Golden Girls
by Johnette Howard
By the time the clock struck midnight and the pop of champagne corks was heard
at the victory party, the game's particulars had begun to fade from
conversation. The feelings were what the U.S. women ice hockey players wanted to
review: the lumps in their throats, the chills that ran down their spines, the
eye-dampening sight of goalie Sarah Tueting high-stepping around the ice like a
crazed drum major after the U.S. won the gold medal game 3-1 against archnemesis
Canada. Sandra Whyte, Tueting's onetime housemate in Boston, had sealed the
victory, nudging in a 40-foot empty-net goal that the sellout crowd in Nagano's
Big Hat stadium traced on its excruciatingly slow path to the net with a
steadily building roar of oh-oh-ooOOHH! "I'm sure all of us will see
ourselves celebrating on tape tomorrow and say, 'I did what?' said U.S.
forward A.J. Mleczko.
"All I could think was, We just won a gold medal—did we not just win a gold
medal?" said Tueting, an apple-cheeked Dartmouth junior-to-be who made 21 saves,
many of them spectacular, in the final, and then floated into both the postgame
press conference and the victory party wearing a two-foot-tall foam-rubber Uncle
Sam hat that her brother, Jonathon, had tossed onto the ice. Suddenly those
despair-filled months in 1996, when Tueting was ready to quit hockey at age 19
because she'd never been invited to a U.S. national team tryout, seemed long,
long ago. "I had gone home that summer, taken the Olympic posters off my bedroom
wall and told everyone I was through," Tueting said. "Then August came, and I
got a letter inviting me to camp. I made the national team. In the space of two
weeks I went from quitting hockey to putting my life on hold to chase this
dream. And now look."
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In winning the six-team inaugural women's Olympic tournament with a 6-0 record,
the U.S. team eclipsed Picabo Street as America's feel-good story of the Winter
Games. On Sunday, General Mills announced that it had chosen Tueting and her
teammates to adorn its post-Olympics Wheaties box. Just hours after the gold
medal game on Feb. 17, the Late Show with David Letterman rushed 10 of
the U.S. players to a Nagano TV studio to read a Top Ten List titled "Cool
Things About Winning an Olympic Gold Medal."
Sportswriters walked into the final grousing about having to cover it and walked
out gushing that it was the best damn thing they'd ever seen. A felicitous line
by Washington Post columnist Michael Wilbon, who called Mleczko "the
first leftwinger I've ever had a crush on," was typical.
That stretching sound you hear is attitudes about women athletes continuing to
expand. After the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics and now the Nagano Games, it's
clear that the U.S.'s female athletic heroes don't have to play what Billie Jean
King has jokingly called the "good clothes sports"—figure skating, tennis and
golf. Women never lacked the strength or will to compete in the grittier sports,
just the opportunity. When they get the chance, they can produce stirring
results. As the U.S. men's Olympic goalie, Mike Richter of the New York Rangers,
said admiringly after watching the U.S. women play Canada, "You felt so good for
them, the way they were just bleeding for each other to win every game."