You Let Some Girl Beat You? (24 page)

“Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations.”
~ Faith Baldwin

In May of 1994, our business advisors suggested that I put the Rancho Mirage house up for sale. The annual air conditioning bills alone on an 8,000 square-foot home were enough to put one of the kids through college, never mind the cost of keeping over a half-acre of grass in the desert. Facts were that I wasn't bringing in the kind of paycheck Donnie had commanded. Peter O'Malley had generously honored the rest of Don's contract for the year, which was a huge financial help, and Don had left us well provided for. However, I knew that from here on out I would be the sole person responsible for everything. I didn't want to uproot the children, but I was a thirtyeight-year-old widow with three kids ages six and under, and I felt the need to simplify our lives as much as possible. It was a lousy time for anyone to have to sell a house, though.

Home prices in Southern California had jumped during the 80s only to plummet in the 90s. The bubble popped in real estate, which affected affluent areas like Beverly Hills and resort cities, like Palm Springs. Clancy Lane in Rancho Mirage was, and still is, considered about as high-end as it gets in the Palm Springs area. Our home, along with all the others near Clancy Lane, had declined in value. Adding to my confusion was a condolence letter from a woman who lost her husband years earlier. She advised against making any big decisions in the first year of a spouse's death because we're grieving, and not emotionally stable or rational enough.

While I knew it was good advice, I ultimately decided to go with my gut. I loved Rancho Mirage; where Don's parents, Scotty and Verna, had been a great help in providing love and support to the kids, but now Scotty and Verna had moved to Hemet to live in a house Don had bought for them two years earlier. Most of my family was in Orange County, and I needed to be near them. I also wanted to be near Dodger Stadium. I reasoned that spending time there would be like sleeping on the right side of the bed when Don was on the road. It would fill a void. Orange County was much closer to Dodger Stadium than the desert. I put the Rancho Mirage house on the market and kept my fingers crossed.

The kids and I stayed with Mom in La Habra that summer while my real estate agent/sister-in-law, Frannie, helped me find the right place for the four of us in the surf capital of the world. Huntington Beach wasn't far from La Habra or Dodger Stadium, and I knew the boys loved the ocean. By the time school started, we were moved into our new home just down the street from Mark and Frannie.

We weren't in the house long when Drew, who was a little beehive of activity, climbed up the stairs while no one was watching and fell, catching her leg between the banisters. There was my seventeen-month-old dangling from the second story, screaming. That night I kept her with me in bed. She was too young to communicate, but the way she whimpered I knew she was in pain. It was late, though, and I didn't know any doctors in town and I didn't want to call my family. I'd imposed on them so much already and, frankly, I didn't want to hear any more disapproval. I waited until morning. When I took her into the emergency room, the doctor said the poor little thing had broken her femur. I couldn't have felt like a worse mother. I knew if Don had been there, things would have been different. I wasn't always good at making decisions by myself.

There were so many other mistakes I made. I'd pushed the boys into public schools with twice the amount of classmates than they were used to at their private schools. Poor Darren was only four and becoming more withdrawn, and D.J always seemed angry. To make matters worse, Drew's cast from the accident on the stairs had barely come off when she fell while we were shopping at the South Coast Plaza and broke her arm.

I missed Don. I needed him to help me raise the children. I didn't know if I'd be able to do it without him.

They say getting through the first year after the death of a loved one is the tricky part. But for me the first three years were so difficult. Amazingly, though, you somehow do it. You get up, brush your teeth, comb your hair, and go on. Some call it a testament to the human spirit. For me it's a testament to my faith and my family. And every time it got really hard, or I screwed up, I thought of Papa's words: “No Whining, No Complaining, No Excuses.”

I had to be there for my children. I had to be strong. Moving into the new home in Huntington Beach helped, and with the kids enrolled in a new school, there were plenty of distractions. I continued to force myself to get out there. I'd already committed to doing the CGA Championship again up in Tahoe. This time I brought the kids along with family to help.

I'd begun preparing for it with Lou after Drew's birth. The problem was that I'd stopped training when Donnie died, and I'd lost a lot of weight. If I could hit the ball 150 yards with a five iron before, now it was twenty yards short of that. Over the four days, I shot in the high 80s and 90s, but still finished ahead of plenty of the guys, including Bryant Gumbel and Charles Barkley, but beating those two might not have been that impressive. I won some cash, and along with it, bragging rights.

By now I was working with CBS covering the men's 1
^st
round of the NCAA Championships, and a job with ESPN doing color for the women's games. It gave me flexibility. That March, I was in Kansas City working for ESPN and Mom was staying with the children. She called me to say that Darren had brought a knife to school and that the school was threatening to expel him. He was only in kindergarten.
How can a child be expelled from kindergarten? Especially when all he did was share something of his father's with his classmates?

Before I'd left, I took out Don's toiletry set, which included a razor, a fingernail clipper, small scissors, and various other manicuring devices, and showed them to Darren. It was just one more way to keep the memory of their father alive. Once I removed the blade, I let Darren hold the razor, so that he could pretend to shave. “Remember how Daddy used to shave his face every morning?”

I knew that at some point I would have to become a father as well as a mother to my two little towheads, who looked a lot like Don as a child, and I figured there was no time like the present. While I was on the road, Darren had taken the all-purpose tool to school as something cool to show his friends. The school, however, wasn't amused and pointed out their no-knife policy.

“It was my fault,” I told the principal. “I guess I just wasn't thinking.”

“I understand completely,” she said after learning that Darren was in a new home and a new school after recently losing his father. Darren was also shy. He was quiet and often let his older brother, D.J., speak up for him.

D.J. was like Don, and Darren was more like me. I worried about being gone with everything the kids had been through, but it was unavoidable. I was the breadwinner now. I had to make a living the only way I knew how, which at this point in my life would undoubtedly involve broadcasting or basketball; and the idea of a pro women's league had been on the rebound.

Women's basketball remained a small sorority where everyone knew each other, so I wasn't surprised when the ABL contacted me about coming on as an adviser of their new women's league. However, in the course of discussions, I began hearing that the commissioner of the NBA was thinking of forming a women's league under the NBA umbrella, so I informed the ABL I would have to pass on their offer.

I was intrigued with the idea of the WNBA, which was a natural progression spawned, oddly enough, from failure. After taking Gold again in '88 Olympics, the U.S. women's Olympic basketball team came in third in '92; and they were greatly overshadowed by the now all-pro men's Dream Team. So in a much-prayed for act of evenhandedness, USA basketball decided to do something similar with the women. They persuaded Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer to swap her university gig for a paid year coaching Lisa Leslie, Teresa Edwards, Dawn Staley, Katrina McClain, Rebecca Lobo, and Sheryl Swoopes, to name a few.

In 1995, they ended up going 60-0. Nothing like that had ever happened before. They were the original women's Dream Team in my opinion, and a sure way to win the Gold at the next Olympic Games. But more than that, it confirmed the NBA Commissioner's suspicion that the time was ripe for a WNBA league.

In early April of 1996, the NBA Board of Governors officially approved the formation of the WNBA, which was announced at a press conference, with the face of the league, Rebecca Lobo, Lisa Leslie, and Sheryl Swoopes, in attendance. The exposure they garnered in the upcoming '96 Olympics in Atlanta, where 30,000 fans screamed for more, helped further launch the new league.

I'd been asked to coach or be the GM of several teams, but that presented another time commitment conundrum, so I was grateful when NBC signed me to a six-year deal to broadcast the games, instead. I had Dick Ebersol to thank.

Dick had been a good friend. The summer that Don died, Cooperstown invited me to attend the Hall of Fame induction, where they planned to honor Don posthumously. I needed to go, since many players were unable to fly out for the funeral. They expressed their condolences and told me wonderful stories about my husband that I'd never heard. Their memories brought him back to me for a short time. It was during the flight back that I met Dick, who had worked with Don when he was broadcasting
ABC Monday Night Baseball
. They were buddies, and Ebersol was now the President of NBC Sports.

Dick was the Olympics Shaman, heading up U.S. Olympics programming since the '88 games in Seoul. During the plane ride, I had hoped to convince him to hire me for the '96 Olympics in Atlanta. But when I dropped out of the '94 Goodwill Games because Don had just died, TNT hired Cheryl Miller. Now it was even more natural that the '96 broadcasting gig should go to Cheryl, since her brother Reggie was on that team; and go to her it did.

By invitation from NBA Commissioner, David Stern, I went to the Olympic Games, along with Juliene Simpson and several other past Olympians, to be introduced at half-time. Juliene and I walked to the Georgia Dome to watch the games, cutting through the Olympic park from the Ritz Carlton, where we were staying. One evening, after we'd returned to the hotel, Juliene was awakened in the middle of the night when her husband, Michael, called, frantic. All over the East Coast, the news was reporting that a bomb had gone off in the Olympic park, and he wanted to make sure his wife was okay. It had detonated fifteen minutes after we'd arrived back at the hotel. We were lucky.

And my luck didn't stop there. When I returned home, Dick Ebersol called me to do the NBC
Hoop It Up
Three on Three event in Dallas, which opened the door to my covering the WNBA games now. As with so many things that had happened in my life, it was all about coming full circle.

The first game pitted the New York Liberty against the LA Sparks at the Western Forum in Inglewood. It was nationally televised by NBC, with over 14,000 fans in attendance. No one had expected ticket sales would be so high, and they had to open up parts of the Forum to allow for the overflow. The League president at the time, Val Ackerman, threw the toss. The two teams tipped-off, while Hannah Storm broadcast the play-by-play, and I did color. It was the first time a major television network had paired two women to cover an event. Like me, she also had Dick Ebersol to thank. Dick also insisted that as many women work behind the camera as in front appointing
Iron Man
producer, Lisa Lax, to call the shots in the truck.

Hannah and I announced the action, and the country watched as a whole new generation of female basketball players seemed poised for a type of job security that had been elusive for decades.

With eight teams, everybody was excited. The plus was the greater sense of credibility under the umbrella of the NBA. They had sponsors, TV networks, and infrastructure already in place. Of course, the birth of one league meant the demise of the other. The ABL folded after lasting three years just as the WBL had, and this left many of the ABL players jumping ship to climb aboard the new league.

In the West, there was Phoenix, L.A/Sacramento, and Utah. The East had New York, Charlotte, Cleveland, and Houston. Like the nascent perceptions, the league would evolve and grow. Teams would move, players would be traded, and I would continue to broadcast, bringing at least one of my children with me every time I went on the road. It was a great way to have one-on-one time with each of them.

At home in Southern California, the local games aired on Prime Ticket (Fox Sports channel) where Chick Hearn called the action, with me as his wingman. Chick had come over from the Lakers, where he had worked with Stu Lantz for so many years that he would often refer to me as Stu. We would be tossing to a commercial break and he'd say, “Some game, huh, Stu?” And I would just smile.

If Vin Scully was the voice of baseball, Chick Hearn was the voice of basketball. He had coined the term “Air-ball,” along with a dozen other ‘Hearnisms' like, “20-foot lay-up,” which he used to describe a jump shot by Jamaal Wilkes. Others were “put him in the popcorn machine,” and “put mustard on the hotdog.” When the game was finished he'd say “The game's in the refrigerator, the door's closed, the lights are out, the eggs are cooling, the butter's getting hard, and the Jello's jiggling.” He'd say the whole thing every time and never miss a beat.

Chick had earned his nickname while playing AAU basketball at Bradley when teammates surprised him with a shoebox containing not shoes, but a dead baby chick. By the time I had the honor of working with him, he had seen more practical jokes than he could count. He'd been working for decades in a business populated with men. I figured being called Stu occasionally was a small sacrifice to work with one of the greats.

Chick had a hard time with names, in general, and specifically the women's names because he wasn't as familiar with the WNBA as he was with the NBA. There was a huge Chinese player on the Sparks team, Zheng Haixia, and Chick spent the first few seasons getting her name right. After awhile, he wouldn't even try, instead calling her “The Big Chinese girl.” One time we did five takes on a toss to a commercial so that Chick could say her name. Each time he called her “The Big Chinese Girl.” Another was Mwadi Mabika, which is pronounced like it sounds, yet he butchered it. But then, Chick had trouble saying
quesadilla
. He was lovable and wonderful, a hard worker, and I sensed that he liked me as much as I liked him.