The Moth Podcast: March Madness
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Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Sarah Jane Johnson, and on this episode, women's basketball. March Madness has us thinking about threes, dunks, and triple doubles, but March is also Women's History Month, so we're thinking about basketball in a slightly different way. We're thinking about Title IX, how women athletes are still fighting to get the same respect that men are, and about all the great March Madness moments that women created, from Charlotte Smith's buzzer beater in 1994,

to Candace Parker's epic first time dunking in the tournament, to Kaitlyn Clark raining threes. We want to highlight how incredible sports can be for everyone. So we've got two stories all about hoop dreams and what happens when they come true or don't. Whether you're rooting for South Carolina, UConn, or my alma mater, LSU, go Tigers! We hope you'll enjoy.

First up is Toya Chester. Toya told this at a Boston main stage where the theme of the night was on thin ice. A note that this story was told in 2020 and due to our reduced socially distanced audience, things are a little quieter than you might be used to. Here's Toya live at the Moth. So I grew up in what I thought was a decently sized town in central Massachusetts.

I say decently sized because unlike most of the cities around me, we had a high school, we had Searstown Mall, and we had traffic lights. Now, my family was the first family to settle in my town after slavery, so all the black families, most of them, we were related. But the Chesters, I'm a Chester, we were known for something different.

We were athletes. And as stereotypical as that sounds, it's true. I myself played softball, soccer, and basketball. I couldn't go anywhere with my grandfather without someone coming up and yelling, Hey, Chet! Shooting stories about back in the day and asking me, Do you know how great he was?

Of course I know how great he was. I heard the story of him running the track meet and then hopping the fence to go and hit a home run in the baseball game before the track meet was even over. I was proud and I knew that I had a legacy to uphold, you know? Basketball was my sport and my grandfather knew that.

He bought me a basketball hoop. He set it up at his house. He didn't play with me. It's my grandfather. But he tried to show me a few moves here and there. The hook shot. I never mastered that one. But basketball was everything to me. It was the early 2000s. It was a real culture for me and my friends. Me and my best friend Taylor, we would ride her bike. Well, she pedaled. I sat on the handlebars. And we would go down to the park.

And we would challenge the boys to a little two-on-two pickup. When we got a little older, you know, we were trying to be cute. We'd wear the jersey dresses. It was an actual dress, but a basketball jersey. It was our life. And, you know, everything, basketball was everything to me. So one time, my mom, she took me to New York City, and we went to the NBA store.

I had never seen anything like this. You walk in and they have this display of basketballs with the imprint of the player's hand on it. So you can put your hand on the ball and just see how big Shaquille O'Neal's hand actually is. It looks like a tennis ball in this hand. So then you go through the store, you go in the back, up the stairs, around the corner, and this tiny section is the WNBA.

And in my small Massachusetts town, I have never seen this much women's basketball gear in my life. But the thing that stuck out the most was the WNBA basketball. And you know it right when you see it. Not just because it's smaller, it is, but it's the orange and white stripes. It's just iconic. I knew I couldn't ask for one of these basketballs. I mean, my mom, she was one of those moms that would take me to the amusement park and

I'd go on the roller coaster, we'd get off, and she'd bring me to the screen, you know, the screen that shows you the picture of when you go down that first hill, and she would look at me and she would say, Toya, you better look at that screen real good because you're not going to take one of these pictures home. But this day, she bought me a basketball, and it was perfect because I needed one of those balls, the WNBA balls, because I was going to play in the WNBA.

I mean, why not? I was a Chester and I was great at sports. I even played on our town's first all-girls basketball team and we went undefeated against all those boys. I was on my way. When I got to high school, freshman year, I told my coach, I looked him straight in his face and I said, I'm going to dunk a basketball by my senior year. And I thought I was going to because I could palm the ball. And everybody knows that's the first step if you want to dunk a basketball.

So I get to college, I'm still playing basketball, and I was recruited. But I was recruited to Division III. And not that you can't go pro in Division III, but let's be honest, you're probably not going to. But I loved it, and I was having fun, and I wanted to do what every college basketball player wants to do. I wanted to score 1,000 points. In every college gym, there's a big sign

And it's all the players that have ever scored a thousand points. And at my school, there was only six or seven. I wanted that. I wanted to see Toya Chester and the number of points that I scored. So I was first in all the sprints. But at the end of my freshman year, I only had 220 points. And that's not on track to make a thousand.

So I tried harder in sophomore year. I made captain. Junior year, I'm going good and we get to senior year and I am cruising. We have a winning season and we're going to the playoffs. It's the last game of the regular season before playoffs. And yours truly only needed 12 points to make 1,000. I was ready to go. So we're playing at MCLA, which is really far. It's in North Adams. And we're driving to the game and

I'm holding out hope, to be honest, but I know that my mom is not going to make the game. It's far. It's four hours, which is, you know, normally fine. She'd go to as many as she could go to. But it's the game that I'm going to score a thousand points, you know? I mean, when this happens, the coach, you score your thousandth point. The coach will call a timeout. And then your mom pops out of nowhere with flowers and balloons. And it's a whole thing. But it's OK. I'm going to just tell her about it after the game.

So we're driving. We get to almost Vermont. We pull up to the school, go into the locker room to get ready. And we look around and there's pieces of paper scattered around like they were left behind. And we pick it up and it's our plays. The other team had written out our plays and they put the names of our plays and the names of our players and what our favorite moves were.

And we thought, okay, this is perfect. We'll be clever. We'll change all the names of our plays to mess with their heads. It wasn't working. By the time we get to the second half, I only have six points. And I was averaging 21 points a game. So I should have been already hit 1,000. So it's the second half. I'm a forward, so I'm playing down low. A girl gets the ball at the top of the key. She's their three-pointer.

She's gonna shoot it. I hear, "Toya!" I turn, I look, I go to run. I'm running up there. I jump up so high, I'm about to block her like Ben. I never jumped this high in my life. My feet are at her shoulders. And she ducked. She didn't shoot the ball. She ducked. And so I land on her back and she stands up. And so I fly off of her back.

And I land on the floor and I smash the back of my head. It was so loud. It's all I could hear. The gym's silent, but in my head, all I can hear is my head smashing. And I'm thinking, I just cracked my head open. So I reach back. There's no blood. I'm good. So I go to hop back up, but I don't make it all the way. I hear my coach. She says, "Toya, get up!" And I say, "I can't move."

She said, "Get up." I say, "I can't move." I had hopped up so fast that I threw my back out. Now, at this point, I'm crying. Now, whether it's because my back hurts or I know I'm not going to hit a thousand points, I don't know, but the tears are streaming. They're telling me I'm going to go in an ambulance and go to the hospital. I get there, they give me ibuprofen. Don't get me started on that bill. I was pissed. But that was it. That was the end.

I never played college basketball again. We went another three rounds in the playoffs. And if you do the math, I definitely would have hit a thousand. I did learn a lesson that day though, and I guess that's important. I learned that when you fall down and you hurt yourself, don't get up too quickly. You might throw your back out. It took me a long time to forgive myself for throwing my back out. But what is there to forgive?

I scored 994 points in my college basketball career. It's almost 1,000. Thanks. That was Toya Chester. Toya is an electrician who teaches aspiring electricians in the Boston Public Schools. She has a husband, some kids, and a couple of dogs. If you'd like to see photos of Toya playing basketball in college, head over to themoth.org slash extras.

We were curious to see if Toya was rooting for anyone this March Madness. Here's what she had to say. People are always asking me my thoughts on professional sports, on college sports, what I thought of the game, who I think is going to win, who's my favorite player. And my answer is always, I don't know. And then they say, oh, you don't like sports? I love sports, but I like to play sports, not watch them.

I hear you, Toya. We'll be back in a second with another story from the court.

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That's q-u-i-n-c-e dot com slash moth to get free shipping and 365 day returns. quince.com slash moth. Welcome back. In my high school in the 90s, my March Madness was getting ready for spring training and track and field. I was one of the first female high school pole vaulters in the state of Nebraska, which is one of my favorite sentences to say out loud.

And while we may not have been flying sky high those first few years, I was very proud to be a part of that history. And it was all because of Title IX, high schoolers advocating for ourselves, and our coaches believing in us. In 2019, I went back to Nebraska where I took a different kind of leap and told a story in front of a few hundred people at the Moth. There in the audience was my track coach, Mr. Sather, sitting in the front row all those years later.

So to everyone who lifts up women and girls on and off the field, thanks coach. Up next is Dame Wilburn. Dame told us at a Detroit Grand Slam where the theme of the night was out of bounds. Here's Dame live at the Moth. That's good. So I don't know if you can tell it by looking at me, but I'm not necessarily an athlete.

If you back up to when I was in ninth grade, I was actually, if you can believe it, less athletic than I am now. My mother and I didn't really see eye to eye on a lot of things, and two of them happened to be the two things she was good at, which was school and basketball. And I was terrible at school and anything that required movement. So...

My school was a Detroit Waldorf school and they were trying to figure out how to assimilate us into the general population because they were getting ready to close the high school down and we had been an enclave to ourselves for a long time. So for whatever reason, Waldorf decided to form a girls basketball team. Now,

I didn't want to be on the basketball team. I just figured that I wasn't going to get A's in school and I wasn't going to do homework ever. So maybe this was just another way of getting on my mother's good side. Now what I planned to do was ride the pine. Like I was going to join and get a uniform and then sit down and then never get on the court ever. But all of the girls in my school

chickened out. So I ended up on junior varsity. Now, the problem with junior varsity was there was only two of us on junior varsity. The problem with varsity was there's only five of them. So as a non-basketball player who didn't want to run and had to get their uniform let out

I spent a lot of time playing basketball. Now my mother decided that this, because she was a physical education major, she was the first African American woman to coach basketball in the state of Georgia. So she decided to help me, which turned out to be an even larger problem. Number one, she sort of stopped playing basketball, but she kept watching it. And she was trying to give me things that I could do

at my size. So I was good for what this thing is called a pick and roll. She's like, you're like the kind of person that can set a pick. And I said, why can't I set a pick? She said, because you're big as hell. So that's 90% of a pick is to be big as hell and flop. And I was like, what's flop? She's like, well, what's going to happen is they're going to hit you and you're going to fall down. And I said, why am I falling down if it didn't hurt? She's like, see, this is what I'm trying to explain to you. You are so big you can foul and then you go to the foul line and make foul shots. That's the only way you're going to be a benefit to your team.

And I said, but I can't shoot foul shots. She's like, I recognize this, but your numbers are going to be, you're going to get fouled so much you will get multiple opportunities.

So she starts teaching me how to do ball handling. I'm terrible at ball handling. She's teaching me how to shoot foul. You know, pop your wrist, pop your wrist. I'm like, what are you talking about? She's talking to me about, basically, I was like a theater geek. So I decided that on this basketball, Mr. Honey, who still teaches gym at Waldorf, said, you need to figure a role. You need to have a role. So I took the role of enforcer. I don't think that's what he meant. But I decided that I was going to be like the linebacker equivalent of a basketball player.

Now, I also had this weird asthma thing where if I was running in fresh air or doing too much, my throat would go cold. So I'm in my Waldorf basketball uniform, big as hell, extra fabric in it because I'm big as hell, with a bandana tied around my head looking for bitches. Because that's all I know how to do. So every time I saw somebody that wasn't dressed like me, I'd bring the paint. But that's not how basketball is supposed to work. So...

We're playing Our Lady Star of the Sea, affectionately referred to as Tuna High. What's up, Tuna High? So we're playing them. Now, I don't know if any of you have been to the Detroit Waldorf School, but it was designed by Albert Kahn, and Albert Kahn is a wonderful architect, but Albert Kahn don't know shit about designing gems. So...

The edge of our basketball court was about three inches from the wall, and there was no padding. So when you played on our turf, we could cut a corner like a sumbitch, so you were already in our world. So these tuna girls are running flat-faced into this brick wall, and Mr. Honey's like, we got him, we got him. So...

The Waldorf team had two moves. We had a gold move and maroon. So if he called gold, that meant you passed the ball to Angela. If he called maroon, that meant you passed the ball to Angela quicker. Angela Taylor, if you know who she is, tell her I said this. Angela Taylor was the only person on our team who could shoot the ball. So we were like, get it to Angela, get it to Angela. Angela played about nine million minutes that one year because she never came off the court. So...

It's the last game, we're playing tuna high, and I start going through the paint, right? And the idea is that I get in the paint and I ditch the Angela. So I'm going through the paint, I go and do a layup, and the damn ball goes in. And I actually scored. My mother wasn't there because we had been so bad so long it was crushing her soul to keep coming to the games. I go home and I tell her I made a layup. She said, you need to tell me what you think a layup is.

And I said, "This is what a layup is." And she said, "Oh my God, you got one." I said, "Yeah, so you have to come to the banquet." So at the end of the school year, my mother shows up. We're at Waldorf. When they call you across the stage, they give your stats. And they say, "Damien Wilburn, total number of points for the year, six. Total number of fouls, 23. Total number of technical fouls, 59."

And I stand by that record. Thank you. That was Dame Wilburn. Dame is a storyteller, Moth main stage host, and host of her own podcast, Dame's Eclectic Brain. Her storytelling began as a way of keeping cool in the summertime on her grandmother's porch in Macon, Georgia. She now lives in Detroit, Michigan.

That's it for this episode. From all of us here at The Moth, we hope that whatever team you're rooting for this March Madness, they win the whole thing. Sarah Jane Johnson is the Director of Creative Operations at The Moth. She's passionate about the transformative power of storytelling and keeping the trains running on time. Her current athletic pursuits include hallway soccer and bunk bed basketball with her son.

This episode of the Moth Podcast was produced by Sarah Austin-Duness, Sarah Jane Johnson, and me, Mark Sollinger. The rest of the Moth leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Christina Norman, Jennifer Hickson, Kate Tellers, Marina Cloutier, Suzanne Rust, Leanne Gulley, and Patricia Ureña. The Moth Podcast is presented by Odyssey. Special thanks to their executive producer, Leah Reese Dennis. All Moth stories are true, as remembered by their storytellers.

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