USC’s Windham, 49ers’ Toler Speak a Different Lingo : 2 Down By Law

In East Coast basketball-ese, sellout is a bad play, down by law is to be with it, bama is someone who’s not with it, sweet is a smooth player and a home girl is, well, someone from the home area. Safe to say, you can’t be bama and a home girl.

The lingo is spoken in playgrounds all over the East. Now it’s in Southern California, and being spoken on two of the best women’s basketball teams in the country, thanks to two players with several similarities.

Each is a great-dribbling point guard. Both are from the East Coast. Each has overcome adversity. Each plays for one of the country’s ranked teams.

Penny Toler, of Washington, D.C., has taken the longer road to Cal State Long Beach, the No. 5 team.

For Rhonda Windham, from the Bronx in New York City, it has been more direct to No. 15 USC, at least in terms of mileage.

“Rhonda’s down by law,” Toler said. “She’s OK.”

“She’s sweet,” Windham said. “That’s all I can say.”

Toler continued: “We both agree that the East Coast is the best. But when it comes to choosing between New York and Washington, then we really go at it.

“Besides, this isn’t Penny Toler vs. Rhonda Windham. It’s Long Beach vs. SC. Poor vs. rich, that’s how I look at it. If we beat them, I get to take some of that money. It’s Raggedy Ann and Andy vs. Krystal and Blake Carrington.”

Point-Counterpoint was never this good on “60 Minutes.” Tonight at 7:30 at Cal State Long Beach, the 49ers, 16-1, and Trojans, 12-4, will compare their point guards for 40 minutes.

PENNY TOLER

Her real name is Virginia Toler but few people know it. One of eight children, she earned the nickname when she was 4 or 5 years old by eating money, then later polished it by extorting her older brothers. If they were baby-sitting and wanted to go someplace, someone had to come up with the money to bribe Penny to agree to go, too.

Nobody had to bribe her, though, to play basketball.

She played on the boys’ team in the fourth grade and by high school was in the National Sports Festival and an All-American, and it seemed obvious to everyone she would go to Cal State Long Beach. She even gave Joan Bonvicini an oral commitment, and the 49er coach said that she had a better rapport with Toler than anyone she had ever recruited.

Still, Long Beach Coach Joan Bonvicini refused to tell Toler she would start for the 49ers immediately, and Toler played it stubborn.

Toler ended up signing with San Diego State, the same school that had just hired her high school coach.

“That’s the worst move I ever made in my life,” she recalled the other day. “The dumbest .

“Every coach in the country knew I was going to Long Beach . . . But I guess you don’t always do what you’re supposed to.”

Two days after she arrived at San Diego State, she wanted to leave.

She stayed, though never feeling completely wanted, and averaged 14.1 points a game, all the while being teased by her teammates about liking Bonvicini and playing against her.

That summer, Toler went to Pauley Pavilion to try out for the National Sports Festival again, and passed Bonvicini in a hallway.

“There’s a girl back in my hometown you guys should recruit, Joan,” Toler said.

“Why’s that?”

“Because she’s a lot like me.”

“Why would we want to recruit anyone like you who says one thing and does another?” Bonvicini said.

Toler was stunned and, for a moment, didn’t say anything. But she called Bonvicini two days later--to say she wanted to transfer.

While attending Mesa Junior College last year in the redshirt season, she made a weekend visit to Long Beach. She returned to San Diego April 26 and learned that her stepfather had died of leukemia. She went home for the funeral, returned to California to finish the semester, and then went back to Washington to attend summer school at the University of Maryland.

She was home for two days when her mother died of a heart attack. That was June 2, about five weeks after the death of her stepfather. Penny figures the two incidents were related.

One of Toler’s first moves at Long Beach was changing her uniform number from 12, which she had used all her life, to 4--as in planning to take four years to graduate. It was a goal she thought her mom would like.

On the court, she became an instant spark plug. Bonvicini talked to the team before her arrival and asked them to give her a chance, not to judge her as a self-centered hotdog on the basis of her loud talk and fancy dribbling.

Now, Toler, a sophomore, is one of the top players on one of the top teams in the country. She went into the 49ers’ game last Thursday against San Jose State averaging 21.2 points and 5.7 assists a game and followed that up with 24 points and a school-record 15 assists in a 120-53 win over the Spartans, and 24 and 12 in Saturday’s 114-65 victory over University of the Pacific.

Said Bonvicini: “Penny has a lot of confidence. I never want to say she’s cocky, but she talks so much I just didn’t want anyone to take her the wrong way. She’s really pretty innocent.

“She has exceeded my expectations for this year. I never expected her to be so good and to have come so far so soon. I really thought she’d start slow and come along to average 13 or 14 points a game.”

Toler is winning friends at about the same rate as games. She has people around here eating out of the palm of her hand,” Bonvicini said. “She’s amazing. People just love her.”

RHONDA WINDHAM During the summer of 1983, I blew out my knee and it took 14 long months and three operations before I could run again. I was playing for the West team in the National Sports Festival in Colorado Springs.

My mind was not on basketball when I went back there. I was still depressed, upset and disappointed about the national team. (She had been cut during tryouts for the U.S. national team earlier that summer.)

We lost our first game and won the second. In the third game . . .

The score was close and I was tired and about to ask for a sub. But I saw Cheryl (Miller) in the stands and she was telling me to play hard. “OK, I can play a little longer,” I said to myself. “Push yourself, Roe, push yourself.”

I was guarding Penny Tollner (sic) from San Diego State. What a hotdog! Between the legs three times. Spin. Behind the back. I had to play serious defense so I wouldn’t get burned.

I was in her pocket, but I felt my knee turn funny. I ignored it.

We get the ball. A steal. We’re racing down the court.

The ball is in the corner. A jump shot. It looks like it’s going to hit the front of the rim.

I was at the foul line and thought, “I can tip it in.”

As I went to tip the ball in, it felt like I was suspended in air. Everything was blurry and in slow motion.

“What’s going on?”

As I landed, I hollered, “Oooohhh (bleep)!”

It seemed like no one was coming to help me.

“Cheryl! Cheryl!”

She was by my side before I could say her name a third time. “It’s going to be OK, Roe, it’s going to be OK.”

My kneecap is turned all the way to the inside of my leg. Cheryl’s holding my hand. Trainers are shooting me up and trying to get me on the stretcher.

Cheryl and Coach (Linda) Sharp meet me at the hospital. “I’m here, Roe, don’t cry,” Cheryl says while she’s crying.

They take X-rays. I’m in pain.

The doctor has to pop my knee back into place. Everyone leaves the room. The nurses have sent Cheryl home because she was too hysterical.

Snap!

It doesn’t go in all the way.

Snap!

My knee is back in place, but it’s as fat as a cantaloupe.

The next morning I asked my doctor was I going to need surgery. What a dumb question, but I had to hear it from him. He handed me a box of Kleenex and said, “Yes.”

--An excerpt from Windham’s journal for a sportswriting class.

“It was about the worst knee injury you could get,” Bob Beeten, the trainer at the Sports Festival, said. “Most people who go through their lifetimes as athletic trainers will never see anything like that.”

Miller said: “I had never seen anything like it. I mean, I almost lost it.”

Bonvicini said that she hopes she never again hears someone moan like that. “Rhonda showed so much courage when she came back,” said Bonvicini, who has won just three of eight games against Trojan teams with Windham. “She might even be better now than before the injury.”

In her first year, when the Trojans won the national championship with the front line of Miller and Pam and Paula McGee, Windham averaged 7 points and 6 assists a game and was named to the all-freshman team. In the process, she set school records for assists in a season, 197, and a game, 17.

She redshirted the next season, had two more operations in April and July of 1984 and finally came back for the 1984-85 season to play in 28 of 30 games, averaging 6.4 points despite shooting just 39% from the floor. Her assists, however, were up to 6.9.

The recuperation process continued after that season, with a few games in New York City, the first time she had played there since high school, specifically the famed Rucker tournament.

“The playground is still in me,” Windham said. “I was hurt and lost a little bit. But that summer, I went back home and played in the streets. That first year back, my knee was fine, but my spirit was not right.”

She averaged 8.9 points as a junior, but has even surpassed that this season as floor leader, scoring in double figures at 10.8 while passing off for 6.9 assists.

It is, as Windham said, fairy tale stuff. The oldest of two girls and two boys, a two-time New York City player of the year at John F. Kennedy High School, Windham has become a Californian.

She lives on the Coast. She met President Reagan in the White House after the second NCAA title in 1984, has been to a reception at Richard Nixon’s digs in San Clemente, traveled to Alaska and Hawaii and partied with Ralph Sampson and the guys from the University of Virginia a few years back.

“To think about doing some of that while you are living in the Bronx would have been a little far-fetched,” she said.

Yes, both home girls have turned out sweet. No bamas here.