We Were Always Athletes

Sometimes I get asked when I became an athlete. It is an innocent question, usually asked while I'm standing on a golf course, carrying a travel bag through an airport, or talking about PARLO. People assume there must have been a first swing, a first competition, a first jersey as if athleticism arrives the day someone hands you a uniform.

I never know how to answer because the truth is, I don't remember becoming an athlete, but I do remember becoming visible as one.

My body has always known movement and rhythm before rules. It knew competition before trophies. It knew joy before the first whistle.

I grew up in rural Texas where movement was woven into ordinary life. We raced to the mailbox without anyone suggesting it. We climbed trees because they were there. We played until the porch light came on. We made games out of gravel roads and every patch grass in the front yard.

Nobody called it training. It was simply being alive.

When I think about the women who raised me, I don't remember them introducing themselves as athletes either.

I remember my grandmother carrying groceries that would make most people ask for help. I remember women standing for hours in church kitchens preparing food for entire congregations. I saw the aunties who could dance all night at a family reunion and still wake before sunrise the next morning. I remember women whose hands braided hair with impossible precision, whose backs carried children, whose feet remained steady through decades of work.

Strength lived everywhere. It simply wasn't given athletic language. 

Somewhere along the way, we narrowed the definition.

An athlete became someone with a scholarship and sought the top spot on the podium.

Everything outside of that became recreation, for leisure, or a hobby as though bodies only become remarkable when someone else decides they are worth measuring.

That has never made sense to me.

Existing as a Black lesbian woman has always required extraordinary physical intelligence.

Our bodies learned adaptation before institutions learned inclusion.

We understood endurance before anyone thought to celebrate it and mastered balance in rooms that were never designed for us. We became fluent in recovery because we had no other choice. None of that appears in the record book.

It lives somewhere quieter.

I think about the woman who walks eighteen holes every Sunday without ever entering a tournament.

The mother who taught every child in the neighborhood how to swim because nobody else would.

The lesbian softball league that has gathered every summer for decades, creating family where the world insisted there shouldn't be one. The aunt who bowls every Wednesday night and line dances on Saturday, not because she's chasing perfection but because she's protecting joy.

It’s us dancing in kitchens, lifting furniture without waiting for permission.

The women whose bodies have always been in conversation with possibility.

Who decided they weren't athletes? Certainly not their bodies.

Golf has made me notice this more than any other sport.

When I first started playing, I felt behind everyone else.

I was thirty-six and did not grow up country club adjacent. Nobody passed clubs down through my family. I couldn't point to generations of golfers whose footsteps I was following. I thought I was arriving late.

Then one afternoon I realized something that has stayed with me ever since.

I wasn't learning how to be athletic.I was learning how this particular sport asked my athleticism to speak, and that felt different.

Volleyball taught my body one language. Golf was teaching another. Neither created the athlete. They both revealed different parts of her. I wonder how many women have spent years believing they weren't athletic simply because no one introduced them to the right vocabulary.

Maybe athleticism isn't a category but a relationship.

One with gravity, curiosity, repetition, frustration, and delight.

With paying enough attention to your own body that eventually the body begins trusting you back.

I’m way less interested in exceptionalism or only searching for the story of the first Black woman to do something. No shade to those stories; the matter. They always will.

I’m curious about the thousands of women who never became "the first" because nobody was paying attention in the first place.

I think that's what I've been looking for- evidence that Black women have always lived lives much larger than the narrow stories we've inherited. Evidence that joy has always been physical. Evidence that recovery is as much a part of athletic history as competition and that friendship, touch, laughter, ritual, beauty, and movement belong in the same sentence.

When I look across a golf course now, I don't just see people playing a game. I see women introducing themselves to parts of their bodies they were taught to ignore.

The course is filled with women remembering confidence that existed before performance reviews and mortgage payments and caregiving and deadlines.

On the course, women can become children again, if only for four hours. Sport has always been about returning to life, not only serving as an escape from it..

So when people ask me when I became an athlete, I don't think I'll answer with a date anymore.

I'll think about every Black woman whose body carried a history far richer than the official record ever bothered to write down. 

We were never waiting to become athletes. We were always athletes. Everyone else is beginning to notice.