Granger Remains Top Gun

Red jersey, red shorts, red dots of polish on her fingernails. Finally, the color scheme works.

For the rest of this year’s U.S. Olympic Festival, she is Red Granger, which means the name has almost caught up with the rest of the legend.

At 21, Michele Granger has half of Nolan Ryan’s earth experience but, within the realm of fast-pitch women’s softball, her reputation looms equally as large. Saturday afternoon, Granger threw a no-hitter. What’s that give her now, 250?

Granger isn’t sure; she quit counting years ago. “I don’t keep track of the no-hitters,” she says with a nonchalant flip of her hair. “All I think about are the strikeouts. I try to strike out everyone I face.”

Occasionally, Granger succeeds. At Placentia’s Valencia High School, she once struck out 21 in a seven-inning game, which seemed incredible until she did it again for the University of California this spring--21 Creighton batters up, 21 Creighton batters down on strikes.

That’s as perfect as a game gets.

At 21, Granger also has pulled off what might be the greatest sports comeback of our time. Name another pitcher who sat out a year with a career-threatening arm injury, returned with a completely re-styled delivery and then struck out 327 and 463 hitters in back-to-back seasons.

Saturday, during the West team’s 1-0 victory over the North, Granger was popping the speed gun at Hjelte Park consistently at 69 and 70 miles per hour. In this sport, 55 m.p.h. is considered average and 70 approaches the land speed record, but Granger says you should have seen her before the tendinitis.

“If I’d use my hips the way I did when I was younger, I could throw faster,” Granger claims. “In women’s softball, between 70 and 75 is as fast as it’s ever going to get. All this hogwash about throwing 111 is baloney.

“But I’m a lot bigger than I was in high school and if I threw the way I did then, I could go faster than 70.”

But if Granger kept throwing the way she did, most likely, she wouldn’t be throwing now. “I developed bad habits,” she said, such as overextending her arm and leading with her elbow. The result was a bad case of tenosynovitis--inflammation of the tendon and the tendon sheath--in her left hand, which forced her to sit out her first year at Cal and rehab for 10 months.

Baseball has its Tommy Johns and its Orel Hershisers; softball had Michele Granger. “There was a lot of concern about her a year ago, about whether she’d be able to make it back,” says Don Porter, director of the American Softball Assn. “We’re talking about one of the greatest softball pitchers ever. There were Bertha Tickey and Joan Joyce, and they’re both Hall of Famers, and there’s Michele. She’s that type of pitcher.”

Her comeback, though lousy for the rest of the Pac-10, has been a salve for softball. With a modified, more compact delivery, Granger is once more dominating games and marquees. “She’s a fantastic drawing card,” says ASA public relations officer Bill Plummer. “Whenever she pitches, she’s worth a couple thousand (fans). She’s had the same effect on our sport that Arnold Palmer had on golf. The speed, the velocity, is she going to throw a no-hitter, is she going to strike out 15--there’s a curiosity about her. I’ve watched her pitch for six or seven years and I still enjoy it.”

Granger is also a bit of a ham, another big advantage for a sport on the fringe. Granger can’t resist a challenge, which is good for softball, because her challenges often wind up on the 11 o’clock news.

Last season, a Bay Area television sportscaster talked Granger into a showdown. “I struck him out on three pitches,” Granger says. “He was pretty funny.”

On a tour of Japan, Granger pitched against pro baseball players in a special exhibition. “The first couple of times, I got them out easy. After that, it got a little harder,” she says.

Next up . . .

Jose Canseco?

“I want Jose!” Granger half-shouts and half-giggles. “Some guy goaded me into saying it on TV. So I challenged Jose. But he hasn’t gotten back to me.”

No news can be good news, yes?

“Oh, he’d kill me,” Granger says. “He’d kill me. If he ever got a piece of one, I’d be ducking and covering.”

Then there was Granger’s ultimate challenge.

Granger: Let me pitch in the Olympics.

Olympics: You just might get the chance.

Last month, the International Olympic Committee announced that women’s softball would be introduced as a medal sport in the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta. Granger will be 26 in 1996, two years out of college, and the ASA wants to see her shutting out lights in Georgia. “She’s one of the keys to the Olympic team,” Plummer says.

After some deliberation, Granger says she wants to be there, too.

“At first, I was skeptical,” she says, “because I’d heard it before. Softball was supposed to an Olympic sport in ‘92, then two months later, it wasn’t.

“But when I found out it was true, I was really excited. Pitching in the Olympics is something I’ve always dreamed about.”

Five more years isn’t too long to wait. The way Granger breaks it down, that’s two final years at Cal, two years on the amateur circuit and one year on the parenthood circuit.

“I’m not going to pitch consistently, all the way through to ‘96,” she says. “I want to take a year off and have a baby.”

As with most everything else in her life, Granger married young. Her husband, John Poulos, is a law student at Cal and he’s missing the Olympic Festival because the bar exam beckons in two weeks.

“That’s OK,” Granger says. “He’s pretty high-strung right now. As it is, he gets really nervous at my softball games.”

So that’s the game plan. By 1996, if all goes to form, John will be practicing law, Michele will be practicing for the Olympics, and the Granger pitching machine, awesome as ever, will be operating under a brand new title.

Three Strikes And A Baby.