We arrived in Moscow on a beautiful warm July day. We were picked up by an interpreter with an old Mercedes Benz passenger bus. As we drove through the city we were all in awe as we were now in what was five years earlier our country’s biggest enemy’s capital city. Although the name escapes me now, we were taken to a hotel that sat up high in the city overlooking the 1980 Olympic Village. About a block from us was Moscow State University, and another six blocks from us was the residents of former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. What the amazing thing was at sort of diagonal from our hotel was a practice ski jump smack in the middle of Moscow.
In that hotel, each floor that we were on had a babushka, whose job was to grandmother those people on her floor. They were extremely kind to us, although they could speak little English.
It was in this hotel that first year that perhaps I have one of the greatest memories of all the years that I have traveled internationally. The morning of our first games, we told the girls’ to be dressed and ready to go at 11:45, game time was one o’clock and the venue was about a half an hour away.
The girls’ were apprehensive and nervous, and wanted to go down to the hotel lobby and wait for the bus. The hotel had very small elevators and so I went down to the lobby early to get out of the way of the players and the other coaches. What I saw next is frozen in my mind as the players came out of the elevators dressed in their U.S.A. uniforms and warm-ups, carrying their U.S.A. bags, the entire hotel came to a standstill. Cleaning ladies, desk clerks, guests, everyone stopped in what I can best describe as awe and reverence.
I do not know if they were surprised to see so many Americans, if they were impressed with how the girls’ acted and carried themselves, or if they were as stunned as we had been on arrival to see Americans in their city, but that moment of time is frozen in my mind.
People in our country today do not understand the extreme honor it is to represent our country.
