By Clay Kallam
You can still hear the bitterness. "Our
favorite president," said Carol Blazejowski, 16 years after her chance
at Olympic glory was sacrificed on the altar of global politics by Jimmy
Carter. The Blaze arrived too early for professional basketball too,
though she did lead the Women's Basketball League in scoring and was
named MVP in her one year of play before the WBL flamed out. In fact,
she almost missed high school basketball, as Cranford High School didn't
even have a girls team until 1974, her senior year. And a big-time
scholarship? Not quite. Blazejowski went to Montclair State in New
Jersey and forged a legend -- a legend lost in the foggy dawn of the
women's game. At Montclair State, the 5-10 Blazejowski averaged 19.6
points a game as a freshman, 28.5 as a sophomore, 34.0 as a junior and
38.8 as a senior. And it wasn't because she was a mindless gunner -- her
shooting percentage went up each year, and that senior season she hit
58.9 percent from the field and 83.7 percent from the line. Could she
shoot it? Can Mariah Carey hit the high notes? Can Gwen Torrence run?
But Blazejowski was just a curiousity in the early days of Title IX,
putting up numbers no one could believe -- and so no one did. And then
her one chance to show the world just how good she was disappeared under
a pile of Cold War rhetoric. Blazejowski can still stroke the J,
playing against men in her New York haunts, and occasionally matching up
against today's best women. "I think the players are more diversified
in their skills today," she said. "They're better conditioned,"
especially when it comes to weights and strength. But the Blaze isn't
about to concede to anyone that she didn't earn her many honors. "There
were great players then," she said. "There are great players now."
And one thing those older great players could do was shoot. "The art of
shooting," said Blazejowski, thinking of all those jumpers she hit.
"It's a lost art. I don't see anybody who can pull up and hit the jumper
like I did. Not one of them. I'm hard-pressed to think of
anyone. "They don't shoot." What they do is run the floor. What
they do is post up. What they do is go one-on-one, hard to the
basket. What Carol Blazejowski did was shoot. Ten-footers.
Fifteen-footers. Twenty-footers. Oh, and there was no three-point line
either. "It wouldn't have helped my game," said Blazejowski of that
19-foot, 9-inch arc. "It would have just added more points." As for
the small ball the women use, Blazejowski is dismissive. "That doesn't
mean anything," she said flatly. "It's not a factor." And neither is
Blazejowski's missed 1980 opportunity. Though the '96 Olympics, and the
memories of old wounds, are just a few weeks away, Blazejowski has her
eye on the future. She's director of the NBA's women's basketball
program, and is busy putting the many pieces together for the 1997
summer debut. She can't reveal many details, given the behind-the-scenes
struggle with the American Basketball League, but she promises that lots
of questions will be answered after the Olympics. But there's one
question that will never be answered: Just how good was Carol
Blazejowski? And here's another: Was she really the greatest shooter the
women's game has ever known? If not for Jimmy Carter and that 1980
boycott, we might be able to erase the question mark. As it is, we can
only look at the statistics and marvel -- and wonder how brightly the
Blaze would have burned in today's vastly more popular, vastly more
publicized world of women's basketball.
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