USA Today – The scene plays out at colleges across the country each night, but on this rainy evening inside a dimly lit Bay Area junior college gymnasium, it serves as prelude to a debut unlike any other in the sport’s history. When the focus of the 12-minute pep talk pivots to this topic, the eyes of 10 18- to 20-year-old women – including one deaf player and another woman a few inches shy of 5-feet – focus on the one Mission College player who has yet to play this season. There near the door sits the oldest (50 years old), tallest (6-feet-6, 230 pounds) and most muscular person in the room: Gabrielle Ludwig.
Ludwig nervously runs her hand over the sock approaching the tattoo on her leg. She has long been eager yet apprehensive about this moment. Can she still play? What will she hear from adults in the stands? What will her opponents on the court whisper? And can she keep her emotions in check? Few outside this room know it all comes back to that name. They don’t know she is 50 and last played a college basketball game in 1980 – as a man. They don’t know the odyssey: one failed suicide attempt, two failed marriages; one 19-year-old daughter who insists on calling her dad, two girls who insist on calling her Momma Gabbi. The woman teammates call Gabbi, Giant or Big Sexy was born Robert John Ludwig in Germany three decades before any of them were a glimmer in their parents’ eyes.
“I don’t want her in the same locker room as my daughter,” Casey says. “That’s a man with girls. Take Shaq and cut his (penis) off and we’ll put him out there with the girls. What’s the difference? You have daughters out there. Mine might be a Tom boy, but she is all girl. They let too much (expletive) go by. Was it Adam and Eve or Adam and Steve? ”She’s got the parts? Just because she has the parts does not mean she is one. That was man-made. Obviously it was not God made because she did not come out like that. Man-made. Fake.”
