Everything They Had (42 page)

In suburban Connecticut at that time, there were all kinds of leagues—the Mite (ages 7 to 8), the Squirt (9 to 10), the Pee Wee (11 to 12) and the Bantam (13 to 14). Things began to get reasonably serious when she wanted to play at the Squirt level (the Mite team did not travel, whereas the Squirts did). There were tryouts for the Squirt team. No girl had ever tried out for it before. A.J. was very nervous, not at all sure that she was playing or skating well. After her workout, Bill Emmons, the local coach, told her she would hear about the results in a few days. Never had she wanted anything so badly, and those few days seemed to last forever. When Emmons finally called, a little unsure of the path ahead and a little nervous, he spoke to her mother. “Are you sure you want her to do this?” he asked Bambi Mleczko.

“Is she good enough?” Bambi asked, wanting no special treatment either way.

“Ability-wise she's right up there at the top,” Emmons said, “but it
is
a boys' game.”

“Well if she's good enough and she wants to play on the team, we want her to play on the team,” Bambi answered.

A.J. thought hockey was the right sport for her. She loved to skate, and she was by nature aggressive and competitive on the ice. That competitive spirit probably stemmed in part from a natural rivalry with an older, talented sister who seemed to do all things gracefully and easily. And in part it was probably orchestrated by her father, who sensed from the start that his second daughter was an uncommon athlete with an uncommon commitment. In those days the Mleczko home had two avid young athletes: Wink, preoccupied with figure skating, who rose early in the morning for long jaunts to distant rinks for lessons, and A.J., by no means a natural skater but most assuredly a natural competitor, who had hockey all to herself. The sport fit her personality. She might have looked like the girl next door, someone just off a Norman Rockwell
Saturday Evening Post
cover, except perhaps a little bigger and stronger, but she was a natural-born tomboy, and there was a certain toughness and resilience to her personality.

In those years hockey became something more than her sport, something equally important, a critical part of her identity. It was not just the local boys who were on occasion irritated by her commitment: The mother of her best friend, a girl her own age, was quite irate when A.J. missed going to the friend's birthday party in order to play in a scheduled hockey game. “How can you let her do this?” the mother asked Bambi Mleczko, both puzzled and angry. A.J. herself had made the decision, Bambi answered. “We don't make decisions like that for her.”

On occasion there was the smell of gender bias or gender prejudice. Sometimes she would skate onto the ice and hear someone from the other side asking who the guy with the long hair was (even though she had cut her hair quite short in those days), and then someone else would shout out, the secret revealed,
Oh-my-God-it's-agiiirrrll!
Most people handled this sports breakthrough, small though it was, relatively well. Her teammates were usually good about it: This may not have been what they wanted, but she was a pretty good player and she never asked for special treatment. If there was an occasional problem with one or two of her teammates, it was probably because they were being teased by other boys for playing with a girl.

There was no checking in the lower leagues, but when A.J. graduated to the higher ones, where checking was permitted, some adults were concerned about how she would fare. In her last prechecking game against the Darien team, an opponent (a boy who had played with her on her day-school team and who had been bad-mouthing her for months—a rare, fully developed child male chauvinist) skated over and gave her a hard check. It was completely gratuitous. Without breaking stride, she wheeled around and whacked him as hard as she could, knocking him absolutely flat on the ice. Hers was an illegal hit, but she had answered the question of whether she would be able to play at the next level.

But it was also an early warning that because A.J. was moving to a league where checking was permitted, she might become a target. From time to time that happened. In a club game against Central Connecticut when she was 13, she brought the puck across the center line, passed it off and was holding her position along the boards when a player from the other team skated halfway across the ice from behind her and blindsided her, nailing her against the boards, full force, a shattering hit with his elbow to her face. She was very lucky; if her face had hit the boards, she might have sustained serious injury. “That's not a hit—that's a mugging,” Tom Mleczko shouted. The boy was thrown out of the game. A.J. missed just one shift and never once complained.

She later viewed those years as a series of tests. At first it was some of her teammates who were wary. Then as she passed muster with them, it was the parents of opposing players who complained that she was not good enough. Things got a little more complicated as she and her teammates began to enter adolescence. She knew she had finally been accepted when she was sitting on a bench in the dressing room before a game, already in uniform herself. One of her teammates looked up, saw that the door was open and asked her to close it because there were some girls outside. “Hey,” she said, “I'm a girl, too.” “Yeah,” he said, “I know you're a girl, but you're … you're A.J.”

When she was 14, she played on an all-girls' team for the first time. Of course, the team—the Connecticut Polar Bears—had to play boys' teams. Suddenly there was a change in her game. In the past she had always played defense, but now she was a much better skater than most of her peers, and she played center and forward, handling the puck much of the time. That was helpful: It improved her puck-carrying skills, passing and sense of the play. Recognizing that the boys were becoming stronger, she took lessons on the weekends to improve her speed and strength.

In the tenth grade she went off to the Taft School, a prominent Connecticut boarding school with a good hockey program. There, she played with and against only women, and her ability propelled her to a higher plane. Instead of fighting her physical limitations against bigger male opponents, she found that she was stronger and more gifted than most of the other players. Taft had a very strong women's team, yet she was clearly better than her teammates. In the finals for the New England championship against Holderness in her sophomore year, she scored all four of Taft's goals in a victorious game that was decided in overtime. During her three varsity years, Taft was the New England prep school champion.

By now there were clear signs of the player she was to become. She had marvelously soft hands, which meant that when she controlled the puck, her teammates were likely to get it not only at the right place at the right time but also in a way that they could handle. Most important, she had great rink vision and an uncommon ability to sense where different players would be as the play developed. “Her athletic vision is almost unique—it's a gift. Some of it may be physiological, coming from great peripheral vision,” says her prep school coach Patsy Odden, “but some of it I think is a thing that great athletes are born with, a wonderful anticipatory instinct for the game. Because she was not the flashiest player on the ice or the best skater, she was not always the player that a lot of ordinary fans noticed. But she was always the one that the other coaches and the real hockey fans noticed—the player who made other players better.”

If there was a flaw here, it was a tendency to be too self-sacrificing and a willingness to pass up shots that she probably should have taken. It was an odd personal signature for a player who obviously loved the game and was fiercely competitive. In this one way she tended to hold back, as if not wanting to call attention to herself and become too big a star. It was, some friends thought, the most natural by-product of her own unusual road to stardom. Enough attention had been paid to her early on, and for all the wrong reasons. Now even as she played among girls, she wanted to do nothing more that might set her apart from her teammates. Her modesty turned into a desire to set up other players. In her senior year Taft made two trips abroad, where it played against the Russian women's national team and the German national team and won every game but one. “It was fascinating—everywhere she went the other coaches picked up on her and her sense of the game. Who is that girl? they would ask, singling her out,” notes Patsy Odden. In St. Petersburg the coach of the Russian national team asked Tom Mleczko, who had gone along as an assistant coach, if his daughter would entertain the idea of staying on in that historic city and playing with the Russian team. The coach reasoned that it would be a great cultural exchange for her.

A.J. was heavily recruited for college, and finally decided on Harvard over Princeton although the latter seemed to have the stronger hockey program. Among those who worked to get her to Harvard was her sister, Wink. Two years ahead of A.J. and, at six feet, too tall for figure skating, Wink was beginning to surface as a quality hockey player in her own right. “If it's a choice between playing with A.J. or against her, I'd much rather play with her,” she once noted. In time she chose Harvard, which was not yet a powerhouse in women's hockey, and where the recruiting was somewhat low-key, based on a certain Cambridge-based presumptuousness that anyone with the chance would want to go to Harvard. On the school's largely mediocre team, A.J. quickly emerged as a great star. As a freshman she was Ivy League and Eastern College Athletic Conference Rookie of the Year. From then on she made the All–Ivy League team every year, and by the end of her third year she was already the leading scorer in Harvard history. But trying out for the Olympic team was going to demand a stronger commitment than ever before.

She was facing an important choice, because, while hockey was important to her, it was not the only thing in her life. She was also a good student and she led a normal social life. Her cousin Caroline Apple Gifford, 24, says, “I've been with a number of other athletes—both men and women—who have reached that level of excellence, and if you're around them for even a few minutes, you know immediately that they are
athletes
and it's the dominating part of their lives. There's a kind of natural arrogance to who they are and what they've accomplished. They really let you know in the first instant you meet them that they are jocks. But A.J. is different—you could be around her for a long time, and unless she had to go off to practice, you might never know that she was a jock playing at that high a level. Maybe it's the nature of women's hockey at this moment—it's so new, and these women have had to fight so hard for their place in the sports world, and they've gotten so little recognition that they're all able to remain very modest.”

For coach Ben Smith, who is exceptionally popular within the world of hockey, working with the women has been an epiphany. When USA Hockey suggested he give this a try back in 1995, he was wary. He was a men's coach at a big-time hockey school, Northeastern, and he had been an assistant coach for the 1988 men's U.S. Olympic team. He had accepted the offer of working with the women, he later noted, because it was proposed on a winter day and he had forgotten that by taking it up he would lose a summer of sailing and golf. But soon he was hooked. “These are wonderful, focused athletes,” Smith says. “They want to go to the rink each day for the same reason I do. They love hockey, pure and simple. There are no agents around, no big bonuses awaiting them, no commercials to be filmed. I love it.”

The first thing he learned was that he had to be very careful of what he said, because women are unusually coachable, and they take seriously everything he says. On his first day he noticed that as they loosened up before practice by skating around the rink, they had their sticks with them, but no pucks—a contrast to the way most men warm up. At the time they were soon to leave on a trip to Scandinavia. Smith immediately blew his whistle. “Look,” he told them, “unless they've changed the rules and I haven't been told, even in Finland and Sweden when you play hockey you do it with a puck.” So they skated over and explained to him that the previous coach had told them they were never to warm up with a puck, and so unless told otherwise that was the way they practiced. “I learned from that,” he said. “I try not to say too much.”

Right after the first selections had been made in late August, the team flew to Scandinavia for a series of games—three with the Swedes and then three with the Finns. International travel was often hard for these young players. They had to deal with jet lag, time zone changes, eating different foods and being away from home. Besides, it was a new team just beginning to come together. But what took place abroad pleased Smith. Sweden was not a powerhouse, and the Americans won all three games rather easily. But the Finns were another matter. They had come in third earlier in the year at the world championships and had almost achieved parity with the U.S., and now they were playing on their home ice. Again the Americans swept all three games. Mleczko emerged as one of the most important players on the team, a player who, in Smith's words, made things happen. She played well on the trip, with four goals and six assists—the high scorer on the U.S. team. She played particularly well in one game, a blowout of the Swedes, and the next morning Smith stopped by to see her at breakfast. She looked a little tired.

“Hey, A.J.,” he asked, “how'd you sleep last night?”

“Not very well, Coach,” she answered. “I don't know. For some reason I was wired and couldn't fall asleep.”

“Well, A.J., when was the last time you scored four goals in an international competition?” he asked. “Do you think that could have something to do with being so wired?”