You Let Some Girl Beat You? Read Online Free PDF

pretty, which was a personal sticking point with me for this day. I broadened my shoulders, lifted my chin and forced the corners of my mouth to turn up. “Let’s do this thing.”
    The Pacers were hosting a luncheon for the sponsors, and I was expected to speak. Crestfallen as I was, I’d never let it show. And in this dress, anyone who suspected otherwise would have their proof that beneath the basketball jersey, I was 100% female.
    When I walked into the room, heads turned, and I’ll admit I was glad. Let them see that I’m not some freak. Let them understand that I’m a basketball player who just happens to be a woman.
    Bob Lamey, the play-by-play radio announcer for the Pacers games, was the first to congratulate me on my brief talk at the Pacers luncheon. “Nice speech, Ann.”
    Giving a speech was okay, but what was next for me? Since I’d signed a three-year contract with the Pacers, it took several weeks for the organization to decide what they were going to do with me. Eventually, they decided I’d make appearances across the country and capitalize on the publicity. I signed with the William Morris Agency and did a Seven-Up commercial with Magic Johnson (who, along with Larry Bird, comprised that year’s most eagerly anticipated college draft picks). In between appearances and commercials, I sat in the booth with Bob Lamey as the Pacer’s color analyst, a position my brother, Mark, had negotiated into the personal service agreement should I not make the cut. Seems I was still carving new territory, since no woman had ever broadcast an NBA game before.
    â€œSo you’re my new sidekick, huh?” Bob said the next time I saw him. He’d never worked with a color analyst before, not during his announcing the Pacers games, or those of the two Indiana hockey teams. Now he would have to share the microphone, and with a woman no less. It was clear from the start that Bob liked sitting next to some dame delivering her bent on the finesse of the game about as much as Slick had liked the idea of my playing with the Pacers. They’d both have preferred to see a proctologist.
    It didn’t take long for the letters to flow: “ W hat’s a woman doing broadcasting a man’s game?” I had taken a broadcasting course at UCLA with Professor Art Friedman and had broadcast two UCLA Men’s Basketball games, but I still had plenty to learn.
    â€œDid you see that?” I’d yell into the radio microphone and Bob would turn to me with this distressed look, mouthing “Huh?”
    And the letters kept coming. “ You don’t know what you’re talking about, lady .”
    The Midwestern mores that had bred men like Slick and Bob, and which permeated the region, weren’t much different from the values my siblings and I were raised with, except with one big exception: Men and women were equal. We grew up with gender-blind parents, who believed their six daughters could do anything that their five sons could do. In return, we didn’t balk when the full force of an older brother’s tackle was felt. There was no complaining, no “fairer-sex” allowances. We learned to hold our own. Now I hoped to hold my own with Bob Lamey in the broadcasting booth, but it wouldn’t be easy. Bob didn’t like it, and neither did the fans. “ Whose lame idea was this?” one of the letters asked. It could have been worse. It could have been a radio call-in show. The talk around the water cooler wasn’t much better.
    Sandy Knapp, the head of public relations for the Pacers and the first woman in the NBA on the corporate side, put it succinctly. “I’m going to be straight with you, I didn’t like the idea of you going out for the Pacers any more than anyone else.” The tone of her voice set my hair on end. Sandy had been the one assigned to fly back and forth with me to do the New York City morning shows when