One "Girl's" Perspective on the Greatest Sports Memory Ever

O.K., I confess. I'm a girl and I love sports. I love to watch sports. I love to play sports, any sport, anywhere, anytime. Well, ok, not any sport. I mean cricket, curling, come on, but any of the good old traditional American sports; football, baseball, basketball, hockey, tennis, you get the idea. You name it, I was ready to see it, college, pro, the local high school team, little league, whatever. I couldn't get enough.

For some reason I just liked the idea of being part of a team. It's not like I saw myself as some famous sports star. Number one, I was a girl, and number two, I was a mediocre athlete at best. I just couldn't imagine myself as Michael Jordan or Wayne Gretzky. I couldn't dunk or make the clutch shots.

And don't even get me started on how embarrassing it was to grow up in Minnesota and never learn to skate. I wasn't completely uncoordinated, but I got tired of falling on my, umm, dignity, and decided to stick to safe sports like cross country skiing and jacks. Hey, jacks is a sport, O.K., anyone who has ever suffered the jacks hand cramp realizes that.

So, I didn't grow up with the vision of myself as a star athlete. As a girl, I always took great pride when I saw amazing athletic performances by women. Watching Chris Evert play Martina Navratilova was thrilling. Seeing the spunky Mary Lou Retton win the all-around gold was inspiring. Watching Dorothy Fleming or Debi Thomas figure skating in the Olympics was mind boggling to someone who couldn't even manage to stay up on skates. But I never wanted to be them. I never really related their feats to myself.

I was born before the generation of female sports stars like Mia, Hamm, the Williams sisters, Anna Kournikova, Michelle Kwan, or Marion Jones. So while I always loved to watch the Olympics and see the flag being raised and hear the national anthem, I never really connected to those experiences. I was just the small-town tomboy from Minnesota with three older brothers who had a lot of sports, and other things, thrown at me from a young age.

There was one truly amazing event though, that I will never forget. That night in 1980 when the U.S. Men's Hockey team beat the Russians for a chance to play for the gold medal. I related to it on so many levels. For one thing it was hockey which was huge in the frozen north, but not such a bid deal elsewhere in America. I grew up watching my brothers play hockey, so to see a bunch of young men, some from the University of Minnesota no less, playing for the Stars and Stripes was just amazing.

I will never forget the shivery excitement of watching that victory in our living room with the whole family around the television set. I remember we were determined to watch our guys from the "U" take on the Russians even though they were huge underdogs. Of course we thought they were going to get creamed like they did in the exhibition game just a few days before, but still we had to watch our guys and the great Coach Brooks.

He, too, had a big Minnesota connection having coached at the University of Minnesota for several years and he was much respected in our part of the country. We even had a guy on the high school team named Mark Johnson, who would probably go to the U in a few years. There just seemed to be a special connection to that team for me. Obviously, I could never have been a member of that team, but I could have known one of them.

I know it shouldn't have mattered that there were so many connections to Minnesota. It shouldn't have made a difference, but it did. I had seen many athletes before give inspiring performances and I have watched and admired many athletes since and felt proud that they were American. But nothing has matched and nothing will ever match the feelings of that night. The feeling that those guys in the red, white, and blue were my team; that I was somehow, in some very small way, a part of their amazing story.