b l o g o s

so excited

Joshie just posted a video link over at FB to the Pointer Sisters' "I'm So Excited" from 1982 (sorry I can't embed it), which has meant the tumbling in of some serious high school memories. As my sister can tell you, this was the song I listened to over and over (and over) before every one of my high school games on my walkman or car tape player (depending on whether the game was home or away). My focus song.

In watching the video just now, I realized that while the video renders it as the ultimate going out song, for me the song conjures the long treks to away games, the back of a bus seat in front of me, missing chunks of black rubber, my teammates (like me) wrapped--rapt?--in headphones, my cheerleader friends chattering and shimmering.

Before every one of our games, no matter how important, I was super nervous and keyed-up, and this song helped me to re-interpret those autonomic responses--heart racing, mind darting, sweating--as sheer exuberance rather than fear. This song is largely why I associate the high school portion of my career with utter positivity and happiness (even though objectively I know there was lots of pain and suffering). At some point, my team started running out to this song--in a layup line--and the exuberance spread through the bleachers. I hadn't realized that the song was at that point 5 or 6 or 7 years old. Its liveliness endures; it makes me want to pull on short polyester shorts, long stripey socks, string up my hi-tops and do some passing drills and figure eights with old friends.

dear promoters of Illini women's basketball:

I am not a devoted fan, though sometimes I feel like I should or could be given my basketball past. I did however score some of those free tickets to the game yesterday vs. Minnesota, and I have a thing or two to say. Okay, just one. I think you all are making too big of a deal about Jenna Smith. Yeah, I know she made honorable mention All-American last year, and maybe it's because I played on a team that had an All American every year--sometimes two. But by *only* and always spotlighting this one player, you are hurting this team in more ways than you know, but in ways I will try to explain to you.

First off, the hype contributes to what is apparently the game plan to defeat Illinois: shut down Smith, and you notch a victory. Now it might be argued that this would be the game plan regardless, and it might, but if this year's recruiting class is in fact the second best in the country, then how about talking about the freshmen? I left the game not knowing who the first years were or even how many there were; instead, I can now tell anyone who cares that Jenna Smith likes to chew 6 different kinds of gum before games, and also that she prefers Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings (much to the dismay of Illini fans, in fact). If you are going to cultivate long-term fans, you have GOT to get people interested in watching players' careers as they develop, rather than always flaunting your one star player. Tennessee fans, by contrast, were so devoted that they became obsessed with the players who didn't start the game. They waved signs to put us in the game. They knew we could contribute, that we had to contribute for the team to be successful. At least four players were sent to the press conference after the game, usually at least one nonstarter. We were a team. Our All Americans were phenomenal, to be sure, but we made them better by scoring when we needed to.

Secondly (and relatedly), by always putting Smith in front of cameras, in the headlines, etc., you are ignoring some very good players who might be made better with a little more hype. For example, yesterday, number 21 had a phenomenal game. Her name is Macie Blinn, but I just had to look her up on the website to make sure that was her name. She kept the team in yesterday's game. Smith had a pretty crappy game actually (she needs to toughen up a little if you ask me), but Blinn did what she needed to do: got steals, made good passes, tore down rebounds, and scored 16 points. And I don't even think she started the game (though she did the second half). The first headline I saw, though, was that Smith scored 21 points. I'll bet she did! She shot like 80 times! This is not her fault, but rather how the offense is designed. And the hype machine.

Finally, if you emphasized some of the other players, Smith would be free to focus on her role on the team. My god, she has great mobility and really wonderful hands. I would love to feed her pass after pass--she catches everything. And she is only a junior. Luckily all the attention doesn't seem to be going to her head, yet. Don't force the issue, or worse, burn her out.

Hey! I just figured out that Blinn is one of those awesome freshmen. There we go. My point here is that this is a team. Not a beehive, not a monarchy. You would do Smith a favor if you pulled back and focused on some of her teammates. Give little kids a range of players to holler for; give devoted fans a sense of the talents of the other players, reasons to come back to games after a star has graduated. Jenna Smith--and the team--would be better for it.

sincerely,
debbie

career decisions

Yesterday's Times ran an article about the "coaching tree" of Pat Summitt--about the impressively high number of her former players who are helping to achieve what, really, was Summitt's aim all along: to raise the level of the women's game. That number, believe me, would be much higher if it weren't for the WNBA or european professional leagues. It's a terrific article, and the print version of the Times features an uncanny shot of one of Pat's many point guards, Kellie Jolly Harper, squatting and squinting, Summitt style, on the sidelines.

Reading this piece made me spiral back a couple of decades to my explicit decision not to go into coaching. The 1989-90 season was a particularly challenging one for Pat. We had some behavioral issues, the details of which escape me now, something to do with missed curfews or spending nights with boyfriends. We had some rifts on the team. One player was perceived as the "coach's pet," which can be devastating to team chemistry. My best friend Regina's unlucky eye twitch happened more times than ever that season (we lost every game before which her eye twitched). We played some pretty raggedy basketball that year, and we didn't make it to the Final Four, which as it happens, was being held on our home court (for more on that particular devastation, go here). Pat made us sit in the stands and watch every second of the 1990 final four. We watched as the Stanford point guard from Oak Ridge who had really wanted to play at Tennessee won her team a championship. The next week, Pat called us in one by one.

Regina and I waited for our meetings with trepidation--my stomach turns just writing about it. After those meetings our team numbers dwindled to 9 scholarship players; nearly a third of the team transferred or rotated elsewhere by mutual agreement. Apart from the fear heading in to the meeting, and the fact that I, like Regina, came out of mine okay (we both were team players with easy-going temperaments), I remember nothing.

At that point I wasn't planning on a coaching career--the pressure cooker that was my high school coach's job already made that option less than appealing--but around 1990 I decided there's no way I wanted to coach basketball for a living because I didn't want my livelihood to depend on the motivational levels or the mercurial temperaments of 18-to 22-year olds. Regina and I talked about this a lot, and we agreed that much as we loved basketball, it was not our future.

It's not that I don't like 18- to 22-year olds, I do. I ended up deciding to become a college professor after all. But there is a big difference in having one's job hinge on the win-loss record posted by a small handful of young adult women and having student evaluations of your performance as a teacher figure ever-so-slightly into promotions and raises. 1990 showed me that no matter how much talent you have recruited, or how hard you work to prepare your team, things still might not turn out well: players bicker, sulk, and rebel much as they hesitate, slough, and miss. Students may do these things too (especially sulk and slough), but one need only wait out the semester, and there's a fresh batch of faces the next term.  Personality management, it seemed to me, had to be one of the most frustrating parts of coaching. Pat--and all those former players who are now coaches--have far more patience than I would, and I admire them for it.

1990 was also, as it happens, the year I changed my major to English. That summer, I fulfilled my major's Shakespeare requirement, and one of my teammates taunted me by swiping my Riverside and coloring in Shakespeare's eyes with red pen.  

gr8!

Last night Tennessee won its eighth--8th!--national championship. Their full-court press was nothing short of heroic.

the gear

This NCAA commercial, which features people who are presumably former student athletes in their professional garb, makes me and JM giggle. This is because if I were in it, I would be wearing pajama pants, a ratty tee shirt, and no shoes.

grounds i used to stomp

In a span of about 20 hours, I have visited the two places on the University of Tennessee campus in which, with the possible exception of my dorm rooms, I spent the most time as an undergraduate: Thompson-Boling Arena, where the basketball happens, and McClung Tower, where the rhetoric and literature (and all the humanities, for that matter) happen. Last night we went to the women's game against Arkansas, and this afternoon I did a little talk on my research in my old department.

Both the arena and the central part of campus have undergone significant changes: the arena has all new seats, and a main thoroughfare that runs by McClung tower got transformed into a pedestrian-only walkway. At the game last night, I recognized several of the media and facilities staffers working on the main floor, and half the coaching staff  remains the same, with Holly Warlick and Pat Summitt still going strong. Today, I recognized some of my old professors in and around McClung and chatted with them briefly.

This seemed to be the obverse of so many other places I know where the people come and go while the structures go on unchanged. And yet somehow the continuities are as reassuring as the new seats and bricks are lovely.

memories in teeth

An elbow, a knee, a bagel. These are what spun through the backs of my eyelids, squeezed tight at the bright noise of dental drills and grinders (yes, grinders). Tooth number 8 (right front) took the elbow and, later, the bagel.

The elbow was courtesy of a player at Erwin High School--or was it Mountain City? (they're rather close if I recall)--a tall player with big eighties hair. I think she resembled the character Glory from Season Five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and her elbow flung me about as far across the floor. But things are a little fuzzy up to the point where I was screaming and rolling. The scream definitely got more deathy when I spit out half my tooth, and I was a little embarrassed later about how loudly I screamed. But it fucking hurt.

Tooth number 10 (two left of 8) took a knee in college. If that sounds odd in a basketball situation, that's because it wasn't a basketball situation exactly. For some reason my teammates and I thought we could be gymnasts in our spare time--spare meaning the few minutes between class and practice, when we usually goofed off in the locker room. That day's goofing was more elaborate than the usual dashing off of letters or flipping of channels or playing of tapes. A few of us decided Lisa Harrison would achieve an assisted back-flip. So someone--I forget who--got on her hands and knees, and  as the assist person, I was supposed to help flip over her legs. Gymnasts don't need this, but that's probably because none of their legs are nearly as long. Lisa came tumbling in and I leaned my head in along with my spotting arms. Her knee caught me on the jaw mid-flip, and my lower tooth chipped the upper tooth, #10. I never got it fixed because I liked how it looked.

Ten years after the elbow, #8's bond came off in a big chewy Irving's bagel right before I was to teach my second or third class ever as a new TA. I thought I would just write on the board the whole class, or stare at my students unsmiling, but the humor of the situation won out, and when I finally exposed my half-tooth the three hockey players in the class developed an instant, collective crush on their TA.

And so today, numbers 8 and 10 got "updated" to the tune of "Make a Wish, Baby" and about a dozen other equally forgettable songs.

on time

I am in a heavily-paneled hotel room a la Almost Famous somewhere in Kentucky, where I have stopped on my way to my parents' house in Tennessee, having left so late in the day that I could only get through part of my drive before needing to sleep. (Plus I'm too much of a wimp about driving more than nine hours alone and so I couldn't bring myself to do it all tomorrow.) The day began with Nietzsche in rhet trad, then turned in to a mash of meetings and emails (the meetings were lively and fun, thank goodness); zero time for working out; barely time to eat. Definitely no time to get lost finding the rental car place, because it moved from its location four years ago when I last rented there. Packing consisted of scooping warm clothes out of the dryer and into the newly-emptied suitcase. Ugh.

Tomorrow night I'm joining in with women who played basketball at my high school over the past two decades to gather around our coach, a hard-nosed, driven, warm, funny, and loving man who was badly injured in a boating accident this past summer. Very badly. Still can't walk. Not sure if he will. The whole thing is flatly awful, not least because he lost his son in the accident too.

But I think the idea for the gathering is to remind him just how many lives he has shaped--for awhile there, every player of his played in college on scholarship, and he coached four teams to state championships. Coach Ricker loves winning, that's for sure, but he lives for the moment just before winning--the crucial moment when a surge of intensity will put away a game, what he has always called rally time. And I guess to some extent that surge is what we're trying to create.

I hope it works.      

interruptions

A few months ago, I wrote about a conference call scenario during which I had to make a decision. Today I was on the phone with the same group of people no less (context: I'm on a PhD committee at UI of Chicago), but a whole new scenario. This time the decision was easy, but the circumstances were still distracting. What happened is simple. During the exam, four different people tried to call our house (five if you count the time one of the people also tried my cell phone). Just for informational purposes, in normal circumstances, this is roughly the total number of phone calls we get in two weeks. This exam was only two hours.

Additionally, our caller i.d. is tied in with call waiting, so I admit that I took a peek to see who was calling in. Let's just say these were some seemingly intriguing callers.

I wondered what would happen if I clicked over but of course did not: that would have been really, really rude.

This scenario actually reminds me of a time when I made the wrong choice where call waiting was involved, a time when I was incredibly rude. This was back when call waiting was brand new. In fact counting out the years, I can't believe call waiting has been around that long. I was a senior in high school and was on the phone with Andy Landers, the smooth talking coach from Georgia, and a famous recruiter (I'm pretty sure my mom would have signed with him). Landers is also known to be as mean as he is charming. So I was talking to Andy--had been for a half an hour--when a call beeped in, and so I asked him to hang on. (Note: as suggest above, I now think this was pretty rude, but in my defense, I was 17! It could have been a potential date or something). Anyway, so I clicked over and it's Lea Henry, the (then)  assistant coach at Florida. Henry was an all american point guard from Tennessee who wore cool wristbands, and I a little bit worshipped her. So I asked her to hang on and clicked back to Landers and told him I had to go. He asked me why, and with stars in my voice I said "it's Lea Henry."

And Landers hung up. I kid you not: he hung up on me. I was mortified. I now pretty much think I deserved it, but still. [There's a whole other discussion here about why I did not go into college coaching: having one's livelihood depend on 17-21 year olds does not seem all that attractive. Though the choice I did make instead doesn't exactly vary all that much, it occurs to me now.]   

Anyway, so today after the exam (MP, you did great, btw!), it occurred to me that a similar 'plot' would make an excellent segment in Metaspencer's and BP's 9-interviews sequel: (the phone interview edition--see M-S's comment in the post linked above). Here's a sketch of the scene:

Nervous interviewee waiting for the phone to ring, notes spread out everywhere, browser pointed to the website of the department that will be calling any minute now. Printouts of the interviewers' photos taped to the wall. Dogs scratching at the door.

[insert lots of other great turns once the connection gets made, like the muffled person you can't hear, the person who coughs loudly right into the speaker repeatedly, that kind of thing--suggestions are welcome in the comments]

Then, while the interviewee is rolling on a teaching answer, there's a call waiting beep.

Search chair: I'm sorry, [name of interviewee], something happened to the connection and we missed part of that last word. Did you say in your writing classes you emphasize Pynchon?

Interviewee: What? Oh, no, I said [beep]tion

[Interviewee glances at the phone to see that a call from Dream U is beeping in].

Search chair: Hm. There must be something wrong with our connection, we missed the last word again.

Interviewee [speaking quickly now]: Right. I said invention. I'm sorry, can you hang on just a second? I'm getting a call--so sorry.

Search chair: Uh, er--

click

[Interviewers blink at each other around the table; cut to interviewee setting up an interview with Dream U and then clicking back all chipper]

Interviewee: Are you there? I really needed to take that.

Hello?

Hello???

Helloooo?

epideixis

All month I've been looking forward to yesterday, what had affectionately become known in our household as "Danielle Allen Day," since Allen was scheduled to visit campus to talk about The Odyssey Project, and since I was lucky enough to share two meals and good conversation with her and even to present a rather encomiastic introduction to her audience (though what introduction is not encomiastic?). I also got to meet her dog; he licked me on the nose.

Yesterday in fact took me back a little, to basketball camp on another campus the summer I turned 14, and to the day I met Mary Ostrowski, a longago Tennessee player who was strong and fast and sported high cheekbones, high socks, and thick black wristbands, and who I thought was pretty awesome. I got to know Mary O at camp; she learned my name and autographed my vinyl adidas bag which I then carried everywhere despite the fact that the bag was yellow with black stripes, the school colors of our cross-county rivals.

It's probably a little dumb or uncool for an academic (or an adult) to admit she has a heroine, but my feeling on the matter is this: if I ever find myself in a position where I can't admit to admiring someone with intelligence so fierce and yet so tempered with generosity and humility, someone who makes everyone around her smarter (qualities she in fact shares with the only other MacArthur fellow I know)--or worse, if I find myself no longer coming into contact with such people, then it's probably time for me to get out.