Promise Me (23 page)

M
AUREEN
C
ONNOLLY
won her first Wimbledon championship in 1952. The city of San Diego was so proud of their hometown girl, they decided to present her with a car.

“Thank you,” she said politely. “But could I have a horse instead?”

I imagine city council members were a bit taken aback. What seventeen-year-old girl wants a mare instead of a Mustang?

An unusual girl. To say the least.

Maureen’s father, an athletic trainer for the navy, walked out when she was four. Her mother, Jessamine, was a pianist who aspired to play concert halls but wound up playing weddings. As a little girl, Maureen was wild about horses, but Jessamine couldn’t afford riding lessons. What she could afford was $1.50 for a tennis racket.

A fireball is born.

Maureen was left-handed, but when she started playing on the public courts in San Diego, she was advised to switch. It felt unfamiliar, counterintuitive, but with singular focus and self-discipline, she did it. Her star began to rise. San Diego sportswriter Nelson Fisher dubbed her “Little Mo” when she was just eleven years old, comparing her backhand to the big guns on “Big Mo,” the USS
Missouri
. Whether she was working out her abandonment issues or just doing what she was born to do, she tore up the courts, playing aggressively, intensely and unapologetically hypercompetitive. She wrote a sports column for the local paper, in which she waxed poetic about psyching herself up with utter loathing for her opponents.

“I have always believed greatness on a tennis court was my destiny,” she wrote, “a dark destiny at times, where the court became my secret
jungle and I, a lonely, fear-stricken hunter. I was a strange little girl armed with hate, fear, and a Golden Racket.”

Oh, that hyperbole! Don’t you love that? And who’s better at it than sportswriters and seventeen-year-old girls? The two rolled into one nattily dressed sports legend who was just too fabulous for mortal kind. Back in the 1950s, Suzy and I and every other little girl in America worshipped Little Mo like she was a Marvel-made superhero. Cameras loved her, and the press decked her out in superlatives; she was the tiniest, the hugest, the fastest, the best. A new coach came into her life and taught her to play a kinder—but not gentler—tennis game. Powered by love for the sport instead of hatred for the girl on the other side of the net, Little Mo matured, as an extraordinary athlete and as an exceptional young woman. She abandoned her anger without losing that singular focus.

“All I see is my opponent,” she told a reporter. “You could set off dynamite in the next court and I wouldn’t notice.”

During that terrible polio epidemic of 1952, at a moment when it meant so much to see this all-American phenom, so unstoppable and light on her feet, Little Mo won Wimbledon—along with the hearts of pretty much everyone in the world. The city of San Diego happily presented her with her mighty steed, Colonel Merryboy. She boarded the horse at a stable in the valley, where she met Norman Brinker, who was a born-and-bred fireball himself. He lived to ride and had earned a spot on the U.S. Equestrian Team, its youngest rider at the Olympic Games in Helsinki that summer. She asked him about horse training. He challenged her to a game of tennis. Sparks flew. About thirty minutes into the smashfest, a boy peering through the chain-link fence with about fifteen other onlookers said, “Boy, mister, do we feel sorry for you.”

Norman had met his match, and he knew it.

The following year, Maureen won the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open. She was the first woman—one of only five players in the history of the game—to achieve the Grand Slam. In 1954, she won Wimbledon for a third time and for the third year in a row was voted Female Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press. That summer, she was ranked number one in the world, on a winning streak that showed no sign of slowing down, until one afternoon when she was
riding Colonel Merryboy down a Mission Valley road. An oncoming cement truck startled the horse. He shied, spun sideways, and crushed Maureen’s leg between his body and the moving vehicle. Her fibula was broken, muscles and tendons torn. She applied herself to rehab, and tried briefly for a comeback, but it wasn’t going to happen.

At the ripe old age of nineteen, her extraordinary tennis career was over, but her extraordinary life had just begun. She’d lost none of her love for the game or for horses. All her drive, ambition, and hyperbole were perfectly intact. She just needed a new place to put all that, and because of the kind of woman she was, she didn’t sit around whining about it. In the years that followed, she wrote, she rode, she taught, she brain-stormed. She provided color commentary for tournament broadcasts on radio and television and shared her love of the sport, nurturing and mentoring young players around the world.

Maureen and Norman were married a year after the accident. He rose to oversee the expansion of Jack in the Box, led the team that took the company public, then left it behind to open his first coffee shop. She was by Norman’s side as he laid the foundation for an empire. He was by her side as she was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame and founded the Maureen Connolly Brinker Tennis Foundation. They were famously devoted to each other and had two beautiful daughters, Cindy and Brenda, who brought Maureen the full, loving family she’d longed for as a child.

“I’ve got everything I want,” she said. “Everything I’ve had I got through tennis. It gave me a terribly exciting life. I met so many people in exalted positions. It opened so many doors, and it’s still opening them. I’ve had a wonderful life. If I should leave tomorrow, I’ve had the experience of twenty people.”

The Brinker family moved to Dallas in 1964, and Maureen enrolled at Southern Methodist University to finish the history degree she hadn’t had time for when she was younger. Norman and his business partners had launched the Steak & Ale restaurant chain, and were rolling into a time of major expansion. Maureen was thirty years old and vibrantly healthy. When she began experiencing persistent back pain, it was reasonable to assume she’d pulled a muscle riding or maybe played a bit
too hard with Cindy, who was starting to seriously hold her own on the tennis court.

Maureen and her physician reasonably proceeded on that reasonable assumption for several months. There’s a tried-and-true philosophy applied to the practice of medicine: “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” It’s essentially the same as Occam’s razor, which states that the simplest solution is the best. It makes perfectly good sense.

Except when it doesn’t.

Maureen was eventually diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Her hopes were high after surgeons initially told her they’d “gotten it all,” but a year later, scans revealed the cancer metastasizing through her abdomen. Norman was beside himself. For the next year, the expansion of Steak & Ale, along with polo and everything else, took a backseat to tracking down the best care that could be found for Maureen.

The Brinkers were as tough and tenacious as they come—smart, resourceful, and financially well set. A golden couple. (In the 1978 movie
Little Mo
, Maureen was played by Glynnis O’Connor, and Mark Harmon played Norm.) The media, reporting that Maureen had “stomach” or in some cases “women’s cancer,” portrayed the spunky, determined champ everyone loved. If anyone could beat this, Little Mo could. But off-camera, Maureen knew she was dying, and she did an admirable job of preparing herself and her family for that eventuality. She kept up her business and charity activities and made time to visit friends, but her daughters were the center of her singular focus now. The lasting effect of her love for them is clearly evident in their lives today.

Despite his saddle-leather hide, Norman struggled under the weight of his emotions as Maureen lost ground. My heart ached when he told me about a telling incident during her last Christmas with the family. Norman left the company Christmas party to walk through the restaurant and greet customers as he always did. In the bar, a guy who’d had a few too many was throwing ice, giving the waitress a hard time, and generally being obnoxious.

Norman, who was invariably soft-spoken, kind, and unbelievably patient with this sort of thing, said, “Hey, fella. That just won’t work. Why don’t you go on outside and get some fresh air?”

The drunk, a head taller and a bushel of bricks heavier, sneered down at Norman.

“Sure,” he slurred. “Let’s go.”

One thing led to another, burly words, back and forth, the guy called Norman something filthy, and Norman wheeled around with a right hook that sent the drunk flying back through the kitschy swinging saloon doors. He landed flat on his back in the vestibule. Norman’s employees were stunned by this entirely aberrant event, but everyone knew what he was going through at home. If anything, it made them love and appreciate him even more. “That Time Mr. Brinker Decked the Guy” went down in restaurant history. (Frankly, it’s probably the only public service the obnoxious drunk ever did; I can think of a few times when Suzy was ill where Daddy might have realized great therapeutic benefit from punching someone’s lights out.)

After a last desperate trip to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York, Norman hired a nurse and had a hospital bed installed by a big bay window in the living room. Maureen spent a few peaceful weeks there, surrounded by a tight circle of love. She died in June 1969, the night before Wimbledon.

I owe a lot to Maureen Connolly Brinker. Wherever Norman and I went over the years, Little Mo’s tennis racquet went with us, occupying a place of honor on a shelf or mantel in every home we lived in. I cherished it as a bit of women’s history and a potent good luck charm. She taught my husband how to love a wife with a life of her own, how to appreciate a woman of singular focus. He was always a work-hard, play-hard kind of guy, and his marriage to Maureen taught him to respect and appreciate a woman as driven as he was.

Theirs was a rare partnership for that time and place. To understand the role of the executive’s wife in the corporate culture of the 1960s, all you have to do is watch a few episodes of
Bewitched
. By and large, a wife who was decorative, quiet, and schooled in the social graces was considered an asset; a wife with talents, ideas, and ambitions of her own was quite often an ex. That mindset was still alive and well in the 1980s, but Norman never bought into it. Maureen had taught him the value of a life partner who has an entire life of her own. Because she was fully rounded and fully grounded in her own accomplishments, Maureen was able to stand
beside him, a tower of strength, supporting him in his endeavors—and that made it a joy for him to support Maureen in hers. He found the equal partnership thrilling, and he wanted to have that
—expected
to have that—with me.

Norman’s brilliance was in his ability to assess and mentor people. For him, there was no greater personal achievement than raising someone else to succeed. He had a keen sense of strategy, and he knew how to communicate direction without barking orders. Most CEOs (the good ones anyway) are visionary in the way they see the possibilities outside “business as usual”; Norman also saw the limitless possibilities inside people. And he knew how to bring them out. He loved women and thoroughly enjoyed them in all the ways you’d expect a roguish Texas millionaire to love and enjoy women. But he genuinely
liked
women, too, and it showed in his hiring practices. Like Stanley Marcus, he was eager to see women on high-trajectory career tracks, breaking through the old glass ceiling. In their early years together, Maureen was a famous professional athlete and Norman was on navy pay. As his star rose in the restaurant industry, it frustrated him to see promising careers stifled by the old folkway that claims a woman shouldn’t out-earn her man, and he brought up his daughters to believe in their own potential.

Norman was enormously instrumental in the early success of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, not because of his money, but because of his dynamic participation on the board, his unique understanding of what’s at stake for a family when a woman has cancer—and because of the way he mentored and believed in me.

In the management of a multimillion-dollar corporation or the emotion-fueled solar system of a giant nonprofit foundation, a firm grip on reality must be maintained. Certainly, a key component to managing one’s own cancer treatment or the treatment of a loved one is managing expectations, which means chiseling some kind of reality-based tunnel between statistics and hope. There’s no practical value in leaping to unlikely conclusions, whether you’re talking about a fantastically unlikely good thing—such as a little girl with a dollar-and-a-half tennis racket achieving a Grand Slam—or an extremely unlikely bad thing—such as a back spasm turning out to be ovarian cancer.

To keep the chessboard moving and for the sake of our own sanity,
when we hear hoofbeats, we think horses. It’s reasonable to think horses. It’s
comforting
to think horses. But it’s sadly self-limiting—and occasionally dangerous—to pretend zebras don’t exist.

Perhaps the legacy of Little Mo is the ability to keep both feet firmly on the asphalt while maintaining an unquestioning belief in the extraordinary. I see it in her daughters and in the children who compete in the “Little Mo” International Open.

I saw it in Norman, and he helped me see it in myself.