Knee-deep in the Hoopla

by Valerie Webster | Apr 28, 2024 | Blog

An undefeated season meets a singular phenom who could drop a shot from mid-court.  March Madness Women’s Final was a three-ring, three-point thriller and we could not look away.  It was legendary play from surefire hall of famers.  Dawn Staley and Caitlin Clark drove to the goal, opposing teams but united in belief of their skill, their discipline and their power.

One fine day in 1891, Dr James Naismith, was lolling about in Springfield, MA trying to think up a sport that one could play in the winter.  His boss, head of the YMCA International Training School, Luther Gulick, gave Naismith 14 days to think up a game to counter the rowdy energies of young men with little to do in snow-bound New England.  Gulick wanted something that required vigorous activity but that did not take the physical toll of the immensely popular game of football.  He wanted an indoor game – way too cold to play anything outside – and that game was to be more skill than brute force.   

Five minutes later Senda Berenson, physical culture director at Smith College, was meeting with Naismith.  Berenson began teaching basketball to her student in hopes the activity would improve their physical health.  Of course, this was the Victorian era so every man jack of an athlete, would-be athlete and plain old misogynist had something negative in comment on this development

Charles Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin, co-founder of the International Olympic Committee and known as the father of the modern Olympic Games called women’s basketball “indecent.”    Then again, he also decried women participating in any sport.  He declared that the Olympics with women would be “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and indecent”.  The “Games”, he said, were created for “the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism” with “female applause as a reward”.    

Oh, give us a break!  Another road to success barricaded by short-sighted males with personas as fragile as a soap bubble.  Unadmitted fear in the male psyche coursed like a heat-seeking missile.  How could men compete with women for the spotlight?  Unimaginable to the dim and unallowable to the ones who recognized reality.

By gosh, they threw everything but that proverbial sink at us.  Scroll back to the 1967 Boston Marathon.  In 1967, women weren’t allowed to officially enter the Boston Marathon, so Kathrine Switzer entered that year as “K.V. Switzer” to hide her gender.  Two miles in, an official tried to eject her from the course. She finished anyway, becoming the first woman to complete the race as an official entrant.  Women weren’t officially allowed to enter the race until 1972. Women’s marathoning wasn’t part of the Olympics until 1984.

And were we glued to the TV in 1973 to watch a tennis match?  We were.  On a September night in Houston, Billie Jean King smashed an ace for women in sports with her defeat of Bobby Riggs, a self-described male chauvinist pig.    King subsequently organized a meeting that led to the creation of the Women’s Tennis Association.  She threatened to boycott the 1973 U.S. Open if male and female champions were not paid the same, which led to the Open becoming the first major tennis tournament to offer equal prize money.

Shoot forward to a few weeks ago, Dawn Staley and Caitlin Clark planted another flag in our craggy climb to recognition and equality.   Unhampered by the “nervous fatigue” warning from starched collar Victorian men.  Bowing to none who forced women’s teams to pay their own way until Title IX, they played.  They played to a packed house of 24M, almost double the audience for NCAA Men.

That skirmish is over, the giant leap taken.  It could not have been without the play of hundreds of women who went before.  I still remember when I played guard in a tunic, a dress; I couldn’t even cross center court and there were six of us.  It was a soft game for people perceived as too soft to play the real thing.

Basketball and the sports arena is but one metaphor for women’s emerging role.  We will bring the full court press.  We will block shots aimed at keeping us subservient.  We will not go back to anything where we are “less than.”   And we will vote to secure our gains and continue our forward advance.

“I figure, if a girl wants to be a legend, she should go ahead and be one.” —Calamity Jane

Return of the Writer

by Valerie Webster | Mar 29, 2024 | Blog

“That deaf, dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball.”  We’ve all read stories of the physically challenged who have overcome.  Like most, I could not conceive that nothing threatening my life and my work would happen to me.  Hey, I made it almost to 75 years without fear that at any moment I could shoot off the planet like a punctured balloon.  Those “bad things” happened to others.  Until it didn’t

It was a Colorado August afternoon.  The sun sizzled the thin air like deep fry oil awaiting the fries.  Over Long’s Peak a restless motion of super-heated sky roiled clouds into towering banks of cumulous thunderheads.  The breeze stiffened.  It’s always a crap shoot as to whether that weather would remain a speculation or pound the earth below.

I decided not to chance it.  I needed to lug an open bag of mulch into the garage.  There were three roofers shooting nails into spanking new shingles on my roof.  Yeah, they told me not to go outside but . . . .    Within inches of the garage door, a heavy something slugged the back of my wrist.  I looked up first – saw nothing and no one.  When I glanced at my wrist, I expected to see a bruise, a big bruise.  I saw bone. I saw ligament tatters.  I saw stars. 

Every worst-case outcome sped through my horrified head as a friend punched the accelerator on the way to the closest emergency center. 

I had an initial surgery to reattach my ligaments.  I sported a spiffy purple fiberglass cast, followed by a softer support splint a few weeks later.  Thought I was on the short path to recovery.  But the incision refused to close two small but nonetheless oozy and resistant-to-closing wounds.  A month after the usual healing period of such an opening, the incision gaps refused to progress.

My optimism started to flag.  My hand hurt and it wasn’t functioning.  I couldn’t type.  While I previously viewed the wound as an annoyance, I began to doubt.  The surgeon speculated on errant stitches and recommended a reopening of the site to hunt.  Nothing turned up.  While I had just completed my second book, musings on long-term disability at first trickled.  After disappointment in the second surgery though, the intermittent disaster scenarios became a steady flow.  My emotional state sank like the Titanic – without benefit of the band or Leo DiCaprio!

I thought back to the writers who I read had survived the incidents and setbacks of bad fortune.  I considered Hemingway who endured back-to-back plane crashes only one day apart.  In order to extricate himself from the day-two crash, Hemingway had to ram the plane door with his head.  He survived with a legacy of persistent killer headaches and the after effects of damages to his kidneys, liver and spleen.  Given my own depressed state engendered by far less egregious injuries, I could not imagine how Papa managed to write with the incessant distraction of head pain.  Of course, he tried suicide multiple times before he set himself free.

I also was reminded of Stephen King’s almost fatal walk along a narrow Maine road where he sustained a broken hip, collapsed lung, multiple lacerations and his right leg was so badly shattered doctors debated amputation. At the scene, EMT’s told King’s brother he might not make it to the hospital.  He spent three weeks in said hospital and endured five surgeries.  In the immediate aftermath, he decided he would not write again.  The pain was too overwhelming.  Still, the siren call of writing persisted and, determined to complete his Dark Tower series, he began perspective repair.  And we know King did, in fact, return to his work which became his saving grace.

Debilitating what-ifs swirled faster than a mixing bowl beater on high when I learned from the surgeon that a third opening of the wound might be of help.  I swore I wasn’t going to cry.  Fear cozied up to me.  It wanted attention and I gave it.  Like a hapless customer in the clutches of a time share salesman, I had no wherewithal to flee.  I could not rationalize my way out.  I experienced my self growing smaller and smaller. Inversely, fear expanded by leaps. 

In a moment of clarity, a still small voice whispered “Enough.”  I clung to that and like a climber scaling a fearsome bare rock wall, I gathered myself to act.  I spent time learning the specifics of how my ligaments were re-attached.  I talked with others who had similar injuries from which they’d recovered.  I learned about things I could do to promote my own healing.  Once I retook my rightful place as chief of extricating myself from this painful tangent, my strength returned, though slowly.  And like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, I embraced the necessaries that would restore me. I booted my PC and took up where I had left off.

Without overt summoning, the flint of defiance stuck the stone of resolve.  I would find a way and I began to take heart as surely as I had begun to take action. It took some time but I found a chronic wound specialist who made a suggestion for a trial remedy.  It worked!

With success came confidence and I’ve been able to return to my writing.  At my lowest point, I had given up the idea of being able to create another book, but ultimately, I’ve never been a quitter.  My recent brush with defeat is far distant in the rear view.  While I continue to have healthy respect for “black swans” and “freak accidents”, they no longer threaten me with nagging residence in my head.

Every adversity has the potential to cut down or build character.  I want always to keep the faith and it was the words of Churchill, whose island was crumbling under the Luftwaffe’s devasting rain of bombing, who delivered the message of defiance that stiffened the Brits’ backbone.   If you’re going through hell, keep going.  And I am.