ESPN MAGAZINE

The man's an ass, an absolute ass. He's an ass for looking straight through his little girl. She used to go see him, when she was 5 and had no skin on her knees, and he'd hand her a quarter, as if that were parenting. She kept going back, of course, back to the Laundromat he owned in Los Angeles, and he'd start asking if she had a boyfriend, because she was 13 now. But she didn't want to talk about that. She wanted to talk about how she'd played Little League with the boys, how she'd turned singles into triples, how the boys' parents would yell to the pitchers, "Hit her between the eyes." She wanted to talk about gymnastics, how she could walk a half-mile on her hands. Or how she was winning 100-yard dashes in high-tops. But he never asked, the dumb ass, because he was whatever he was: bitter at his ex-wife or incapable of opening up or afraid, flat-out afraid, of a child.

The last time he sent her a birthday card, she was 8. But she didn't hold that against him, not then, because she thought she could win a foot race and plop a blue ribbon on his desk, and he would dive back in. And pretty soon she was 15, and she'd become the fastest teen-age sprinter in the country, appearing on Good Morning America. And pretty soon she'd taken up basketball and could hang on the rim, scoring 48 points in high school one night. And yet this man still hadn't shown up at a game, or at a race, or at graduation. And pretty soon she'd gone on to the University of North Carolina, where she'd been the starting point guard on the Tar Heels' national championship team as a freshman. He must have read about it because, two years later, she had a tournament game in L.A., and he was in the stands by himself, stoic. But when the game was over, he vanished, never having said hello or goodbye.

She sent him a team photo, and she knows damn well he got it because it was up on his wall when she went back to the Laundromat again, went back for more pain. She was 20 by then, and she had seen his car in the lot that day, and she had pounded on his office door. But he hid from her. He had one of those windows where he could see out but she couldn't see in, and she kept knocking until, finally, his assistant answered. "Is my father here?" she asked. And the assistant said, "He was just a second ago." She thinks he may have been under the desk -- and that was it, that was the end. That was the last time she was going to let this dumb-ass man ignore her, ignore his own flesh and blood, ignore the next great female Olympic athlete in this nation. "His loss," she said to herself. And the thing is, she had something to tell him, something he might have wanted to hear. She had a boyfriend.

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