beginnings go way back, so I will begin by acknowledging my parents. Along with loving me as best they could and providing for me in nearly every way possible, they set me up with all the curiosities that make up my personality and well supplied me with grist for my mill.
Jumping forward fifty years to 2008, Dara Torres, whom I have not had the pleasure of meeting, nonetheless inspired me to question my assumptions about my own limits. Her willingness to challenge accepted boundaries related to age and peak athletic performance on the world stage set me on course to write this memoir, by igniting my desire to train for the Olympics again. Michael Gervais, PhD, took the hand-off from Dara. He didn't laugh me away when I first asked him to help me train for the 2012 Olympics, but took me seriously, advising that “something unexpected will likely come out of this adventure.” He was right; my return to the water as a competitive rower opened the memory floodgates that flowed not to London, but right here.
Thanks to Lisa Wogan, who didn't snicker when I first shared my dream to write a memoir but directed me to Hugo House, Seattle's Mecca for those seeking their muse, where I immersed myself in the world of writers and writing and luxuriated in the experience of learning as a fresh-faced (okay, not really) novice.
Without Kelley Eskridge, I would still be stuck on page 100, unable to figure out where and how to go. Kelley served as my writing
coach and editor, first helping me figure out what story to tell and then coaxing and cheering me through every paragraph, period, and page. Realistic, yet supremely knowledgeable, compassionate, and patient, she took my initial draft down to its foundation and guided me from there. A champion of the writing process, which in my case meant a seemingly endless loop of rewriting, Kelley buoyed me through writing's rough waters in every way possible and, in doing so, floated into the realm of trusted confidante and friend. Without Kelley, you would not be reading this sentence.
My beta readers agreed to peruse an early draft of the manuscript and provide unalloyed feedback, likely wincing in anticipation. To Ester Bailey, Susan Coskey, Nicola Griffith, Cathy Harvey, Charlie Stevenson, Ed Taylor, Joanie Warner, and Andrea Wenet, thanks for donating your only chance to read this book for the first time to the improvement of a version that needed your help to find its full self.
My Yale Women's Crew posse searched their memories and their files for various tidbits pertaining to our college years on the water and off and engaged in spirited e-mail exchanges to help me recall various incidents: Chris Ernst, Sally Fisher, Jenny Kiesling, Margaret Mathews, Elaine Mathies, Mary O'Connor, and Cathy Pew. Thanks also to Nat Case and Barbara Chesler at Yale University for generously making source materials available. Thanks to David LaBarge for affectionately reminiscing with me about why he stayed so adamantly in the closet while he was at Yale, and to Ann Strayer, who so generously allowed me to share part of her story without shortchanging the truth.
Kelley Eskridge and Nicola Griffith merit double mention, Kelley for introducing me to her wife and well-reputed author, Nicola, and Nicola for thinking her agent might like
Course Correction
and then introducing us. Stephanie Cabot, no doubt influenced by her experience with the world of rowing, courtesy of her two oldest children, both Division I collegiate athletes, stepped up to the not inconsiderable challenge of finding a publishing home for a new author writing about a minor sport. Of course, Stephanie got her job done, for which I will be eternally grateful. Without her optimism and dedicated follow-through, my dream of becoming a published writer would be wallowing in the muddy backwaters of bitter longing.