Being Two Different People

I competed in athletics for over 26 years and I have loved every minute of it. 

To me, the greatest gift I could have received was my athletic ability. Being an athlete has given me inner peace and has made me in tune to myself and people. Most of all because of athletics, I am a whole person. I am somewhat of a perfectionist, because sports is one of the avenues of mankind that never ceases to strive for excellence. 

Athletics has enabled me to accept reality. I can accept the whole and not overlook the unpleasant. 

Athletics has helped me mentally, physically and morally. Through athletics I have experienced confusion, struggle, pain, failure, anxiety as well as success. 

I had the pleasure of experiencing success and failure which I found to be an essential element of communicating with oneself, thus meaning freedom from insecurity. 

I derived values from athletics that I have molded into my personality and my everyday life. 

At the present time I am employed by the Chicago Department of Health as the Administrator of the Woodlawn Neighborhood Health Center. I feel I am a good administrator because of my athletic background, which has provided me with the tools necessary to make just decisions. 

As an athlete I was looked upon as being very different from other women. It was almost as though I was a freak of nature. As an athlete you take on certain masculine qualities in the “weight room” and on the practice field. It was impossible to look like Farah Fawcett lifting 400 pounds of weight or running back-to-back 440s. 

The girls would tell me how muscular I looked; the boys would tell me how hard I was. As I grew older, I had difficulty with men who were non-athletes; these men could not understand why I had to always be at the practice track training three times a day, six to seven days a week. Or why I was always going to the “smelly weight room” three times a week and lifting weights and not sitting at a bar all night all “dolled up and smelling pretty.” 

Later on, I had difficulty dating other athletes because they expected me to idolize them and since I was an athlete too, I didn’t think they were so great. I find some female athletes to be too independent for most male athletes. A male athlete can be the same all the time. He doesn’t have to defend his masculinity. A female athlete must always be two different people. She takes on certain masculine qualities on the field. Off the field she must become ultra-feminine because of the stigma attached to being a female athlete. 

I am the only American female athlete who has ever placed or been in five Olympic Games with two Olympic Medals. Yet, I am not known in Chicago or the U.S. as well as I am in other countries. 

I have spent many years fighting bitterness and defeat. I can honestly say I have succeeded. I have gained so much from sports, that without it, I would not be what I am today. 1 am truly thankful for such a lovely gift for I am one female athlete that is most richly blessed.