Fear And Loathing In Carolina, by Annick Labadie

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I can’t recall her silhouette looming about the bench, directing her “pack” with the instinct of a mother, with the fervor of a hungry wolf.  I’ve had a few nightmares about North Carolina State, and by “a few” I mean “a lot.”  But she was never in any of them.  Though it might lead to deranging introspections, sometimes I wish I could claim to dream of Kay Yow every night.

The woman had grit.  Coaching an ACC Conference team to the Sweet Sixteen while undergoing chemotherapy takes a whole basket load of it.  Coach Kay Yow, who passed away in January 2009, was a part of that small breed of humans who seem to be brave five minutes longer.  She had been doing the unthinkable, stretching the limitations of illness and inspiring all witnesses in the process.  Winning wasn’t just an outcome or a contract clause; it was a way of life.  She remained on the sidelines because she couldn’t live without the game, because her passion for the sport, for leading, was greater than the illness itself.

The people of NC State supported Kay Yow.  At least that’s what I found out my freshman year, five games into my first NCAA basketball season at Seton Hall.  Though I’m still not quite sure why it happened, on December 2, 2004, I started a game against the Wolfpack at Reynolds Coliseum in Raleigh, NC.  December 2, 2004 is also the date of Kay Yow’s 600^th win as a women’s head basketball coach at North Carolina State[1].

You do the math (or reread the title.) Let’s just say I was pretty easily impressionable back then, and my feelings towards Reynolds Coliseum were no exception.  The game was about like the Loony Tunes vs. Monstars on Moron Mountain, without the halftime dose of “Michael’s Secret stuff.”

[1] (For proof, go the to bottom of this article.)

I remember entering the gym and staring at three letters painted the wooden floor:  ACC.  An oversized red “S” figured prominently at half court while “Home of the Wolfpack” slithered across the baseline in block letters.  The hardwood was so well polished I could see my face reflected in it.  I looked like the guy in Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Not very chirpy. I had no business being scared, I know.  Only pansies are scared. And they have no business on an ACC court.

As an incoming freshman, I was used to playing in gyms with court line delimitations that looked like a bad geometric abstract painting: handball, volleyball, badminton, tennis, basketball, and soccer lines, each superimposed over the other.  My high school team wore the kind of reversible jerseys students are often given in gym class, to cut expenditures.  We called ourselves the Lasers.  Which was an acronym for a long French sentence.  We dominated the court, just not the wardrobe department.  And during our league games, parents and reluctant boyfriends were the only “crowd” found in the stands. Even at the national championships with my (better dressed) provincial team, I had only seen a few hundred fans watching me play basketball.

But that night was different from anything I had ever imagined.  I played a little differently, too.  That night, there was a band, there were orange skinned cheerleaders that my teammate Cortne kept staring down, and a throng of fans who weren’t genetically related to me.  Everywhere.  The gym reeked of hot dogs and popcorn.  Ball girls diligently rebounded my pre-game shots, because they weren’t exactly going in.  I was a little overwhelmed.  On the verge of turning my blue Adidas shorts into navy Adidas shorts – overwhelmed.

My teammates were overwhelmed as well.  Kerri Shutz, a junior from New Jersey, and Asia Carrol, a senior from Virginia, both experienced point guards, would ride the pine to watch me, the inexperienced French Canadian, hold her own against an ACC team that eventually finished 21-8 that season.

I had been kicking some serious practice ass over the last two months, sure.  I was like the Energizer Bunny on speed back then, while most of my older counterparts had turned into Garfield on a load of Xanax (to learn how such transformation typically occurred, click here for an earlier FlipCollective article on the subject).  But even though I was a little, ahem, overeager when compared to my jaded upperclassmen, I was still confused about many elementary subtleties of the American way of playing basketball.  For instance, how many players could stand along the lane for free throws?  Are you sure I can call time-outs whenever I want?  Sweet!  And for an entire month, my coaches wondered why I was in such a hurry to bring the ball past half court.  It was only a week before this fated NC State game when I finally learned there wasn’t a 10-second back court violation.  International (FIBA) rules are kinda different.

Let’s just say I wasn’t exactly up to the task, just yet.  But here I was, starting at the point guard position in a game that could potentially give Kay Yow, one of the most respected coaches in basketball history, her 600th win with the Wolfpack. In a pretty loud arena.  It was a quaint way to jumpstart my stellar college career.

So, there are a couple of instances in my life in which I have been scared.  The feeling I had as the announcer in Reynolds Coliseum butchered my French Canadian name – On-NIQUE Ru-TIRE La-BAY-dee- during the pre-game presentation was definitely one of those instances.  If you don’t already know this, playing scared is a really bad idea.

This was no exception.

The announcer energetically presented the Wolfpack starting five as a stroboscope kept flitting and their mascot breakdanced to the beats of the pep band.  As my coach stoically drew up our plays on the board, I kept staring at the humongous cubic scoreboard descending from the ceiling, wondering how many third-world economies could be saved by selling it.  Somebody please smack some sense into me. As I walked on the court and nervously tucked my jersey in for the fifth time, Heta Korpivaara, a sophomore, asked me which plays we were running.  I stared at her in silence, and then got distracted by the chubby cheerleader guy touching his feet with his fingers.

“We’re running, um, I think Taurus.”

Taurus was my mini-basketball team’s out-of-bounds play.  (And incidentally, the car Mick Shaffer drives.)

Then I took a deep breath.  I’m not scared anymore. This is what I always wanted and it will go just fine. This, was a lie.  In truth, I forgot everything I had been told during the previous days of practice.  I forgot that Billie McDowell was a trigger-happy shooter; that Kendra Bell was faster than Tiger Woods in a Vegas nightclub; I forgot the intricacies of our press break; I even forgot that we were playing 2-3 zone defense.  The spotlights blinded me when I looked up court.  The noise from the stands was so loud I couldn’t even hear myself call out, “Taurus!”  My teammates looked at me in a mix of confusion and anger.  I was distracted by the oversized retired jerseys hanging from the ceiling, and by the dimensions of their star player’s biceps.

I was supposed to lead my teammates, but I couldn’t even take care of myself. I was pansy.  They were my pansy children.  My hands were endlessly moist even as I wiped them with the Gatorade towels during time outs. I couldn’t remember how to dribble.  I was convinced the ball would bounce off my foot.

It did.  Maybe even more than once.

I felt like I had just finished seven Taco Bell burritos.  I was heavy.  Slow.  The ball slipped out of my hands as I amassed turnover after turnover.  I missed my free throws (five along the lane, by the way).  I failed to catch the ball off of skip passes and got it stripped out of my hands as I drove to the basket.

I finished the game with eight turnovers.  Eight.  Turnovers.  We lost by thirty; 65-35.  After that performance, I deserved to rot on the bench for the rest of my life. I kind of did.  And I’m not complaining; Big East Conference teams aren’t exactly renowned for giving second chances.  That is… unless you fail every other drug test but can dunk from the foul line… or unless you take 9 minutes to run a mile that should easily be run in 6 minutes every preseason, but you have “really good court vision.”

When the final buzzer sounded, the fans waved “Kay Yow, 600” cardboards above their heads and were showered with shiny red and white confetti.  We left the roaring stadium as fast as we could and shamefully hid in the visiting team locker room as our coach addressed the media.  I sat on a chair and listened to the silence of humiliation, a silence interrupted by a few complaints seasoned with adverbs I’d rather not write down.  Cortne, the cheerleader-fixated senior who hadn’t played much, grabbed the game sheet, scrolled down to my statistics and read them out loud.

“Damn Annick… damn” is all she kept saying.  I sunk into a red plastic seat in the back of the room, put on the nearest shooting shirt and hid my face with sweaty strands of hair.

My first thought was something along the lines of “I just made Jean Van De Velde look clutch,” the second was, “I am a disgrace, I let everyone down, and I will surely be deported back to my Laser team, where I probably belong,” and the third was quite literally, “f*ck, practice is going to suck.”  This last thought was one I had way too many times in my subsequent years at The Hall.

Coach walked into the locker room and lectured us with a speech that masterfully contained all of the thesaurus’s synonyms for disgrace (shame, discontent, discredit, disrespute, ignominy, dishonor, imfamy, opprobrium, odium, etc).  She discussed our shortcomings, one by one.  I still admire the Shakespeare in her.

In another world, the idea of Kay Yow would have annihilated such terrible feelings about practicing.  Thinking of her would have made me feel bad about any complaint; the woman had cancer and you didn’t hear her whining.  But that day, on December 2^nd, 2004, her name signified exactly what her devotion should normally impede.  I wasn’t brave five minutes longer.  I wasn’t brave at all.  And I forgot a key lesson ever sports movies will always harp on and on about: no matter how high the stakes, a game is just a game.

Sometimes I wish I could go back into Reynold’s Stadium with Kay Yow in mind.  Now all I can do is dream about a game with a different beginning, and a different ending.  So I guess it goes to show that for every revered hero exists an antihero[2], and that day, though it might almost sound narcissistic, Kay Yow and I were at opposite ends of that spectrum.

[2] The Joker, Chris Webber, Winston Smith, 2008 Bret Favre, George W. Bush, Macbeth, Bill Buckner circa 1986 world series, etc.