Everything They Had (41 page)

Back in the summer of 1996, as he began laying the groundwork for this year's Olympic team, Smith told Mleczko and the other candidates that he would not and could not make their career decisions for them. He knew all too well the kind of financial sacrifices he was about to suggest to them, since if they did what he advised they would not be able to hold jobs. But if they wanted to make the Olympic team, he said, they would be well advised to spend the entire year working out under Michael Boyle's strict supervision.

Thus in Mleczko's case the ultimate challenge had been offered to a passionate and committed athlete. But the first day of weight training under Boyle was devastating. She couldn't do a single pull-up or a squat worthy of his demands. She bench-pressed only 65 pounds, far too little for a player of her size. Size clearly did not equal strength; if anything, her size now worked against her. Because she was taller and heavier than almost all of her teammates, it was harder to do pull-ups. She reached a point that Boyle knew all too well, where many a gifted male athlete decides that the price for doing what has always come so naturally has gone up too much. But she did not tell Boyle that she was going home; nor, he noted, did she do what many athletes often do at this point: ignore the weaknesses and reinforce the strengths. Instead she asked, “What do I do next?”

She stayed with the program. For the first two months there was little in the way of reward and a great deal of pain. When she picked up the bar to do the bench press, she often had to take off the weights that the other women were using. But by the third month the workouts became, if not exactly fun, more acceptable, because she could see results, not just in the weight room but, more importantly, on the ice when she skated. What kept her going in the hard times, she later decided, were two things: First there was her dream of becoming an Olympic hockey player, of getting a chance to play at such an exalted level, a chance so many women who had gone before her had never had; secondly there was the support of her teammates, all of whom hoped to be a part of history on this first Olympic team.

By the summer, she could do three sets of eight reps on the bench press at 105 pounds, no mean feat, and three sets of five pull-ups. By then Boyle would needle her, saying, “A.J., I really wish I had a video of you when you first started—I'd use it as a before-and-after commercial for the program.” To Smith, her improvement was equally impressive, a test not just of strength but of something perhaps more important—character—because he knew how easy it was for someone who had led a charmed athletic life to unravel after running into an obstacle like this.

What also helped keep her going was the attention of Boyle, a coach who could easily have been using his time in other ways but who seemed gender-blind. Boyle took the female athletes as seriously as he did some of his more celebrated male athletes. He had come aboard at the request of coach Smith, who was a pal. In the beginning, he had regarded the assignment as a lark, but working with these women had turned into one of the most enjoyable things he had ever done. In the world of sports, both he and Smith decided, they had found something of a sanctuary, a place where there was a sense of excellence and dedication but none of the countervailing egotism, born of the intense new materialism of sport that is so destructive to the concept of team. No one was spoiled. No one had an attitude problem. “Coaches who haven't coached women before,” Boyle said recently, “don't know what they're missing. It's very different from coaching men—with some of the men these days it's like pulling teeth to get them to do certain things, and on some days they make you feel more like a dentist than a coach.”

What Smith and Boyle were watching in these athletes was the unleashing of an immensely powerful force that came with the removal of a ceiling that had for so long suppressed the dreams and possibilities of young women. Here were all these talented and dedicated athletes, who had worked so hard for so long and had excelled at every level, but had always known there was a limit to their dreams and expectations that would not have existed if they were men. They had all been the best in junior high, in high school and in college; had they been men, they would have been superstars, brazenly recruited by colleges and courted by agents and pro teams. (In Mleczko's case both her talent and the likely elusiveness of her dream had been underlined by a sentence in her ninth-grade yearbook that predicted she would be the first woman to play in the NHL.) All these young women were acutely aware that the Olympic spotlight had a unique capacity to illuminate the importance of women's sports. Ordinary American sports fans, a preponderance of them male, who would never bother to watch women's rowing or volleyball or softball, would do so if the United States was competing against some feared rival—the Russians, or the Chinese, or, as in this case, the Canadians. That had happened in the summer of 1996 in Atlanta with the women's softball, soccer and basketball teams; this year it might well happen with women's ice hockey.

As Mleczko's strength began to increase significantly, so did her athletic ability. If anything, she now became slightly embarrassed about the hockey player she had only so recently been, someone who because of a lack of leg strength had too often skated straight up, instead of bent over, simply because she was not in good enough shape. “I used to think that I skated that way because that was the way I skated, but then when we started doing weights I realized that it had been because I had so little leg strength—that you skate straight up when you're tired, but that you can skate bent over for a long time if you have the leg strength.”

If it is true that adversity breeds strength, then this group of young women was unusually strong, not just from Boyle's weight training but from the inner resolve required to follow a dream against such odds for so many years. From the beginning, people had tried to keep them from playing because of their gender. They had been challenged in numerous ways, by officials who did not want them on teams and by boys who tested them with cheap shots in order to show that hockey was a masculine sport.

Many of these women were in their mid-twenties and were delaying career decisions in order to try out for the Olympic team. Lisa Brown-Miller turned 31 in the fall. She had been the head coach at Princeton and had tried to recruit Mleczko several years before. But now they were teammates, for Brown-Miller resigned the Princeton job to try out. Or, as Sandra Whyte, 27, a former Harvard captain who left her job as a lab research assistant to train with the team and who lived with her family to save money, says, “Part of my competitive instinct is the need to survive against considerable odds and to prove to myself that I can do this [play hockey] despite all the various people who for so much of my life kept telling me that I couldn't.”

Even at this level of accomplishment the economics are hard: The subsidies the women receive from the American Olympic organization are infinitesimal, somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000 a year from USA Hockey to be used against living expenses (those who were members of the last national team, which came in second to the Canadians at the world championships, get an additional sum). Not everyone accepted the subsidies; Mleczko turned down both of them in order to retain eligibility for her final year at Harvard. A teammate told her she was crazy—she obviously needed the money, and going back to Harvard and playing after the Olympics would be a step down. “Well, that may be true,” she answered, “but I love playing for Harvard, and I can't imagine being there and not playing for them. It's been a great school for me, and I've loved going, and I think I owe them something—like playing one more year. Besides, we've never done things for money in my family anyway.” She comes from a family of modest means: Until his retirement in 1996, A.J.'s father, Tom, was a teacher at a private day school in New Canaan, Connecticut; he is also a skilled charter fisherman in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Her mother, Priscilla (known as Bambi), runs a small clothes shop. Mleczko attends Harvard on scholarships and loans, which means that she will need to carry her debt that much longer.

The women's game, it should be said, is very different from the men's. There is no checking, or at least no legal checking. That means speed is of the essence. It places a premium on skating well and fast, and on passing. It is, says Ben Smith, “a purist's game—it is all about skill.” When he and the other coaches he has assembled to work with this team, many of them men, talk about the quality of the women's game at this level, they talk about it as a reflection of the way hockey used to be before the hard checking and fighting became (with the encouragement of television) so much more important. Smith believes the good women's teams bring back memories of the famous 1972 Russian national team, one that absolutely delighted hockey aficionados with its passing and speed.

This is the pioneer generation of women's hockey. These women all began as rebels, astonishing their friends and families when they were young by preferring to play hockey with boys rather than follow the gentler track of figure skating, as they were supposed to do. “I just don't know what to do with her,” defense-man Vicki Movsessian's father, Larry, once said when his daughter was about 6. “She's supposed to be a little girl, but she likes hockey better than figure skating, and even when she's doing her figure skating, she refuses to wear her figure skates and she wears hockey skates.” Hockey, Vicki thought from the start, was much more fun. It was a real, live, honest-to-God game. There were more kids playing. Besides, figure skating was not only lonelier, it was not really fun. Instead, it was filled with the terrible tension that came from constantly being judged and critiqued, and at the ages of 6 and 7 Movsessian did not like being critiqued. When she was about 8, her father tried to sharpen her figure skates himself and somehow managed to grind down the distinguishing toe picks at the front. He was distraught, sure that he had ruined an expensive pair of skates. She immediately comforted him: “Don't worry. Figure skating's over for me anyway. I'm a hockey player.”

Some of them had brothers who were hockey players. Cammi Granato, perhaps the best known of the women players, has several brothers who have played hockey at the elite levels, including one, Tony, who's now an All-Star with the San Jose Sharks in the NHL. (Ironically, of the two, only Cammi is going to Nagano.) Meaghan Sittler's father, Darryl, played in the NHL for the Toronto Maple Leafs, and her brother, Ryan, was a high draft choice a few years ago. A.J.'s father was the hockey coach at the day school where he taught. It turned out that he had always loved the idea of her becoming a hockey player.

A.J.'s entrance into the world of skating was somewhat draconian. She was 2 years old when Tom Mleczko took her out to the center of the frozen pond by their house, put skates on her and walked off the ice. It was, she later learned, exactly what he had done with her older sister, who had quickly fallen in love with skating. (The skates, it should be noted, were not double runners.) It was fall, crawl or skate, and the first time she tried, A.J. fell and broke into tears. Then she crawled across the pond, absolutely convinced that her father didn't love her. At least her mother had prepared hot chocolate for her in case she made it to shore, a sign of some parental love.

But soon afterward, perhaps the third time she tried, she began to skate, awkwardly but doggedly. She quickly decided that she had accomplished something important and, moreover, that she liked skating. She was not as innately talented as her older sister, Wink: Wink skated gracefully; A.J. skated forcefully. When A.J. was 6 and Wink was already passionately involved with her figure skating, A.J. came home one day and announced that she wanted to be a hockey player. It was a moment of complete innocence: She had no idea that there was such a thing as a gender barrier in hockey or in life. “Hockey looked like fun. There were all these kids, and they were
playing together
. I didn't notice that they were all boys.”

The gene pool in the Mleczko family is formidable. Tom was a good schoolboy athlete and played several sports at Bowdoin College. He is to this day a skilled outdoorsman; during the crunch of summer, he can take three separate charter fishing parties out during a day and never seem to tire. His sister, Sarah, was a star athlete at Harvard and won 12 varsity letters there. A.J.'s mother, the former Bambi Gifford, was a club champion tennis player and part of a large Nantucket clan whose members tended to be tall, powerful and athletic.

Tom Mleczko would later say that the day his daughter announced her intention to be a hockey player was the greatest day of his life. He immediately went to a meeting of the organization that ran the local boys' hockey leagues and said that his daughter wanted to play. No one could see anything wrong with his suggestion, and so the league heads decided that she could play. Tom then went to the lost-and-found at the New Canaan Country School and gathered up various stray pieces of equipment for her, including, A.J. remembers with some amusement, a cup.

Tom is a talented coach, a man who could easily have succeeded at a much higher level if he had been so inclined. He is also a man of relentless enthusiasm, who believes that talent should not be wasted. He was not a Little League dad, and he did not demand too much of either daughter, but he treated their athletic aspirations as he would a son's—that is, he took them very seriously. If he did not pressure them to excel, he quite skillfully convinced them that the pursuit of excellence was fun, as well as something they were doing of their own volition.

When A.J. first started playing, there was an undertow of protest from some of the boys and their parents, who presumably believed the intrusion of a girl on this particularly physical sport would make hockey just a little less macho. From the beginning A.J. played with boys, largely because women's (and girls') hockey as an organized sport did not really exist. For many of those years she was the only girl on her team, and often the only girl in the league.