Bracing For a Whole New World

Playing for a school team, and winning the school's first-ever trophy for girls' basketball.

(This post originally appeared as an opinion piece in the Wisconsin State Journal.)

For those who care about women’s athletics, there has been much to celebrate about the 40^th anniversary of the passage of Title IX.

Luminaries and legends have gathered together throughout the U.S. Sports Illustrated and ESPN dedicated coverage to the events of June 1972. That’s when Congress passed a law mandating that institutions that received federal funding had to offer equal opportunities to males and females. That opened the door for interscholastic athletics for girls and women.

For me, the effects of it were monumental. I played sports and became a sports writer, traveling the U.S. covering many events that wouldn’t have even existed without Title IX. Dreams I didn’t even know I had came true because of Title IX.

I am far from alone in that regard; any woman who is over 40 and has played sports likely feels that way. Yet as Title IX has seeped into my consciousness again in recent months, I’ve come to realize how the timing of it could not have been any more perfect for who I was and how I would grow up to look at the world.

Title IX passed when I was finishing fifth grade; it more or less went into effect the following year. Somewhere between sixth and seventh grade came the news that there was going to be a girls’ basketball team at our local high school.

This news was beyond big for me. I inherited a love of basketball from my mother, who didn’t play for a school team but loved the sport nonetheless. My friends and I, in the dresses we were required to wear to school back then, shot baskets at recess. I’m proud that the first activism in my life was to pass around a petition in about third or fourth grade to ask that the girls get the gym before school, too, because the boys would never let us play. We got Tuesdays.

So the news that one day my friends and I would be able to be on a school basketball team was the most joyous thing we could imagine.

Unfortunately, at about the same time, I was diagnosed with scoliosis. The curvature of my spine was severe enough that surgery was a possibility, but a brace was another option. Even this lesser option, this clunky brace, would clearly impact my life.

“Can I still play basketball?” I asked the doctor. He said I could be out of the brace an hour a day, so that would work for a basketball game. There was really nothing stopping me from playing with it on, either, except hurting someone else who might ram into me. This amazing opportunity to play basketball was out there in my future and by god, I was not going to miss out.

So in the weeks leading up to seventh grade I was fitted for the brace – a leather ‘girdle’ with two metal bars in the back and one metal bar in the front that all screwed together with a piece that went around my neck. The day I got the brace was the day Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes tennis match; the two will always be merged in my mind.

In seventh grade, when you’re just starting your tortuous teen years, going to school wearing something like that should have been horrific, and believe me it was no picnic.

But I could play basketball. I might have been encased in metal from hips to chin, but I could still play basketball. As awful as this was, it didn’t take away the thing I loved most back then, and that was basketball and sports.

I continued to wear that brace in high school when I got to finally be on a team. Sometimes I practiced with it on, I always took it off for games. I could whip in and out of the thing like Houdini escaping his chains, maybe even quicker. Doctors said I couldn't do gymnastics so I spent that portion of gym class off in a corner shooting baskets instead.

I don’t think much about my brace when I think of my teenage years; in fact when I see pictures from back then they are kind of jarring to me.

But I’ve come to realize that by being able to play sports at a time when I needed them, I gained not just opportunity but a way to look at life. Wearing that brace stunk, but it didn’t take away what I loved most. It was a wonderful lesson to carry with me into adulthood, through a crippling bout of the neurological illness Guillain-Barre Syndrome, through an adventure with breast cancer, through family trauma. These weren’t fun, but I knew they didn’t take away everything.

So I thank Title IX for the chance it gave me to play sports. But it also gave me the chance to learn how to recognize and cling to what is good. And that has been the gift of a lifetime.