melissaisaacson.com

Only once do I remember wishing I was not a female. OK, twice.

When I was 10 and my best friend Anthony Lanzillotti got to play Little League baseball and wear the cool cap with the “L” for Lincolnwood on it and I couldn’t, it crossed my mind that this whole girl thing wasn’t what it was cracked up to be.

When I was in college, I learned that a woman who wrote sports for the school paper, a woman I thought was a man because her byline was H. Forest Woolard, evidently didn’t think she could be an effective sportswriter without hiding her gender.

I wanted to be a sportswriter, but I discovered H. Forest was really Holly. And I kept reading things like a New Yorker magazine article which chronicled the plight of women sportswriters at the time, their inability to get into lockerrooms or even press boxes, and for many of them, their ultimate decision to get out of the business by age 40.

Thankfully, those women were the trailblazers and many of their obstacles were eliminated by the time I came into the business.

Covering the Bulls in the early 90s, after I took over the beat from Sam Smith at age 30, players got so used to me being around that, as I had always hoped, I blended in. Scottie Pippen got so used to me that 10 years after I got off the beat, he nonchalantly undressed in front of me.

Pippen was with TNT at the time, and I wanted to talk to him for a story I was working on. Carrying a suit bag over his shoulder before the game, we talked and walked through the inner catacombs of the United Center until he ducked inside the empty lockerroom designated for visiting hockey teams, and gestured for me to follow.

There, he stopped in front of the first dressing stall and proceeded to change into his suit for the game.

“Uh, excuse me,” I said, clearing my throat for effect.

“What?” he replied.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“What?” he replied.

“STOP UNDRESSING in front of me,” I said, screeching only slightly. “You’re not a player any more. And I am not covering you.”

Well, maybe I was covering him in a manner of speaking.

“But, it’s just you,” he replied and I smiled, because in the sometimes twisted world of what I did for a living, this was a compliment, and he continued to change as I looked down at my notepad as I always had.   

If I wasn’t a woman, I would have never witnessed the expression on Phil Jackson’s face when he walked into his Bulls lockerroom shortly before a game one night, and saw his starting point guard, B.J. Armstrong laying on a trainers table, his legs in imaginary stirrups, and  teammate Ron Harper simulating how Lamaze works -- using a basketball for a baby and me, nine months pregnant, as the labor coach.

And if I wasn’t a woman, I would never have experienced what I did last night, as some of my high school basketball teammates got together. We don’t see each other often enough. Years have gone by without talking. But this year is the 30^th anniversary of our state championship and certain events have brought us together.

One was the death of our coach’s wife, when we gathered for the funeral. Another was last night, when one of our teammates came in for a visit from North Carolina, in part because she couldn’t make it to the funeral.

We ended up at my house, doing what all women do when we get together – drink beer, watch the Bulls game and gossip. Stupid as it was, I was a little embarrassed about my current unemployed state.

And so, like women know how to do so well, they comforted me. They made me laugh until we cried. We drank a little more. And then they got angry for me.

I love these women. I forgot just how much. They took the lessons we learned as athletes in the 1970s, lessons inaccessible to the girls who came before us, and became strong, independent women.  

One of them -- our sophomore center the year we won, so I can’t help it, I still think of her as a baby -- dropped me an e-mail recently. Holly told me she was sorry I had been laid off and likened it to the time in college when, as a scholarship player, she was cut from the basketball team to make room for younger players.

She told me she had always regretted not trying harder to prove the coach wrong. When one of the young recruits who had pushed her out became academically ineligible, Holly said she could have asked the coach for a second shot.  But she had a boyfriend, they had planned a ski trip to Colorado over winter break. And she was 19. So she went on the ski trip.

She said for years she felt like a “loser.” But ultimately, that trip led to other decisions, which led her to meeting her husband and having their beautiful son together. That’s the way life works. As she got older, she realized that.

She told me that everything happens for a reason and assured me that I will be successful in whatever I do.

“How could you not?” she concluded. “You’re a state champ.”

Darn right.