Mariah Burton Nelson: Article

MARIAH BURTON NELSON
An Athletic Approach to Leadership and Life

Feminism, Football, and Forgiveness: Some Notes on an Unpredictable Careeer
© Mariah Burton Nelson

As a four-year-old, I had a clear vision of my future: I would become an author. I had no idea what “being an author” would mean, however. I couldn't imagine then that I would write books about feminism, football, and forgiveness. I couldn't foresee that I'd spend as much time writing speeches as writing books. Nor could I know how often I would feel lost.

In Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist, everyone in the family gets lost when they leave their neighborhood. In my family, we do the same thing. On the way from Point A to Point B we travel through Points R, G, and Q, stop, spin around, feel hopeless, and only sometimes reach Point B. We seem to be missing the gene for sense of direction.

My writing is equally nonlinear. I stumble around on the page. I have trouble deciding what goes where (I want to put everything in the first paragraph). I have trouble deciding what to include (I over-research, then drown in my notes). I almost never start at the beginning.

I stumble between books, too, lurching from one bad book proposal to the next. Other jobs suddenly look appealing. One year I considered becoming a tree surgeon.

“Difficulty,” Jane Hirshfield writes in Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, “whether of life or of craft, is not a hindrance to an artist.” Could have fooled me. Oh how I covet one good outline! Alas, the best I can hope for is that if I pay attention, and say “yes” at the right moments, and stick with it, my writing path will evolve in its own organic, albeit unpredictable and circuitous, way.

I was the youngest of three kids. By the time I was born, all the bedrooms in our house were occupied, so my parents put me in the room that had been my father's study. They didn't remove his furniture, however, so on my way to bed I had to crawl over my father's desk and file cabinet. Basically, I grew up in an office.

The walls were lined with bookcases full of my father's books. My big brother Peter had taught me to read and write early, so by the time I was four I was lying in bed reading the titles of Dad's books, dreaming of writing my own someday. The books' straight spines and dark colors looked beautiful to me, and intriguing. One was entitled Comedies and Tragedies. Its initials spelled CAT. How wonderful! I thought. Maybe my books, too, would have titles with initials that spelled something.

That was an early exercise in what we now call goal-setting. Since then, I've set some other significant goals. I decided to become one of the nation's leading authorities on women's sports, then did that. I decided to write my first book by age 35, and did that.

Yet despite my appreciation for goal-setting, I've learned to accept the fact that sometimes you can't know where you're heading, no matter how much you might want to. The writer's life requires a willingness to experiment, to wander down roads less traveled, to become disoriented and lost. This writer's life, at least, is mostly messy rough draft.

My first article, published in 1980, was about my experiences playing professional basketball (in the first U.S. women's pro league). Yet until the end of that decade I couldn't imagine writing a whole book about women and sports because virtually no one else was doing it. Then, in 1988, a literary agent named Felicia Eth read “My Mother, My Rival,” my Ms. Magazine article about how Mom used to race me in swimming, never letting me win, until finally, the year I was ten, I beat her, though she disputes this now, maintaining that I was eleven.

Felicia called and asked if I was thinking about writing a book.

“Yes,” I said, recalling the childhood dream.

“What's the topic?” she asked.

“Uh, I'll get back to you about it tomorrow,” I replied -- transparently, I'm sure. I quickly polled my friends, who said my book should be about “women and sports, obviously!”

That book became Are We Winning Yet? How Women Are Changing Sports and Sports Are Changing Women. I chose the title, but hesitated before committing to it. After all, the initials -- AWWY? -- didn't spell anything. I mentioned this to a friend, who replied, “Yes, it does, Mariah.”

“What does it spell?” I asked.

“Awwy,” she said, “Like: Awwy winning yet?”

My second book was called The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football: Sexism and the American Culture of Sports (Tswgtmmlf). This book emerged from the Are We Winning Yet? book tour. As I talked on radio and television shows about Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Susan Butcher, Julie Krone, and other fabulous female athletes, men kept calling in to argue contentiously, “Yeah, but women could never play pro football!” They said it with such regularity, and such similar phrasing and intonation, I almost started to believe that there was just one angry guy following me around the country.

I wondered: Why, when I'm talking about strong women, are they talking about football? I theorized that some men retreat into football -- where men are heroes and women stay on the sidelines -- when they're threatened by strong, outspoken women.

Women loved The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football, and some men praised it, but the men who hated it hated it so venomously that they proved one of my points: football is an emotional, symbolic issue for many men. “You radical feminist male-basher man-hater castrator!” the anonymous callers said this time. Even the hosts (Robert Novak, John Sununu) attacked, mocking my research and authority, trying to dominate the interviews. Then came the hate mail, the physical threats -- and the policemen, who showed up to protect me during public appearances.

All of that somehow led to my third book, Embracing Victory: Life Lessons in Competition and Compassion, which includes a chapter called “Why Many Men Are Threatened by Female Victory.”

Professional speaking was a career path I never considered until a man from Bell Atlantic offered me $2000 to give a keynote address. It was 1988, the same year Felicia called, and I was at the Women's Sports Foundation's annual black-tie fund raiser because I had won the Miller Lite Magazine Journalism award for that same “My Mother, My Rival” article. The Bell Atlantic man asked me if I did any public speaking. I said yes. My grandmother had died when I was seventeen, and I gave the eulogy. I also competed in high school oratory contests. Those were probably not the kinds of public speaking experiences the Bell Atlantic man had in mind, but I didn't volunteer details.

He said he was looking for a speaker for an upcoming sports banquet, and that he had already asked a professional golfer, who had quoted him a fee of $2500, which he thought was too high.

“Yes, it is,” I agreed, never having heard of such a thing: $2500 for a single speech?

I said I'd do it for $2000. In this serendipitous way I gave birth to a professional speaking career, which now feels like a second child who has grown so big, loud, and demanding that she threatens to overwhelm my soft, sensitive, intuitive, quiet, first, and best-loved child: writing.

But I do love speaking too. It's fun, challenging and, with each audience, unique. So now I'm a half-time writer and half-time speaker. As long as I can make room for writing, the combination offers me a nice balance of introvert and extrovert activities, solitude and socializing.

In a chapter of The Stronger Women Get... called “My Coach Says He Loves Me,” I wrote about the widespread problem of coach-athlete sexual abuse. During my research, I called the coach who had molested me for three years when I was a teenager. He asked me to forgive him. Wary and angry, I refused. But a few years later he sent me a series of apologetic and seemingly heartfelt letters, reiterating his request for forgiveness. I reconsidered, and during an emotional six months of phone calls, letters, and two face-to-face meetings, I did forgive him.

The process transformed me. Not only did I let go of my anger about him, I became a less critical, less blaming, more emotionally generous person. My revelations led to my new book, The Unburdened Heart: Five Keys to Forgiveness and Freedom -- which, perhaps because it is deeply personal, was the easiest book I've ever written. Decisions about structure and research seemed obvious, and the writing felt as simple and satisfying as exhaling.

Now I'm at another crossroads. I cannot see if my next book will be related to forgiveness, or sports, or women, or something else. This is the point when I usually start bombarding Felicia with bad book ideas. (Thinner Thighs Through Forgiveness?)

Yet over time I'm growing increasingly comfortable with confusion. My lack of internal compass feels natural to me now, and familiar, the way I feel when I leave from my Virginia neighborhood and venture over to Maryland.

I can't know where “being an author” will lead me next. But based on my experience, I trust that it will be somewhere I need to go. On good days I even feel confident and eager, the way I did when I was a child, lying in my bedroom-office, looking longingly at my father's bookcase, staring at all those beautiful possibilities.