Winning Sounds Like this

Prologue Nanette Virnig wasn't the first sign language teacher I had, but she was one of the best. Her patience was unending. She would show me a sign, I would try to repeat it, and then she would show me again. This is how it went all year in my season with the Gallaudet University women's basketball team. I wasn't fluent by season's end, but I could at least sign "Good morning," "How are you?," and "Great rebound" without provoking overt laughter. Well, that's not quite true. One time I was trying to tell a player that I understood what she was saying. I wound up making an observation about sexual appetite. Most of my sign lessons in that 1999-2000 season took place on the Gallaudet team bus, traveling to road games. It was a perfect setting. My teachers were captive, and I had a lot of time to correct my mistakes. The bus was a white rectangle on wheels, sort of like the kind rental-car companies use to pick people up at the airport. It had Gallaudet University printed in block letters on the sides. There were big boxy windows and padded blue seats and interior lights that were always left on at night. I didn't understand why the lights stayed on the first trip or two, until Ronda Jo Miller, Gallaudet's All-America center and the greatest basketball player in school history, clued me in. "How can we talk if we can't see?" As the bus rolled out of Washington, D.C., through the bare brown hills of the George Washington Parkway in Virginia one Saturday, Nanette and I sat together in a blue seat in the middle. She was a senior cocaptain, an undersized forward who didn't score much, rarely dazzled people with her skills, and never did anything to draw attention to herself. But she played with such passion that it always felt reassuring to see her out there, with her No. 25 jersey and a little knob of a ponytail on top of her head. I was scribbling notes on my pad, and she was scribbling back. The pad was a vital communication tool for me when I was without my interpreter, Mary Thumann, but it was a crutch, too, and not fair besides. It made it too easy for me to retreat to the comfort of English. It forced the players to converse in a cumbersome way, in a language most of them struggle with, instead of in their native American Sign Language (ASL). So for the rest of the trip, I retired the pad. Nanette taught and I followed. I learned how to sign "I am hungry" and "When are we leaving?" and worked up to "I like riding the train" and "Gallaudet is a good team." When I got stuck, I would fingerspell, a skill I was developing, albeit slowly, thanks to Paulina Wlostowski, the team's student manager. Paulina, a Swede of relentlessly sunny disposition, had given me an order a week earlier: "You need to learn the ASL alphabet." The next time she saw me, she would be expecting me to be able to fingerspell my name. On the Amtrak trip back to New York, I studied The Joy of Signing, a wonderful book I brought with me everywhere during the season. We came into Philadelphia, and I worked on my P's and H's and I's. When we hit Trenton, I practiced my T's and R's. In Newark, I liked that K's were really P's turned upside down and that you could make a Z by tracing it in the air, like Zorro. As the Gallaudet bus pulled up to the gymnasium at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, the players grabbed their blue-and-yellow equipment bags and filed off the bus. I signed to Nanette, "Thanks, teacher." She wants to go into elementary education, and she has a future. She put one fist on top of another, index fingers extended. It's the sign for "Sure." In my seat at the end of the bench, I rooted a little harder for Nanette that day. Her assignment was to guard a woman named Rachel Taylor, a diminutive Marymount backcourt player with a placid face and a deadly jump shot. Taylor hadCoffey, Wayne is the author of 'Winning Sounds Like this' with ISBN 9780609607657 and ISBN 0609607650.