Her Threat Isn’t Idle, It Gets to the Point

As words go, they’re hardly shocking. You could say them to the principal and walk away without so much as a detention. You could doodle them in your diary, scribble them in your science book or embroider them on your underwear. Nobody would raise an eyebrow.

But write THREE-POINT THREAT across the top of your car windshield and suddenly you’re a teen-age egomaniac--the most brazen basketball player on Earth.

Just ask Joan Paje. All the Edison senior intended to do was add a dash of flash to her oh-so-basic economy car, dress it up with a slogan for her senior season. Three-point threat? She never thought three simple words--in cheap, stick-on lettering--would cause such a fuss.

But when she drove up for the first day of practice this season, Paje--and her newly decorated windshield--were met by disbelief. Teammates giggled. Coaches paled. Paje didn’t say a word.

“She just smiled and walked away,” Edison Coach Philip Abraham said. “It was like, ‘I’ll show you.’ ”

She has for 10 consecutive weeks.

Paje (pah-hey) last week surpassed the county career record for three-point baskets (since broken), and has 147 in her three varsity seasons. Against Huntington Beach two weeks ago, Paje scored a school-record 50 points, including seven three-pointers.

This from a slim, 5-foot-2 guard--5-4 in extra-thick socks and hightops--who looks like she’d be more at home scampering around Toon Town than the highly competitive Sunset League. This from a girl who calls you on her Garfield the Cat telephone, convinces you to come over and make a fool of yourself on her karaoke machine, then, unbeknown to you, uses your singing as the outgoing message on her answering machine (Apparently, Abraham’s version of “Johnny B. Good” has earned the most laughs thus far).

But Paje, a native of the Philippines, isn’t all fun and games. She takes her basketball seriously, from her four-step pregame routine--nap, shower, snack, blast the rap--to the way she zombies out while the rest of her teammates giggle and joke before competition. At the free-throw line, where she’s shooting nearly 74%, Paje adheres to a simple rhythm: five quick bounces, spin the ball and shoot. Swish after swish.

Hers is a disciplined approach, one that resulted from a long, hot summer of hoops just after her sophomore year. Paje wasn’t interested in going to the beach or the mall or the movies back then. She loved basketball, she wanted to improve, so, on an outdoor court at a Seal Beach park, she and Abraham formed their own version of summer school.

They went over everything--dribbling, passing, inbounding, defense. . . . again and again, two hours a day. Paje developed her shot, her fake, her free throws, she found her three-point touch. Abraham made her use a heavier basketball to improve her strength and boost her conditioning. When it came time to address her court awareness--or lack thereof--Abraham gave Paje a blindfold.

Now if this gave Paje pause, or even a terrifying flashback, it would be understandable. After all, when Paje and her family landed in the United States 10 years ago, it was on a Halloween night. Paje, then 8, had no idea why people were running around with masks over their heads. (America, Land of the Freaky?) Now, a decade later, her coach was telling her to don a blindfold.

The idea was simple, Abraham said. For Paje to be the best ballhandler she could be, she’d have to stop relying so much on her eyes. She would have to develop an inner vision, a sixth sense about the court. So with a bandanna, he blindfolded her--then told her to get dribbling.

Skeptical? Paje certainly was. Not only would she have to worry about running into a wall or two, but it was a bit embarrassing, floundering around a public park with a bandanna wrapped around your head. What if one of her friends passed by? What if she fell flat on her face? What if Abraham ran off and left her looking like a wandering game of Blind Man’s Bluff?

Worse, Abraham didn’t always remember the bandanna. Sometimes an Ace bandage would have to do, or a T-shirt. More than once, Paje was forced to take off one of her very own socks. Stinky? You betcha.

“The thing is,” Abraham says, “whatever we used, I’m sure Joan could probably see through sometimes.”

“Yeah,” Paje says with a smile. “But it didn’t help.”

Maybe not, but the work paid off. Paje has become one of the leading scorers in the county. She’s a significant threat from long range. So much so, in fact, that Abraham is considering his own version of the now infamous Paje slogan.

“I’m tempted to put on my windshield, ‘I coach the three-point threat,’ ” he said.

Sounds good. If he can find a windshield wide enough.