Big Girl in the Middle - Hardcover

Reece, Gabrielle; Karbo, Karen

 
9780517708354: Big Girl in the Middle
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0517708353 ISBN 13: 9780517708354
Verlag: Crown Pub, 1997

Inhaltsangabe

The six-foot-three, 175-pound professional beach volleyball player, TV sports commentator, and cover girl tells the story of her childhood and the development of her athletic career

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gabrielle Reece lives in Los Angeles. <br><br>Karen Karbo is the author of two novels, including <b>Trespassers Welcome Here</b>, which was a <b>New York Times</b> Notable Book of the year. Her journalism has appeared in <b>Esquire</b>, the <b>New Republic</b>, and other publications. Karbo lives in Portland, Oregon

Aus dem Klappentext

Gabrielle, but mostly she is called Gabby or Gab. She possesses a look that conveys both athleticism and feminine beauty. She is 27, 6'3", and a Nike spokesperson for women's athletics. A professional athlete (Women's Beach Volleyball Leagues 4-Woman Tour), Gab's face can be seen on the cover of <b>Outside</b>, <b>Shape</b>, <b>Elle</b>, <b>Fitness</b>, <b>Volleyball</b>, <b>Self</b>, <b>Men's Fitness</b>, <b>Harper's Bazaar</b>, and <b>Vogue</b>, as well as other magazines. <b> Big Girl In The Middle</b>, her first book, co-authored with Karen Karbo, explores her life as a professional athlete and beyond. From 1994 to 1995, Gabby was a contributing editor at <b>Elle</b> magazine, writing her own sports and fitness column. In the fall of 1997, she will begin writing a column for <b>Conde Nast Sports for Women</b>. On television, Gabby won a huge number of fans by taking risks while road-luging, white-water kayaking, drag raci

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The Friday Morning Grind

Gabrielle Reece likes to roar. When she's frustrated, she opens her large, much-photographed mouth and heaves forth a sound beloved of five-year-old boys playing monster. Errggghhhhhh! Today, at Southern California's Manhattan Beach, dressed in her uniform -- black running tights, black sports top, black visor emblazoned with a white NIKE swoosh -- she leans forward at the waist, carotid arteries snaking up either side of her long, strong neck, clenches her fists, opens her mouth wide and roars. Again and again, she roars. Sometimes the roar is followed by a half-swallowed curse. Farge! Profanity earns you a red card from the ref; a red card gives a point and the volleyball to the other team.
        
Even though we live in a time when a certain amount of female brutishness is considered to be spirited, and thus sexy, there are still limits, big ones. One thing women of the '90s have in common with every woman from Mary Magdalene up through Hillary Clinton is the feeling that there are boundaries beyond which you must not go, or else be written off as unacceptable. To flourish personally, professionally and, in the case of someone like Gabby, in the public eye, you must still refrain from being too opinionated or too emotional or too successful. A recent cartoon in The New Yorker shows two men at a cocktail party; one says to the other, "She's your type. Good-looking, some money, not too much ambition."
        
There is something you must understand about Gabby's roar. There is nothing remotely attractive about it. It's genuine, unfiltered human expression. Gabby's roar is -- like just about everything else about Gabby -- is a shade past the pale. It's a too big sound from a too big girl who turned bigness and buffness and brute strength to her advantage.
        
Gabby's roar comes out when she's frustrated, and she's frustrated a lot these days. It's the middle of the summer, the middle of her 4th season playing middle blocker on the Bud Light Professional Beach Volleyball Tour; the middle of a losing streak. Team NIKE, her team, cannot seem to put together anything resembling a winning streak. Unlike every other women's team on the tour, Team Norelco, Team Paul Mitchell, Team Discus, and Team Sony AutoSound, Team NIKE has never made it to the Finals. Not once.
        
But these are big picture facts that Gabby tries not to think about at 11:30 a.m. on this Friday morning in the middle of July, Round Three of the three day tournament, Team NIKE versus Team Norelco, Shoes Versus Nubs. The most hazardous seconds during a volleyball game are the 45 seconds or so before service when your mind can sabotage your game. When you might, if you were Gabby, start thinking that you need a win more than any other team, if only to prove that you're not doomed to spend the entire rest of the season losing. When you might start thinking how this year, more than any other, you've put it all out there. You've got the stats, you've got the awards, but this year, you wanted to both dominate the center and captain a first place team. First place, nothing else. And there you are in fifth. Fifth place out of five teams. A bad dream that shows no signs of ending.
        
But you can't think that, you mustn't, and all players know this, Gabby especially. She knows it's what's happening on the sand, this instant. And at this instant one of Gabby's teammates, also her roommate, a quiet girl named Jennifer Meredith rushes a shot and thwacks the ball straight into the middle of the net. Jen looks frustrated. Gabby roars. Tennis great and veteran grunter Monica Seles was publicly chastised for less.
        
Despite Gabby's status as someone famous, there are not many people around to watch her play on this Friday morning in mid-July. On Friday, the day before the weekend, when the tournament is routinely crowded with the usual smacking-of-good health-and-good-cheer California beach crowd, the scene is grungier than you might expect.
        
The ocean at Manhattan Beach is a disconcerting olive green, the breaking waves trimmed with pale green lace. Tiny, tobacco-colored moth flies alight on piles of kelp. Whenever the wind shifts, the tonic salt air is undercut by the carnival aromas of cocoa butter, fried foods, and incense. A blimp swims overhead. Fair grounds-by-the-sea.
        
This is the first year the Bud Light Pro Beach Men's Tour and Women's Tour have been combined in a single event -- the Men's tournament alternating with the Women's -- which accounts for some teams having to play to whoever strolls past on Friday morning.
        
Sure, it seems like an up-and-running, fully-operational professional sporting event; they have Smashing Pumpkins blasting from the speakers at the Sony AutoSound Truck, and the giant white Paul Mitchell shampoo bottle balloon is up and tethered between two sets of bleachers, and there is a girl with neat hair posted at the Paul Mitchell booth cradling a wicker basket of sample envelopes of Super Clean Hair Gel, but the tunes are grooved upon mostly by the roadies still assembling the bleachers, and the shampoo samples go unspoken for. What the organizers of the Bud Light tour have either failed to consider, or didn't care to, was that most people who might follow beach volleyball as a serious sport have something to do on Friday that forces them to miss the first day of play. Like jobs, kids, summer school.
        
The pleasing irony is that this fledgling quality is what makes beach volleyball attractive; the organizers and sponsors of the sport may be in it for the usual reasons, but the players are in it for love, and for a public weary of sports as big business, its a balm. Discovering the sport is like heading for Bali on an over-booked charter and stumbling upon a virgin beach. It's refreshing, and at the same time frustrating, that in an age when professional sports are over-covered by the media, there's rarely a whisper about beach volleyball in the local paper.
        
It's unlikely you'd find mention of beach volleyball in the L.A. Times. Especially on this day, in the middle of July. It is July 17, a big news day sports-wise which means money-as-it-relates-to-sports-wise.
        
On Page One, headlines: a 24-year-old actor, rapper, restaurant owner, spokesman for Reebok, Pepsi, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell & KFC, and basketball player, Shaquille O'Neal signed a 7-year, $120 million dollar contract with the Los Angeles Lakers. (O'Neal's contract breaks down to about $17 million a year, a million more than Lakers owner Jerry Buss bought the entire team for in 1979.) There is also an all-Shaq section. Articles on The Agent; The Competition; The New-Look Lakers; the Uniform; The TV Picture; Around the NBA; Assessing the Lakers; The Money Trail.
        
We also have The Olympics, on home turf, in Atlanta where, if you believe the hype, women will figure big, particularly women in the traditionally over-looked team sports: basketball, softball, volleyball and, for the first time, beach volleyball.
        
Page One of the Business section has this: Some 50 advertisers have paid an average of $500,000 each for 30 second prime time spots during Olympic coverage. Coca-Cola will air 100 different commercials, one time each, spending $62...

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Verlag
Crown Pub
Erscheinungsdatum
1997
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0517708353
ISBN 13 
9780517708354
Einband
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