been crying. With so many children and a husband who was often on the road, she didnât need anything extra to worry about. She didnât need to know that those seven words coming from David hit the bullâs-eye, where thousands of similar words from others had only skirted along the targetâs border. I didnât want her fretting about my feelings, and maybe I was also a little embarrassed by what David had said. But I shouldnât have been. Not in front of my own mother. When it came to the larger issue of how a daughter should behave, it took more than a wardrobe choice to concern Pat Meyers.
A girl in jeans with short hair who preferred playing basketball with the boys may have worried other moms, but not mine. There was never any assumption in our family that a girl who wanted to play sports was anything other than athletic.
While some folks in our neighborhood may have thought my clothes and behavior odd, conversation in our family never stooped to speculation about what others thought. How could it when we were so busy talking about things that really mattered: sports, politics, or being busy doing homework and chores? While everyone knew how girls were supposed to behave, I knew that I wasnât the same as most girls. I was a tomboy, and that was just fine with me. What I couldnât stand was that all of a sudden it might not be okay with David.
But if I wasnât playing basketball with my older brother and his friends as much, I was playing even more of it with the sixth grade boysâ team at school.
âAnn Meyers emerges the unlikely leader to bring home the championship in the La Habra City School District basketball tournament,â read the headline in one of the local papers above a photo of me holding a trophy surrounded by my all-male teammates.
Less than three months later, national headlines would bring the country to its knees.
It was June of 1968, and Bobby Kennedy was at the Ambassador Hotel where heâd opened his speech by congratulating his friend, Don Drysdale, whose shut-out streak was capturing the attention of Angelinos everywhere. âI hope to have the same success with my campaign here in California.â Hours later, he was dead.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, earlier that same day, the 6â6â, thirty-one-year-old, Don Drysdale was pitching his sixth straight shut-out game for the Los Angeles Dodgers, ultimately beating the Pirates 5-0. Radios across the southland were tuned in to the game.
No pitcher had ever gone fifty-eight innings without giving up a run. The closest anyone had come was Walter Johnson, who pitched fifty-five shutout innings back in 1913. Certainly, I had an idea who Drysdale and Koufax were, since weâd been living in Southern California for a few years now and the Brooklyn Dodgers had become the Los Angeles Dodgers nearly a decade earlier. But I was more of a Giants fan because thatâs who my brothers followed. I especially liked Willie Mays and Willie McCovey. We collected baseball cards for the bubble gum. But even with that, the playersâ stats were a lot less exciting to us than the sound the cards made against the spokes on our bikes. Baseball just wasnât as important to me as some of the other sports I played.
Now the game was over and it was another Dodger triumph. Southern Californians celebrated with no inkling of the tragedy that would take place later that evening, just as at 13, I couldnât know that I would grow up to marry Donnie, or that he would carry around in his back pocket a tape recording of Robert Kennedyâs address that evening for several years to come.
While I grasped the importance of a no-hitter on the one hand, and was saddened by the assassination of someone who appeared to be a great man on the other, I really couldnât think much beyond my own dreams of making the Olympics someday. Until then, I would simply continue navigating my way through
A girl in jeans with short hair who preferred playing basketball with the boys may have worried other moms, but not mine. There was never any assumption in our family that a girl who wanted to play sports was anything other than athletic.
While some folks in our neighborhood may have thought my clothes and behavior odd, conversation in our family never stooped to speculation about what others thought. How could it when we were so busy talking about things that really mattered: sports, politics, or being busy doing homework and chores? While everyone knew how girls were supposed to behave, I knew that I wasnât the same as most girls. I was a tomboy, and that was just fine with me. What I couldnât stand was that all of a sudden it might not be okay with David.
But if I wasnât playing basketball with my older brother and his friends as much, I was playing even more of it with the sixth grade boysâ team at school.
âAnn Meyers emerges the unlikely leader to bring home the championship in the La Habra City School District basketball tournament,â read the headline in one of the local papers above a photo of me holding a trophy surrounded by my all-male teammates.
Less than three months later, national headlines would bring the country to its knees.
It was June of 1968, and Bobby Kennedy was at the Ambassador Hotel where heâd opened his speech by congratulating his friend, Don Drysdale, whose shut-out streak was capturing the attention of Angelinos everywhere. âI hope to have the same success with my campaign here in California.â Hours later, he was dead.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, earlier that same day, the 6â6â, thirty-one-year-old, Don Drysdale was pitching his sixth straight shut-out game for the Los Angeles Dodgers, ultimately beating the Pirates 5-0. Radios across the southland were tuned in to the game.
No pitcher had ever gone fifty-eight innings without giving up a run. The closest anyone had come was Walter Johnson, who pitched fifty-five shutout innings back in 1913. Certainly, I had an idea who Drysdale and Koufax were, since weâd been living in Southern California for a few years now and the Brooklyn Dodgers had become the Los Angeles Dodgers nearly a decade earlier. But I was more of a Giants fan because thatâs who my brothers followed. I especially liked Willie Mays and Willie McCovey. We collected baseball cards for the bubble gum. But even with that, the playersâ stats were a lot less exciting to us than the sound the cards made against the spokes on our bikes. Baseball just wasnât as important to me as some of the other sports I played.
Now the game was over and it was another Dodger triumph. Southern Californians celebrated with no inkling of the tragedy that would take place later that evening, just as at 13, I couldnât know that I would grow up to marry Donnie, or that he would carry around in his back pocket a tape recording of Robert Kennedyâs address that evening for several years to come.
While I grasped the importance of a no-hitter on the one hand, and was saddened by the assassination of someone who appeared to be a great man on the other, I really couldnât think much beyond my own dreams of making the Olympics someday. Until then, I would simply continue navigating my way through
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