Playing With Heart Members of the mighty U.S. softball team have dreams that are far brighter than gold by Steve Rushin Let's get one thing straight: These women are in a league of their own, but you will not find them in A League of Their Own. "This is not the damn movie with Madonna," says U.S. softball pitcher Michele Granger, of the sport that made its Olympic debut on Sunday. "We are not out there playing in skirts, catching the ball in a hat." Richardson, who had gone deep in her sleep many times, hit one for real in Sunday's win. photograph by V.J. Lovero Nor do these softballers keep an Igloo-ful of Meister Brau beneath the bench, a sobering concept that even baggage handlers can't seem to grasp. "I can't tell you how many times in college I would have my UCLA travel outfit on, and a skycap would say, 'Oh, yeah, I play softball too. I'm batting .500 in my slo-pitch league,'" says Lisa Fernandez, a Team USA pitcher and third baseman who won two national championships with the Bruins. "And I would look at him and think, There is no way you can think that what you play and what we play is the same game." These women play softball like Iraqi judges play hardball. The U.S. national fast-pitch softball team, which 10-run-ruled Puerto Rico on Sunday, 10-0, has an international record in the last 10 years of 110-1. That loss, 1-0 to China at the Olympic complex in Columbus, Ga., in August '95, ended a 106-game winning streak and was immediately avenged in the final of that tournament, when the U.S. shattered China 8-0. On the home front, from April 27 to July 4 of this year, Team USA won 63 of 64 exhibition games against various regional all-star teams. Christa Williams, an 18-year-old pitcher, missed the lone loss of this summer's pre-Olympic tour (to a team of Southern California stars) because she was attending her prom at Dobie High School in Houston. "I can't wait to get to college," she says of her forthcoming life as a UCLA freshman—and she isn't talking about playing softball for the Bruins. For these women are well-adjusted, reasonably balanced human beings, doctors and scholars who happen to be athletes, and who are, as they see it, advancing the cause of womankind. Who needs passage of the Equal Rights Amendment when you have your own, unsurpassable ERA: 0.08 over 356 innings for the entire five-member staff on that 64-game pre-Olympic tour. In other words they are essentially unhittable. In softball the pitching rubber is only 40 feet from home plate, and long-striding pitchers actually release the ball from about 35 feet. Granger, to cite one example, has been clocked at 73 mph, giving batters virtually the same reaction time as they would have facing Randy Johnson throwing from 60'6" away. Which is why, when former national-team pitcher Kathy Arendsen whiffed Reggie Jackson three times in a row in a 1981 exhibition, Mr. October reportedly forbade public showing of the videotape. That isn't to suggest that these softballers are big-league material. They are far too pleasant for that. "It costs ya 20 bucks now just to pahk ya cah at Fenway Pahk," says Worcester, Mass., native Ralph Raymond, Team USA's septuagenarian, hearing-aid-wearing, World War II-veteran head coach, who looks like the unholy offspring of Don Zimmer and Casey Stengel. "This team is a throwback. It's a throwback to the old days when we went out there with a taped bat and a taped ball and just ran around for hours, for no money, enjoyin' the game." One of the many U.S. players with high-minded goals, Smith went low to avoid a tag against Puerto Rico. photograph by V.J. Lovero They certainly did that on Monday night, when the U.S. touched the Dutch for 10 hits in a 9-0 victory. And yet, somehow, this is one lock we did not pick. In a brief tango with insanity, this magazine predicted in its Olympic preview issue that the U.S. team would win just a bronze at these Games. "SI," says the 5'11" Granger, paraphrasing a certain Cleveland Indians ogre, "can kiss my gold medal." But she is smiling when she says it and quickly dissolves into laughter. That's the thing about these women. They are no parts Albert, and all parts belle. Take Dot Richardson. At 34, the shortstop has fielded more softballs than the collective guest list of Larry King Live. This was not necessarily by choice. Growing up in Orlando, she wanted to play Little League baseball but was not allowed to. "Not unless I cut my hair," she says, "and called myself Bob." Mercifully, her hair and her name were left unbobbed, and Richardson became a softballing prodigy, getting drafted into a women's professional league in Connecticut at 15 but choosing to retain her amateur status in case she could one day play in the Olympics, which was her ludicrous dream in 1976. Now, 20 years later, her hope-against-hopefulness paying dividends, she sees the faces of little girls illuminated at ball games. "I see a look in their eyes that they will never be the same again," she says, "that they now know they can be an Olympian. And that through softball they can receive an education and actually achieve a lot of their dreams." Richardson used her UCLA softball scholarship as a rope ladder to Louisville Medical School. Now in her third year of orthopedic residency at the USC Medical Center in Los Angeles, she took a one-year leave of absence to prepare for the Olympics and is using her one month of vacation during the Games. (She is due back in the O.R. 36 hours after the gold medal game on July 30.) While holed up in Columbus, she has popped into the local Hughston Clinic and assisted on an arthroscopic knee surgery and a "capsular shift, for recurrent dislocation of a right shoulder." She did this simply because she has the energy reserve of Con Edison. When not taking time off from softball to perform surgery, she does the opposite. At home in Sherman Oaks, Calif., Richardson created a crude batting cage, using a tee and a large net, in a bedroom of the third-floor apartment she shares with Fernandez. She would come home from the hospital in some small hour of the night and, with each swing, kiss softballs and her security deposit goodbye. Richardson would then fall asleep and have genuine dreams—"sleeping dreams"—of homering on the first pitch of her first at bat in the Olympics, though she is not a home run hitter. She woke one morning and found an anonymous note taped to the door. "If you're going to train for the Olympics," it read, "please do it at a decent hour." "It was sarcastic," says Fernandez. "Nobody knew we really were training for the Olympics." To look at their day jobs, the notion simply wouldn't occur to you: For five years Michele Smith has taught English to Toyota employees in Kariya, Japan. She speaks Japanese, loves the Asian culture and only occasionally pitches in Japan's industrial softball league. The fact that she pitches at all is a remarkable feat in its own right. Exactly 10 years ago this past Sunday, while her father was driving her home to Califon, N.J., from an oral surgeon's appointment, the sleeping Smith was thrown from the truck when her door opened on a turn. She careered into a roadside post, chopped off part of her elbow bone and tore the triceps from her left arm—her pitching arm. "It was like losing my identity," she says. Smith resolved then to broaden her horizons, not knowing that she would do so literally and live in another hemisphere. "If you'd have asked me five or six years ago, I'd have thought I'd be a thoracic or cardiovascular surgeon by now," she says. "But I realized that the central theme of what I wanted to do was to help people and make a difference in lives. On the field, I can help little kids. It might not be in an O.R. suite, but to put your hands on their shoulders and see their eyes light up and hear them say they want to be like me someday, that's my proudest moment as an athlete." Likewise, children can look to Sheila Cornell, a double major in psychology and kinesiology at UCLA who achieved her master's in physical therapy from USC with a 3.96 GPA. Granger graduated from Cal-Berkeley with a double-major in history and mass communications. "I'd like to work for a publisher," she says, "and read books all day." "These women are all well-educated," says Richardson, who hit a home run to dead centerfield in her fourth Olympic at bat on Sunday. "And that's a reflection that we know, as women, that the farthest we can go in athletics is to get a scholarship, and with it an education, and then be a contributor to society for the rest of our lives." So, which is the real Dream Team? Says Richardson, "I guess it depends on what your dream is." Over 10 days in a genuinely global competition, members of the U.S. softball team are likely to become champions of the world. But win or lose, they say, they will champion the world. "There have been a lot of complaints that these Olympics are very commercial," says Smith, "and that's going to happen whenever professional sports get involved. But we are all amateurs. We do not get paid to play anywhere. To me, money is not what makes the world go around. My happiness is not based on my bank account. Sometimes, I'll be on the mound and step back and think that there are people lying on operating tables right now, with their chests cracked open, and someone is reaching in with their hands, working on their heart." And it's nice to know, isn't it? These days, when everyone seems to have their hands on your wallet, there are still people reaching in with their hands, working on your heart.