Going Rogue: An American Life (11 page)

SARAH

PALIN

Our senior year, when my girlfriends were receiving rhe srandard “cool” gifts, like Van Halen cassette tapes and L.A. Lakers sweatshirts, Todd gave me gold nugget earrings, nestled in a grass-woven Native basket instead of a gift box, the consummate Alaskana gift. He didn’t worry about money as much as my friends and I did because he knew he’d fish rhe next season and would be rewarded according to how hard he worked the waters. Because Todd had been exposed to conditions in rural Alaska many of us cannot imagine, he’d made tough decisions on his own from a young age. Because of that, principles like honesty, justice, and accountability became crucial to his life perspective, and he understood intuitively that you get to
choose
how to respond to circumstances around you-even those out of your control. You get to decide what’s really important and what your attitude will be.

Our background differences were exciting to me and opened up my more sheltered world. We spent more and more time together, and when we couldn’t, we still stayed connected. With four teenagers in our house, our single landline phone was offlimits for long boyfriend-girlfriend calls. But Todd and I discovered we could close the five miles between our homes if we stood on our back porches and used the handheld VHF

radios he used on his fishing boat in Bristol Bay. For months, we snuck whispered nighttime chats until we discovered that the commercial rruckers barreling through town could hear us. I snuck other things with Todd, too: Copenhagen dipping tobacco, which I tried for the first time about an hour before I met his mother, Blanche.

cracked up watching me trying to

make conversation with her, while I gagged with dry heaves and cold sweats caused by the nauseating chew.) My first chug of beer, with Todd and Tilly the summer after we graduated. My first PG13-equivalent movie, which Todd and I watched on the VCR at my friend Karen’s house.

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Then, on the drive home in his Mustang, he tried to kiss me for the first time. But the truth was, I was a never-really-been-kissed nerd. As soon as Todd hit my driveway, I jumped out of the cat, scared to death that this suave worldly guy that I was ctazy about would find out what a wallflower I was.

The next day,.my sheltered little world felt shatteted when he told the boys in the locker toom-my “brothets” whom I’d grown up with-that I didn’t even know how to kiss. I was mortified. He thought it was sweet and figured it reflected innocent modesty, but I was humiliated, sure that the whole school now knew the story. My young, crushed spirit learned a lesson about guys that day: even the good ones can act like jerks.

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My friends and I lived for basketball, and at the beginning of my senior year, we counted down the days until the season began. A reportet from the Mat-Su Valley
Frontiersman
asked for my preseason prediction. Speaking for rhe team, I declared that we’d go all the way, that we wanted a state championship. To us, losing state for a third straight year would be intoletable. I spoke off the cuff and from the heart, but walked away from the interview with a sense of dread, fearing that my wotds would be interpreted as cocky and naive. When the spOtts page came out, I swallowed hard, read what I’d said, and decided I’d have to work that much harder to live up to my bold proclamation. It was supposed to be a rebuilding year for the Warriors. But Karen and
I,
and other benchwarmers, like Jackie Conn and Michelle Carney, Amy, Wanda, Katie, and Heyde, resented the years we had spent riding the pine. We were determined to make up for it, to show our respected Teeguarden and

Coach Randall what rhey’d been missing out on, and to seize the opportunity to win. As a captain, I played furiously; I drew

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SARAH

PALIN

a lot of fouls, but I brought evetything I had to every pracrice and every game. I left everything on the court because I simply wanted rhe team to win.

I was certain I wanted victory for my team more rhan any opponent wanted it, and that would be the key to reaching my goal of a state championship, even though we were an underdog team. When I have opportunities ro speak ro arhleres today, I always ask rhese kids what I asked myself that season: Who wants it more? Who will work harder for it? And who will be most prepared when the opportunity arises to score and win?

I was bold but pragmatic. I reminded my teammates that thtough all our years playing the sport together, all our camps,
our practices, games, seasons, our obsession with it all, at one
time or another we had defeated everyone of our opponents. So there was no reason we couldn’t beat them one more time in that final, shining season.

Game by game, week by week, our scrappy but determined team surprised everyone by piling up victories. As the season progressed, I recalled my newspaper prediction and thought thar maybe we had a shor at making it come true. We were on a roll. But then I stumbled. It was hard, painful, and very public.

During a game
in the
regional tournament a week before
state, I came down wrong on my right foot, twisted my ankle underneath me, and felt a sickening pop. Coach Teeguarden carried me off the
Boor
and the rest of the team carried us to regional victory. I was devastated ro think that my season, my
dream, was over.

It was just days before the state tournament, and I refused to see a doctor because I didn’t want to hear him say something was btoken. I hobbled around and sat on the bench through a week of practices with my foot planted in a bucket of ice. But after all

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Going Rogue

we’d been through, I decided it would be over my dead body that I’d sit the bench in the state tournament.

Ar state, we batrled through rhe bracket and made it to the championship game. Our litrle Wasilla Warriors team faced the big Anchorage squad, the Service Cougars. Coach T. knew how badly I wanted to play. I had shown him through four seasons rhar I would give 100 percent effort no mattet the cost, so he took a chance and gave me a shot. He put me in the game. I made it up and down the court, not gracefully but playing as hard as I could. I’d never worked so hard for anything in my life, because I’d never wanted anything so badly. I felt like I couldn’t pull my weight, but I encouraged the team: if we stayed together and played selflessly, I promised them we would win. My teammates were tenacious, intense, and focused, and we never let up. I scored only one point that game, a free throw in the waning seconds. Bur we pulled off the upset.

That victory changed my life. More than anything else to that point, it proved what my parents had been trying to instill in me all along: that hard work and passion matter most of all. Everything I ever needed to know, I learned on the basketball court. And to this day, my right ankle is a knobby and misshapen thing, a daily reminder of pushing through pain.

In May 1982, Todd and I walked together during our graduation ceremony in the Warrior gym, dressed in caps and gowns to match our school colors, red and white. Over the next six years, we kept walking together, though we’d be thousands of miles apart.

Todd headed off to play basketball at a college in Seatrle but eventually felt drawn back to Alaska, to the kind of hard work he thrived on. He earned his private pilot’s license in Prescott,

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SARAH PALIN

Arizona, along the way. I kicked off college by taking a semester to thaw out; along with Tilly and two other girlfriends, we flew to Hawaii for our freshman year of college. Our intention was to play basketball there, but we made it to only a few tryouts and then decided we’d better concentrate on our studies … and the beach.
It
turned out that Hawaii was a little too perfect. Perpetual sunshine isn’t necessarily conducive to serious academics for eighteenyear-old Alaska gitls. Besides, we were homesick for mountains, cooler seasons, and even snow. After that first semester, we realized we’d better transfer back to sometbing closer to reality so we could actually earn our degrees.

Tilly and I opted for a more conventional and affordable campus, choosing Idaho because it was much like Alaska yet still “Outside” (Alaskans’ alternative term for the Lower 48). I still desperately wanted to earn a journalism degtee and to put my passion fat sporrs and writing to work as a sports teporter. After our freshman year, Tilly and I returned to Wasilla for summer work at a little diner. While we were home, our friend Linda Menard, Doc’s wife, talked me into entering the local Miss America Scholarship Pageant wirh the promise of tuition for college.

I thought it was a horrendous idea, at first. I was a jock and quite square, not a pageant-type gitl at all. I didn’t wear makeup in high school and kept my hair shorr because I

like wasting time primping. I couldn’t relate to the way I assumed most cheetleader types thought and lived, and figured it was those girls who were equipped for the pageant thing.

On the other hand, there

the scholarship money. I knew I

wasn’t a good enough athlete to get a Division I scholarship, but I did want to graduate debt-free. Was there some way I could make this work?

I thought about it for a couple of days. My stomach knotted up at the thought of parading around onstage in a swimsuit, especially

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since I’d packed on the famous “Fteshman 15” and wasn’t in the best shape of my life, It would be humbling at best, risky and embarrassing at worst. But a scholarship was a scholarship, and in the end, pragmatism won OUt. Half seriously, I wondered if the pageant organization would accept for the talent portion of the competition a fancy display of right-and left-handed dribbling. But Linda suggested I play the flute, something I’d been doing since age ten. Linda also reminded me that the scholarship money was generous, especially if I won individual competitions within the pageant, in addition to the Miss Wasilla crown. I enlisted the advice of a former pageant winner, my friend Diane Minnick. Then I shocked my friends ‘and family, put on a sequined Warrior-red gown, danced the opening numbers, gave the interview, and uncomfortably let my burt be compared to the cheerleaders’ butts. I played my flute, and I won. In fact, I won every segment of the competition, even Miss Congenialiry.