A Kind of Grace by Jackie Joyner-Kersee Page B

cut down the nets and celebrate? If you don't want to go through that again, we have to keep working!”
    We went undefeated that season. Our only close game was against Marshall, the perennial powerhouse team from Chicago. It was late in the season and we were playing them on their home court in Chicago. Marshall's mascot is the Commando and they were in command of this game. We hadn't lost all season but we were trailing 59–61 with just a few seconds left. My teammates and I refused to believe we'd lose to any team that season. We didn't feel desperate or despondent. In the huddle at the bench during the last timeout, we told each other we'd find a way to win the game. Still, things looked bleak. Marshall had the ball and the clock was running down.
    Justine Moore, our quick point guard, stole the ball and scored: 61–61. Marshall brought the ball upcourt again. All they had to do was hold it and let the clock run out. We had to make something happen. I saw the point guard's eyes shift and I anticipated a pass. As she turned to throw the ball, I jumped out and intercepted it. My heart was in my throat as I dribbled downcourt to our basket. The rushing footsteps behind me sounded like a stampede. The pro-Marshall crowd was screaming. I focused on making the shot. I put it up and watched it fall in. A millisecond later, the buzzer sounded. Lincoln 63, Marshall 61. My ecstatic teammates rushed me and I whooped. We tumbled to the floor, giddy and relieved. We didn't come close to losing again en route to the finals where our opponent was none other than Chicago Marshall. A rematch.
    “They'll want revenge,” I told my teammates in the locker room before the game. I was standing in front of them, my game face decorated with braided pigtails and an orange sweatband. “We can't let them have it. We've worked too hard to get it. We have to
want
this tie more than they do to win.”
    The game was played inside Assembly Hall on the University of Illinois campus. The place holds 11,000, but only 4,000 seats were filled, most of them by fans from East St. Louis. They had carpooled or ridden in one of the school buses as part of the caravan that arrived in Champaign-Urbana on Thursday night for the Friday-Saturday tournament. Our team bus, an air-conditioned charter, had led the caravan. With so many fans in the stands, it felt like a home game at Lincoln High gym.
    We were up by just six points in the third quarter when Deborah Thurston jumped up for a rebound and came down on the side of her ankle, twisting it. Gut check time. We all knew we had to play with more intensity to compensate for Deborah's absence under the boards. Debra Powell replaced her and started hitting shots from everywhere on the court. I banged the boards and snatched every rebound I could. We applied a full-court press that finally wore Marshall down. We pulled away and won 64–47. We now had a gold medal to go with the silver one each of us had received the previous year.
    We mobbed each other at center court. Then we got a ladder, walked over to our basket and cut down the net, which we draped across the championship trophy. On the bus ride back home, we sang our theme song, the Kenny Loggins tune “This Is It.” We were delirious. When Deborah Thurston and I helped the track team win a third straight track championship, it was the perfect way to finish our high school careers.

9
    My Feminine Mystique
    T here was no jealousy or animosity between the boys' and girls' squads at Lincoln. The boys respected our talents and always congratulated us after we won a meet or a basketball game. During our first basketball season at Lincoln, while the girls' and boys' coaches bickered over which squad would practice first in the gym after school, the boys on the team volunteered to let us start first, at 3:30, so that we could get home before dark.
    A few of the male long jumpers treated me as a rival, albeit a friendly one. Even though I rarely jumped farther