Coach Pam and I met in an alley in northwest Washington, DC, on “K”
Street in-between 16th and 17th. And it’s a funny story.
I was a bicycle messenger and Pam worked in an adjacent building on the
evening shift. The bicycle messengers used to come up the alley because we had
to enter our dispatch office that way. When they didn’t have a job for you,
they’d call you back to this nerve center of the operation, so the guys would
hang out in the alley and do all sorts of nefarious and illegal things. Some of
the more intrepid characters used to chat up any woman that might venture into
the alley. But I was not one of those—I was a shy boy.
One afternoon when I was leaving the alley, I saw this nice-looking
young lady, and I probably looked at her and smiled as I passed by. She winked
at me, and I got scared and ran away! I don’t remember if I hopped on my bike,
or what, but I skedaddled. I was not used to getting “cracked on,” as they say
in DC.
But the next day, I went into Burger King and there she was again. And
if I get that obvious a “go” signal,
I usually have the courage to at least start a conversation, which I did. We
had a good chat, and over the next several years we fell in love.
I was twenty when I met Pam, and as I got to know her, what really
attracted me was that she seemed to have an innate sense of who she was and who
she was not. She seemed to have an internal compass, and the needle would stay
where it was no matter what life threw her way. Maybe she was born with it—I don’t
know—but she’d had it ever since I knew her and it really attracted me because
I didn’t have it at all. And most of
the people I had known, or had bounced into, didn’t have it, either. So I found
it strangely secure and comforting. It felt like something I was seeking, and I
thought if I had it, I would be a happier person with a better relationship to
the world around me.
PAM
LOVES BASKETBALL
Coach Pam had grown up in the Anacostia housing projects in Washington,
DC. And, during the course of our long relationship, which included having a
child together, she always spoke fondly about two things: playing basketball “down
at the rec”—the rec center near the apartment where she grew up—and
photography, which she had worked on sometime before meeting me. But she really
loved basketball, and she was pretty
good. She could dribble pretty well and she had all these street moves, like
dribbling in-between her legs and behind her back.
We used to play basketball together early in our relationship. We lived
in a house in Adelphi, Maryland, and there was a court nearby. We also went
down to the University of Maryland and had these great one-on-one games. And I could
never figure out why I was always doubled over and breathing hard, when she was
the one who smoked a pack a day!
We had a lot of fun. I was heavier than she was at that time, and at
various points in my life. Sometimes I had sixty or seventy pounds on her, so I
would try to back her down and throw my weight around, etc. But we always had a
lot of fun playing each other, and really enjoyed it.
Then we went through a period of about ten years when we didn’t play. During
that time, we lived in Chicago, where our daughter was born and raised, and
then we moved to a small town in Pennsylvania, close to the New Jersey border.
WHAT IS
WORK?
Through the course of our marriage, Pam worked a string of supremely
unsatisfying jobs, though I guess they were satisfying in the sense that she
loved to work. She was working when I met her, and she had a big sense of
responsibility and loved to earn money and be able to provide for herself, but
the work itself wasn’t something she seemed to want to jump out of bed and do. When
we met, she was a cashier at a breakfast shop for a hotel in DC, and in Chicago,
she worked for an auto-body store doing office work and had several other jobs.
In Pennsylvania, she cashiered for a large Brinks-type operation, and also
worked briefly in the office of a racetrack.
And she worked in a textile mill amidst massive machines. I used to
pick her up at work and the older people who came out of the mill looked
horribly deformed. They were bow-legged and their joints were all out of place
and they had lost fingers by catching them in the machines. It didn’t seem like
a picnic by any means.
For Pam, though, it just seemed to be a job. And one of the things that
we talked about a lot—but perhaps had different points of view on—was that I
was always seeking work that was meaningful to me and that I was passionate and
really excited about doing. I was in constant search for that, especially when
I was working on jobs that bored me or were unsatisfying. It was a big issue to
me, but I always got the sense from Pam that work wasn’t supposed to be fun. It
was a way to earn money, and that’s all it was. One’s ability to find something
that they actually liked to do, and got a lot of non-monetary rewards from, was
really just a pipe dream, and the sooner one accepted that, the better. So it
was interesting to see how our differing perspectives played out in our lives.
PAM
COACHES
The story of Coach Pam begins before I met her, when she fell in love
with basketball. And one of the most exciting things that ever happened to me,
in my entire life, was to watch her story develop. To me, it encapsulates many
things.
We had moved to Pennsylvania and I was working for a pharmaceutical
company and wasn’t home very much. I had an hour’s commute to the job and was
trying to make vice president in two years or less, so I was often at work even
on the weekends. We had just moved into the neighborhood, which was kind of a
strange neighborhood relative to the ones we had lived in before. For example,
the first day we were there, our next-door neighbors came over and asked us if
we’d like to join them on their nightly walk. That was certainly a new
experience for us!
Anyway, Pam got to know our next-door neighbors fairly well, and they
had a daughter named Claire who was the same age as our daughter. Claire and
our daughter never became friends or buddies, but Pam took an interest in
Claire. And one day when Claire was ten or eleven, Pam saw her shooting around at
the basketball hoop her parents had put up in their driveway.
I don’t know the exact details of the story, but my understanding is
that Pam went over and started helping Claire—showing her a few tricks and
giving her tips about her shot and encouraging her and having fun with her and
playing around and being good company, I’m sure. I don’t know how long this
went on, but apparently Claire’s mom took notice and really appreciated the
time Pam spent with Claire and saw that Pam had a lot to offer.
Being the activist mom she was, Sue went to the coach of Claire’s team,
which was an intramural league, not the public school league, and encouraged
him to take Pam on in an advisory role or as a co-coach. And to his credit, he
did.
In retrospect, I think he recognized in Pam—probably pretty
quickly—that she had a knack and an intuition for the game, and that she worked
well with the girls. And that was something he probably felt was missing in their
experience. So they teamed up and started working together.
COACH PAM’S
FIRST TEAM, AND HER SPECIAL GIFTS
The first team Pam coached was a group of Claire’s friends and assorted
peers who had known each other for a long time, probably since early elementary
school. Pam and her co-coach, Mr. Lawrence, coached them for four or five years,
and their team had a nemesis—Palmer—whose girls always seemed to be three feet
higher than they should be for their age, and they were well coached. But Coach
Pam’s team got better and better each year, and in the fourth year—I believe it
was—they won the intramural championship in the summer league. It was a
crowning achievement and was very exciting, because the girls had been together
for so long and had worked hard and finally won.
And it was the most exciting game! I think they were behind by about
six points with a minute to go, and one of the girls hit a three-point shot.
And then, as I recall, the game was tied, but one of Palmer’s girls was fouled
as time ran out. So if one of Coach Pam’s girls could make a free-throw, they
would win the championship. She missed the first one but sank the second! Coach
Pam was about three feet off the ground and the girls were ecstatic.
What was very interesting about that team was that Coach Pam had an
innate ability—which I could see that coaches on other teams did not have—to
size up each girl and her strengths, and put each player in a position on the
team where they would be successful. And it was often counter-intuitive. The
girl who sank the free-throw to win the championship was relatively short, and
she was stocky. Most coaches would put someone short in the guard position, and
if they’re tall, they’d put them down low where they can grab rebounds and
shoot close to the basket.
But Coach Pam saw that this girl, whose name was Jess, was very good
inside, even though she was short. She could catch the ball, she was quick, and
she had these great moves where she would duck under taller players. She had a
low center of gravity and was aggressive, so when she caught the ball, she
could move quickly and forcefully to create open space, and wasn’t afraid to go
very strong to the hoop. And she was lethal under the basket. But when Jess
played for the school teams, they always put her at shooting guard, where she
was much less effective.
Mr. Lawrence’s daughter, Elissa, was also on that team. She was quite
tall for her age, but was very quick and had great leadership qualities—she
could see the floor and was good at distributing the ball, etc. So Coach Pam
had her in a guard position, and oftentimes Elissa brought the ball up and ran
the offense. She had a lot of energy, and when she was running the offense, the
team really got up. She also had a fighting spirit, and if the team was behind,
she would sacrifice her body—she was a real hustler. So Pam had her as the
floor general and the quarterback for the team, which, again, was completely
counter-intuitive. And when Elissa played for other teams, the coaches, who
used the old rule of height equals down low, put Elissa down low, where she was
much less effective. She was lithe, light, and lanky, with long arms and legs,
and when she got down in traffic, it was probably hard for her to operate.
These are examples of Pam’s innate sense in terms of players’ physical
attributes. But she was also intuitive about where every girl was at that
point, not just in relation to basketball, but in relation to their confidence
about life in general and their relationship to the other girls—all these
factors. And Coach Pam seemed to just know how to put them in positions where
they could be successful and grow.
SHE WAS
BELOVED
She used to get extraordinary letters from the girls’ parents after
every season. I was running a consulting business by then, and I used to tell
all my friends that if I got even one letter like that from my clients, I’d
take the next six months off. The letters these parents wrote her were just
beautiful, and said things like: “My daughter has never enjoyed basketball, but
this year she really had fun and she’s really developed.” In essence, they’d
say, being on the team had changed their daughter’s life. And they’d remark
that there had always been a lot of drama on the team in previous years, and a
lot of conflicts between the girls, but on Coach Pam’s team, there didn’t seem
to be much of that.
These are just the first of many incredible things about Pam’s teams.
One time, I took my friend Paul to watch a game, and he’s a basketball aficionado. He has courtside seats to
the New Jersey Nets, and his son is a high school phenom—a shooting guard—whom
Paul has taken to tournaments all around the Northeast corridor since he was
knee-high. When Paul came to the game, he said that Coach Pam’s team was
extremely well-coached, and what struck him the most was the girls’ unselfish
playing. They would pass the ball unselfishly and look for the opening and get
the ball there, which was uncharacteristic of teams, especially when the players were going through puberty or were
post-pubescent and in high school!
It’s interesting how Coach Pam’s career developed. By the time she won
the intramural championship, I guess word-of-mouth had gotten around about her,
because parents lobbied the public school to have her come and coach the girls.
She took that opportunity for a season and coached the 7th grade
girls to a 22-2 record. It was the best record of any girls’ team at the school,
including JV and Varsity, and who knows if it was the best record for many
years previous and hence. It was quite an accomplishment, because most of the
“stars” of the 7th grade had been selected for the 8th
grade team, so Coach Pam basically took a team of girls who had not been picked,
and turned them into champions.
One mother commented on the fact that Coach Pam patted her girls on the
head when they came off the floor and onto the sidelines. And I think the
reason that Coach Pam is so special—which fascinated me and I tried to
understand it—is that she was coaching these 7th and 8th
grade girls at a time when they were going through a lot of changes, questioning
themselves and their life and their relationships with others, and trying to
make sense of it all. And Coach Pam had a quality that none of the other
coaches had, as far as I could see. In particular, many of the coaches were
white and male. We lived in a predominantly white neighborhood—almost
exclusively white—and I can’t recall one black player on any of the teams. I
haven’t mentioned it before, but Coach Pam is black—and proud! And I saw a lot
of the male coaches relate to the girls in a way that felt really wrong. They
were not positive or encouraging, and they used to demean the girls publicly. For
example, if one girl passed the ball to someone who dropped it, the coaches
would say—right in front of the whole team, the parents, everyone—“Don’t throw
it to her. She can’t catch.”
I remember going to a practice, and there was one girl who was
overweight. The male coach made her run around the gym the entire time that the
other girls practiced their shots and scrimmaged. I thought it was a very
demeaning thing to do.
WHY
THEY LOVED HER
I also saw some female coaches who couldn’t relate to the girls the way
Coach Pam did, but it was primarily the males who yelled at the girls and
demeaned them. Sometimes I’d watch the men Coach Pam’s teams, and it was like
night and day. It was obvious that the girls did not want to play for those
coaches, but when Coach Pam was coaching, they would have taken a bullet if
someone shot at her. They really wanted to play for her and do well—they loved
her and they loved playing for her. And the only way I can make sense of it is
that she was giving them the same thing, if not more, and they wanted to show
their appreciation.
My sense is that a combination of things attracted the girls to Coach
Pam, but one of them was the same thing that attracted me: that clarity about who
she is and who she isn’t. And the girls saw it tested under all sorts of
conditions—during games, when they were losing by a lot—and in all sorts of
scenarios. One time, there was a man in the stands from the opposing team who
was talking trash to Coach Pam. I can’t remember if he gave her the finger in
the middle of the game, or what, but she turned around from the bench and said,
“Come see me after the game.” They went out in the hall and Coach Pam was Coach
Pam. She got up in the guy’s face and gave him a lot more than he’d probably
bargained for!
Another time, the team went to a neighborhood where the ref had to kick
the entire opposing team’s cheering section out of the building because things
had gotten violent. One of the opposing players had hauled off and punched one
of Pam’s girls in the face. So Coach Pam had to manage that and finish the game
and coach the girls and the girl who had been punched. And afterward, the whole
crowd was waiting outside for Coach Pam and the team, and she had to make it to
the bus and out of the parking lot, etc.
There were all sorts of situations that Coach Pam faced with the girls,
and I think they came to see that she knew who she was, and they were drawn to that
and respected it, and saw it as something they wanted in themselves. I think
the other thing is that she is a powerful combination of encouragement and
love, in the stereotypical mother sense, but she’s also very tough, in the
stereotypical male sense. And they’re all in the same package. She can stick a
foot in your butt if you’ve crossed the line or done something uncalled for,
but she also knows when you need love and encouragement, and she can give that,
too.
The bottom line was that she wanted playing to be fun for the girls.
She wanted it to be fun.
Even when she got mad, there was always a sense of joking around and
playfulness, as opposed to other teams with other coaches. And when you watched
her teams play, they seemed to be having a lot of fun, because they were. She
brought that to her teams.
I also noticed that there were girls who changed their opinion of Coach
Pam between the time they first came in contact with her at an young age, and
the time they had grown older and were on the high school varsity teams, where coaching
was much more about Xs and Os, etc. Perhaps Coach Pam wasn’t an Xs and Os
superstar, or as cerebral as some of the coaches they had in other venues, but
many of those girls came to respect her.
She was also an extremely good manager, which I think is an almost
impossible task. You have to be great with the girls, you have to manage the
playing time, and you have to manage the parents, which is probably
three-quarters of your job. I thought Coach Pam was very artful in helping
parents understand that the goal of the team was to win and there were times
when they needed to give their best players a disproportionate share time on
the floor. But she also involved and encouraged everyone and went to great
lengths to make sure that she did. She used to stay up the night before games,
plotting out the different sets she was going to have and how much time each
one would get. She almost planned the entire game in order to ensure that all
the girls got the same amount of playing time.
We used to talk for hours at length about how to manage a situation
with a parent, or which girl should go where and who should do what. I added
nothing to the conversation—I just listened to her and I could tell that she
was working out these ideas in her head. And when it worked out well, she was
really happy. But it was effortless for her, she really enjoyed it, and it was
unlike any of the previous work experiences she’d had. It was a great thing.
She gave it her all, and got it back in spades. And it was beautiful to watch
Coach Pam go into the world and do something she really loved.
COACH
PAM AND HER “LADIES”
I remember the last game I saw her coach. She had coached at the school
for a year, but she liked the intramural league better because she had more
control. In the school, there were a lot of internal politics, etc., and it
wasn’t as pleasant an experience. But at the intramural league, she could
basically manage things as she saw fit. She had a great team and got such a
reputation that I think a lot of the girls and their parents followed her
wherever she was. If she wasn’t coaching at the school, the girls didn’t go out
for the school team—they went to the intramural team. And many of the parents
who were dissatisfied with the school coaching regime moved their kids into the
intramural league, which I thought was great, because that’s the benefit of
competition: you go to where the quality is. And I think a lot of people
thought Coach Pam was quality—cubed.
I remember the last game I saw her coach. The team had a successful
season and made it to the finals, where they played a team that they had played
twice in the regular season, and Coach Pam's team had
won both games, but only by a point or two. For the final game, the stands were
packed. I would guess there were at least two hundred people at that game and
everyone knew that the teams were arch rivals. They were vociferous in their
support or detraction.
Coach Pam’s team was ahead for much of the game but the other team
closed and put the game into overtime—two overtimes, actually, if I’m not
mistaken—and ended up winning it. But the most amazing thing happened right after
the game, which is when they typically take pictures of the champions and then
pictures of the second-place team. The girls had friends in common on both
teams, and it was a testament to the sportsmanship that had been cultivated by
Coach Pam and the other coach, that the two teams took their picture together.
Some of the girls were in tears, but Coach Pam gave them a rousing speech and
always called them “ladies,” which I loved and the girls loved—they started
calling each other ladies. It’s not a term that young girls use anymore, but
Coach Pam used it and always gave the word and the people associated with it
the utmost respect, so it became a term of endearment to all.
Anyway, Coach Pam gave them a rousing speech and told them to keep
their chin up. Believe me, no one likes to win more than Coach Pam—she’s a
fierce competitor!—and it was another hallmark of their teams that they never
gave up. But they were very graceful and gracious in defeat, and I think that’s
the sign of a real champion.
Coach Pam became close with several of the parents and I think they so
appreciated the impact she had on their girls and their families and their teams
that she was invited to coach the girls’ lacrosse team for the public high
school. Now, having grown up in the inner city in Washington, DC, I doubt Coach
Pam had ever seen a lacrosse stick! I don’t think she could have picked one out
of a lineup, though I could be wrong. She had no clue about lacrosse, and
everyone on the board of the lacrosse team knew that. But, in another testament
to the intangibles that Coach Pam brings to everyone she’s involved with, I
think they rightly realized that the content was immaterial—that she would pick
it up and learn the game, and that what she really brought to it were all the
intangibles I’ve referred to.
So, Pam became a lacrosse coach and really enjoyed the game. It was
funny, because she had developed these Ten Commandments for basketball, and it
turned out that eight of the Ten Commandments were exactly the same for lacrosse.
And when she showed them to one of the other lacrosse coaches, he said, “This
is great!” He made a few edits for lacrosse terms versus basketball terms, and
they went to town with them. What a story!
BREAKING
A MOLD—WHAT GREATER IMPACT?
I noticed something that’s all over the culture at the personal level
and that you see in many areas of society. We look at people who come from
Anacostia, or from other parts of the country where a lot of the folks are on
welfare and there’s a lot of inner-city poverty, and most of us think, “These
people need help. How can we, in white, cultured society, help them out and
give them a great vocabulary and dress them up in a nice suit and teach them
good table manners?” In short, we have so much to offer them, and there’s nothing
they can offer us. But what I saw was that Coach Pam had an astounding amount
to offer—not only to me, personally, but also to all the girls and families of
this community. That was wonderful.
And one of the things I realized was that those girls will go into the world
and hear about black people and poor black people, and about black people who
have come from the inner city. And none of that will take root because they have
had the experience of being with Coach Pam. She’s coached hundreds of girls,
and I think she’s had an impact on their lives and their parents’ lives. I
don’t know if she was the first black person that many of the parents had met,
but I would venture to say that she was probably the first black person that
many of them had a close working relationship with. And I think she really
changed minds about what black people have to offer white people, and what
black people who come from the inner-city have to offer.
If anyone is involved in a team competition of any kind, I think Coach
Pam will have something to add. Ultimately, though, I think there are a lot of
young girls growing into women who will look back fondly on the twists and
turns of their lives and reflect on the lessons and inspiration and the example
that Coach Pam set for them. What greater impact can one have?
But it all started by her just wanting to help a girl next door. She
didn’t plan it at all—she didn’t have some grand scheme to try to become a
basketball coach or to try to get invited to the school to coach the teams, or
anything. She just got up one day and went next door and helped a girl who was
trying to get better at basketball. And that was beautiful.
I think of Coach Pam as a seed of the new world. She came to a
community and had a deep impact on the girls and on their families. I think she
taught them a lot—and, just by her example—changed their thinking about
themselves and the world at large. That’s Coach Pam: a seed of the new world.
spring, 2008.
spring, 2008.
story produced in collaboration with Corinna Fales.
