She would crawl down a gravel road on her hands and knees rather than give up playing hockey, but on this particular January night, Cammi Granato has to kneel only to sign autographs.
There is a shortage of chairs at the Blue Line Ice Arena in Fond du Lac, Wis., where the U.S. women’s hockey team has just overpowered the University of Wisconsin women, 12-0. More than 2,000 people watched the game, and now many of them are waiting patiently to speak with the players.
By the time Granato emerges from the locker room, her neck still aching from a collision a few nights before, her teammates have started the autograph session and there is nowhere for her to sit. She assesses the situation, lowers her knees gingerly onto the nubby black vinyl floor and props her elbows on the table.
Seconds later, a reporter crouches alongside, thrusting a tape recorder at Granato’s chin and firing questions. A camera flash glances off her high cheekbones. Allie, her 2 1/2-year-old niece, presses close, clutching a black felt-tip pen in one stubby hand. Fans start handing posters, photos, T-shirts and hockey sticks to Granato, and she brightens. She signs. Allie signs. Goodwill reigns. This is one sport where fans can still touch the stars.
In 1998 Granato and many of these players won Olympic gold medals in Nagano, Japan, defeating a favored Canadian team. Granato, the team captain and scion of a hockey-happy west suburban family, slept with her medal that night. Back in the United States, she and her teammates became instant media darlings: sincere, articulate pioneers who had honed their skills in near-total obscurity. But most Olympic moments have a short shelf life. Two years after Nagano, two years before the next Olympics in Salt Lake City, the hockey players are back on the margin of American sporting life.
Like actors in an amateur theater troupe who sell their own tickets before a performance and sweep the floor afterward, the women must promote their sport as fervently as they play it. They skate at small rinks for small crowds of true believers. They barnstorm against college teams that don’t put up much resistance. They put off schooling, jobs, mortgages, marriage and children. They travel by bus and live out of duffel bags for weeks at a time.
Which makes them . . .
“Lucky,” Granato says a couple of days after the Wisconsin match, sitting in her parents’ Plainfield home, where they just moved from Downers Grove. “We know we’re lucky just to have the opportunity.”
The family that nurtured Granato’s dreams is still at the center of her life. In the months before Nagano, she told the story over and over: her three older brothers whacking shots at her in the basement, her parents encouraging her when rival boys’ teams balked at her presence.
Granato didn’t stop to think about how much she loved hockey until she had to stop playing competitively in her early teens, when the size and strength disparity between her and the boys simply became too great. She tried other sports, but nothing replaced her family’s shared passion. When her brother Tony played in the 1988 Olympics, it seemed impossible that she would ever get the same chance.
When Granato was growing up, girls who played ice hockey considered it a hobby, not a future vocation, practiced only at a few scattered, mostly East Coast outposts. One of them, Providence College in Rhode Island, recruited Granato; she excelled there, and the year before she graduated, women’s hockey was granted Olympic-medal status. Since its 1998 debut at Nagano, the sport, which was already gaining participants, has gone through a growth spurt: In the 1998-99 season, 1,268 girls’ and women’s teams registered with the sport’s national governing body, an 18 percent increase from the year before and more than eight times the number that were competing when the decade began.
The U.S. team, which used to gather only occasionally, will spend a lot of time together over the next two years, in training camps, touring and competing in such major events as April’s world championships in Toronto. That, in turn, is part of a larger trend in Olympic sport. The influx of corporate sponsorship money, greater television exposure and advances in sports medicine and training techniques mean that many minor-sport athletes can support themselves and stay healthy well into their 30s. Granato, 28, is one of them.
Descending from Mt. Olympus can be tricky, however.
“When you’re on a high like that, you have to come down from it,” Granato said. “It’s something I’ll cherish forever, but it also has its place and its time, and I have to look forward and have new goals. You don’t want the one defining moment of your life to be when you’re 26 years old.”
After a heady spring and summer of being sought after for speeches, talk shows and clinics, all the women went through some version of post-Olympic blues. Coach Ben Smith watched from afar and waited to see who would come back out to play.
“They had to come to grips with what their sport was,” he said. “It’s still not a game that everyone’s dying to follow. The high they were on was equal to anyone’s in athletic achievement. Then they had to go back into the same tunnel. They had to decide how much they had left to give.”
Granato thinks she has more to give than ever, now that she is free from from the chronic lower back pain that plagued her for months before the Olympics, making it impossible for her to weight-train and build strength.
Few people outside her family and team knew it, but by the time Granato reached the gold medal game, she was spent, unable to skate more than 15 seconds at a time without feeling wobbly. “Keep it simple, keep it simple,” she whispered to herself on the ice. “There are other players who can put the puck in the net for us.”
“It was more or less `Go out there and play with adrenalin,’ ” recalled Granato, who went scoreless in the medal-clincher but had four goals in five other games in the Olympics. “I wasn’t at my potential. But that’s the glory of being on a team. Everybody else played awesome and I just did my job. I have no regrets now, because we won.”
The team scattered after the Olympics and didn’t play together again for 10 months. Some players went back to college. Some took jobs as assistant coaches just to have a place to work out. One had a baby. A few got married.
Granato reported to the National Hockey League’s Los Angeles Kings in the worst physical shape of her life, but fortunately for her, she wasn’t there to play. She had landed a dream gig doing radio color commentary for the Kings, the team where her brother Tony had played with Wayne Gretzky for seven seasons. She would become only the second woman ever to do regular broadcasts for an NHL team.
It was in the broadcast booth, where Granato had to watch rather than play, that she realized two things: that she was nowhere near ready to give up hockey and that, for the moment, she and her teammates had nowhere to playa quandary common to many female athletes.
“It was hard to go from skating every day at such an intense pace and working toward this goal, (to) the day it was over, we didn’t know when we’d get back together,” Granato said. “We were coming home to a country that was excited, for the first time, about women’s hockey and wanted to see more. There was a buzz, but the buzz didn’t last long. It would have been nice to play some games.”
Last fall, shortly after Granato had begun her new job, the Kings held a skills competition, a casual evening for season ticket holders to see the players and the staff cut loose. Granato was skating toward the goal on a breakaway, ready to wind up and launch the puck — and then she fell. A one-car accident, no foreign objects on the ice. She just fell. And then scrambled right up again like a deer on the pond and skated back to the line, red-faced.
“I knew she was embarrassed — it was her first test in front of the team and the fans,” said left wing Steve McKenna. “She came and stood next to me on the line. I started giving it to her, and she laughed and started giving it right back.”
Granato’s rookie year at KRLA-AM was under way, and it would have a few slippery spots.
Hockey, with its mercurial flow and abrupt transitions, is a difficult sport to broadcast. Analysis and anecdotes have to be served up in a few seconds or woven into game action and repartee with a partner. Granato, with the typical perfectionism of an elite athlete, prepared thoroughly and then discovered how tough it was to convert what she knew into quick sound bites.
She sounded nervous and she knew it. Some listeners weren’t about to cut her any slack. There were nasty calls to the post-game show and nasty letters to the Los Angeles Times. “Did anyone from the Kings’ front office ever think to give her a tryout?” one man wrote. Granato also got support from fans, but after a while even the sympathetic comments made her crazy.
“I felt like saying, `OK, everybody, I’m checking my pride at the door. Just listen for the next two hours as I make a fool of myself,’ ” Granato said. “I knew the game. I just didn’t know the way to fit it all in and express it. . . . I knew I wasn’t going to be good until I had done 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 games. That was hard for me to accept.”
There were nights she wanted to rip off the headphones and nights when things clicked. In that way, she was not unlike many former jocks who make the transition. “Our expectations of her were no different than they would have been for an ex-NHL player,” said Granato’s play-by-play partner, Nick Nickson, who has worked with a few in his 26 years on the air.
But there was one significant difference: Granato was not an ex-jock. She was a jock trying to work her way back into shape to compete for a spot on the next U.S. Olympic team.
“We all realized that she wanted to keep playing the game at a high level,” Nickson said. “She still loved it, and because she was committed to it, it put her broadcasting progress a bit on hold. It’s hard to excel at two things at the same time.”
Granato improved enough during the season to feel that she wants another crack at broadcasting. But the immediate impact of her daily bird’s-eye view of the NHL was that it made Granato as hungry as she’d ever been for her sport.
“When I was working, I missed it,” she said. “I’d get to go out on the ice for 20 minutes after practice and play three-on-three or do some sprints with the injured players, but it wasn’t like playing every day.”
Granato also thought about the younger women coming up through the college ranks and knew her spot on the U.S. team was by no means assured.
So, with the confidence of a sister who knows she can count on her brothers, Granato sought guidance from the professionals around her. At the urging of All-Star Luc Robitaille, she started a workout program under the supervision of Kings speed-strength coach Joe Horrigan. She consulted with the team’s nutritionist, discovered that she was anemic and protein-deficient and added more meat to her diet.
“The color came back into my face,” she said. “I had lost my olive skin the last couple years and I couldn’t figure out why. I thought I had chronic fatigue syndrome. I’m in a different category than I was then.”
Granato also used her season at the mike to deepen her understanding of the game. It was an insider’s experience that few women athletes ever have.
“I watched the best players in the world play hockey from the best seats in the house,” she said. “I got to watch plays develop and analyze why they developed. I saw the way (the players) trained, I saw the way they ate, I saw the way they traveled, I saw the way decisions were made in coaching and management. It rubbed off.”
Granato said she learned a lot about being a professional. Her friend and workout partner McKenna says she’s being too modest.
“I see her as more the true professional than we are,” McKenna said. “She’s had to deal with a lot of different situations and she doesn’t crumble. She loves the game, and that’s the kind of person we need as an ambassador.”
Don and Natalie Granato, Cammi’s parents, are in the stands at Fond du Lac, as they have been at hundreds of their daughter’s games, surrounded by children and grandchildren.
Joe, their youngest, is visiting from Boston, where he is studying architecture and interior design. Their daughter Christina lives nearby. Don and Natalie have an empty nest for the first time in more than 30 years, although the term is a bit of a technicality given the constant activity at home base.
Hockey is still the backbone of the clan. Last summer, the Granatos all pitched in to help Cammi with her foundation’s first charity game to benefit children’s causes. They ran a hockey camp that attracted nearly 200 girls and women, ages 6 to 58. Tony plays with the San Jose Sharks. Don Jr. coaches the minor-league Peoria Rivermen.
Robby, who works for the family’s beverage distributorship, coaches youth teams. Last year, he and his father took on the job of coaching a 12-and-under girls hockey team, their first experience with an all-girl squad. The team, which drew girls from all over the state, competed against boys in a local league and finished third in a national girls tournament. It represents a head-shaking evolution from 15 years ago, when Cammi suited up alone in the girls’ bathroom before joining her boy teammates.
“The girls are there because they really want to play,” Robby said. “That was refreshing for me as a coach. A lot of the boys I see are (there because of) pressure from their parents or their peers.”
Don also enjoyed the season. “I admired their grit,” he says of the young team members. “They worked so hard, and they threw their bodies around out there.”
The pregame atmosphere, however, with the players’ swapping hair scrunchees and playing with their Beanie Babies, was quite a contrast with the male locker rooms to which he was accustomed. One day, he walked by his center forward and was nearly asphyxiated by perfume. “You’re going to get set for the face-off, and he’s going to ask you for a date,” Don told her.
Cammi stopped by to see the team in action. “They still have similar obstacles,” she said. “The boys are more hung up on trying to hit them than they are on the puck, and that’s what I remember. With a few, I could see the determination in their eyes that I had when I was young, to play hockey all the time.
“They say they want to play in the Olympics, and they ask me, `How do I get there?’ “
On your knees sometimes, while you learn to walk again.
