Chapter Thirty-Five
THE GRACE METHOD
Each year, during the months of September, October and November, Grace Gresham-Nelson, her twelve ball players, and her assistants locked themselves in a gymnasium for eight to twelve hours a week and transformed themselves into champions. It was no easy task. Grace made sure of that. Practice began promptly at four-fifteen after school, Mondays through Thursdays, and for two hours the athletes endured the most strenuous training of their lives.
September was devoted to getting into shape. The afternoon began with ten minutes of calisthenics before a fifteen-minute jog around the track. Then it was weight training. For thirty minutes, the girls performed body-shaping repetitions using three-pound dumbbells. One day, they flexed and burned the muscles in the chest, shoulders, abdomen and calves (the trainers called it “the ABC workout,” for abdomen, breast, calves); the next day, they worked the thighs, hips, buttocks, back and biceps (“the three-B workout”). Weight training was followed by thirty minutes of step aerobics. Grace, who participated in the workout once a week at the head of the class, preferred the happy upbeat rhythms of Janet Jackson’s Control and Rhythm Nation albums. Finally, accompanied by various R&B hits with steady tempos, a cassette produced by the trainers, the Twelve’s day ended with a twenty-minute ride on stair-climber machines.
October was devoted to ball-handling skills. For the first hour of the day, the girls endured endless drills, none of which, in the beginning, involved touching a ball. These apparently pointless dull exercises—flicking the wrists forward and back with the arms held at the sides, doing the same flicking motions with the arms held above the head, curling the fingers like angry animals—lay the foundation for what was to come. During the second hour, each player shot one hundred freethrows, twenty-five lay-ups, twenty-five set shots, and twenty-five jump shots. Technique was closely monitored by the critical eyes of Grace and the trainers. During the second half of October, the ball-handling drills advanced from simple finger and wrist flicking to flicking while using the ball, to stationary dribbling, to stationary passing, to dribbling and passing while running around the gym, to dribbling and passing while running in symmetrical zigzag patterns, to dribbling and passing while running in patterns and executing lay-ups. By the end of October, these elaborate ball-handling drills consumed most of the two hours of after-school practice.
Saturday-morning sessions were another feature Grace added in October. The first hour was lecture, during which Grace, impeccably dressed in street clothes, imparted to the girls her view of strategy. Basketball, she told them, like most sports, was as much a game of thought as it was exertion. Like chess, she said, one simply had to advance strategically to block the objectives of the other team. She tried to make Saturday lectures interesting, not only discussing techniques and rules but using the trainers to perform staged scenarios that demonstrated on-court mistakes. She showed films of NBA games and documentaries about women’s basketball, and discussed these with the girls. She sometimes used the lecture hour to shape the girls’ thinking in matters of nutrition, hygiene, and comportment. For example, in an attempt to teach the art of graceful movement and restraint, she performed what veteran Grace Girls call “the egg thing.” After demonstrating the ability of an eggshell to withstand pressure from the heels of her palms, Grace stood at her table-desk, a clear crystal bowl sitting before her, the egg held daintily in her beautifully manicured fingers, a delicate gold tennis bracelet dangling from her wrist. “Most things in life,” she said, tapping the eggshell lightly against the rim of the glass, “can be accomplished with the same delicacy and finesse it takes to crack open an egg.” As the golden yolk slipped down the side of the bowl, her point was clear: Accomplish each task with only the amount of effort needed, and make any effort look easy. The demonstration seemed simple, but as a testament to its power, it was the thing most talked about by Grace Girls who had graduated from Beck and moved on to adult lives.
The gymnasium was a sealed sacred chamber during pre-training, but on one Saturday in October, Grace made an exception. On that day, she gave both academies an open invitation to hear a motivational lecture given by Darrel “Jazz” Nelson. To prevent an overflow crowd, the athletic department kept the visit a secret until final announcements on the day before the Saturday visit. The standing rule was that Beck students and staff who arrived on time were let into the complex first, followed by Langston students and employees, and then the public. For the lecture, Darrel spoke warmly to the audience about his life in Alabama, where he grew up in a household that was financially poor but rich in spiritual values. He credited his father with instilling in Darrel a respect for women. “My father always said, ‘There’s nothing smaller than a man who hits a woman, and nothing bigger than one who walks away when he has every reason in the world to lay her out.’” The comment always elicited laughter from his audience, but when they stopped laughing he continued seriously. “I believe that. Because women are God’s gift to the human race. If they didn’t nurture children and men, the species would die out. So how dare a man treat a woman, especially a lady, like anything but a treasure. And when you Beck ladies select a young man to be your special friend, and he doesn’t feel that way about women, leave him alone, he doesn’t deserve you.” The speech endeared him each year to the females in the gym, especially to one, because she knew he lived by his words. Darrel spoke also about his struggles as a college athlete, and his NBA career. He called Grace “the love of my life,” a statement that always made the girls in the audience swoon.
Each year after Darrel’s general lecture, the audience was ushered out of the auditorium so that the Saturday practice session of the Grace Girls could begin. Darrel stayed behind to speak briefly to the Twelve about basketball strategy and mental and physical techniques that helped him become a champion. For the new Grace Girls, this private meeting with Jazz Nelson marked the moment they grew into their status, knew they had arrived socially, became aware that they were not just Beck Girls but Beck Grace Girls—and it was a moment none ever forgot.
Saturday’s second hour was not lecture but activity, an actual full-length game of basketball followed by a brief instructional pep talk and lunch.
The first two weeks of November involved a synthesis of everything already learned: cardiovascular workouts, weight training, ball-handling drills, and scrimmage games. On the first two Saturdays in November, local college women’s teams visited Beck to compete against the Lady Lions. The Girls usually won these games, or came close to doing so. On the third Saturday of the month, training came to an end with a celebration. Grace treated the players and trainers to catered seafood—steamed crab legs and boiled shrimp and deviled crab and flounder filet—and mounds of fresh cut fruit. There were hugs and tears as the girls said good-bye to themselves as co-learners; henceforth, they would be co-players. And so they wept for themselves for moving from one phase, never to be recaptured with the exact same companions, and advancing to another.
And then, for several days, the team rested.