ORLANDO, Fla. - The Japanese television crew had traveled across time zones and an ocean to chronicle the life of the 70-year-old Orlando woman spending her golden years playing pro football.
But Charlotte Chambers was going to make them wait.
"Can I get out of here? I'm tired," she pleaded to Orlando Starz team owner/CEO Marsha Beatty halfway through the two-hour evening practice.
Asking for Beatty's permission was a formality. The 5-foot-4 free safety/kick returner for the second-year team in the Independent Women's Football League was as good as gone as soon as she fixed in her mind that she was ready to leave - television cameras or not.
She had spent the week entertaining reporters and making public appearances for the fledgling football team, and now she was just tired.
Besides, Miss Charlotte always has done her own thing.
No one gave her a chance to live when she entered the world two months premature on a cold December day in 1932. Back then, potbelly stoves - not hospital incubators - warmed premature black babies in segregated Moultrie, Ga.
But a combination of a grandmother's devotion and strong faith helped keep Miss Charlotte alive. Years later, the baby that Chambers' mother once compared to a little rat blossomed into a three-sport dynamo.
She played volleyball, basketball and track at Orlando's Jones High School during a period when girls were not expected to participate in sports.
Chambers could have remained with an abusive husband when her marriage began crumbling in the early 1960s. Women didn't often leave their husbands in those days, and the phrase "domestic violence" wasn't yet a part of the public lexicon.
Not Miss Charlotte. She ran off to Connecticut - a state she chose because it was the farthest place from Orlando where she knew anyone -and created a new life for herself and her five children.
She eventually returned. And when she left service one day last year at Washington Shores' Carter Tabernacle Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, decked out in pink chiffon suit and black hat, she passed a group of women playing football at nearby Sylvester Hankins Park.
Chambers changed into a T-shirt and shorts, returned to the park and declared that she was going to play tackle football.
At 69 years old.
"Back in my day, you were supposed to be a lady," Chambers said. "And ladies only could do certain things. Some men think that way now."
Chambers' already large brown eyes grew even wider, and her small face lit up with a gigantic grin.
"Roll over, men! The women are taking over!"
Chambers is no gimmick or marketing tool for a league in need of attention and funding. She played for the Starz in obscurity last season, enjoying another activity to add to her already full plate.
She retired from teaching 17 years ago, but still substitutes for Orange County Public Schools. She's active in 10 community organizations, regularly attends church services and choir practices at Carter Tabernacle, tutors children in reading and gives tennis lessons to kids in Washington Shores.
She rises early to prepare for her daily 5-mile walk at 6:30 a.m., before the Florida heat becomes oppressive. Bedtime comes 17 hours later, after she watches the news at 11 p.m.
There is something else, too.
"What's that thing I do three times a week?" Chambers asked Beatty.
"Aerobics?"
"Yeah! That's it!" she proclaimed. "Excuse me, I'm having a senior moment."
Her eyes grew wide again.
"I think I've earned it!" said Chambers, laughing.
Although Chambers was busy before the media discovered her story, she was always organized. She participated in entire football practices, leaving early only for evening church services on certain days.
"I was having fun last year," she said. "Nobody knew nothing about me."
On April 12, during the team's first home game of the season, a reporter serving as a celebrity guest noticed the 70-year-old strapping on a helmet. He did a few interviews, and a short piece on the woman aired on an Orlando television station the last weekend in April. CNN picked it up the next day.
Then the floodgates opened.
Visits to the team Web site, www.orlandostarz.com, quadrupled from the 105 average daily hits recorded before the story aired. Beatty's monthly cell phone bill has topped the $500 range because of calls she's fielded from newspapers, radio stations, television programs and two Japanese networks, among others.
CNN first stuck the moniker "Gridiron Granny" on Miss Charlotte. Now the Starz and Chambers embrace it.
Beatty and Chambers will travel to New York on Wednesday night for a Thursday appearance on "The Late Show With David Letterman."
Chambers has been a quick study in media savvy. Knowing that her story soon would be seen in Japan, she asked a Japanese member of her Women for Peace Interfaith Dialogue group at downtown Orlando's First United Methodist Church to teach her a phrase to say on camera.
While in Miami for a road trip on May 2-3, she handed out Orlando Starz keychains to children who recognized her while she toured South Beach. Miami Mayor Manny Diaz gave her a special mention during an official speech supporting the Fury, his city's home team.
But as her 15 minutes of fame stretch toward the one-month mark, she's getting a little testy. Media appearances are interfering with her active lifestyle and prohibiting her from substitute teaching.
"I'm losing money!" she cried. "I've got to go to work one of these days!"
Talk to Chambers long enough, and you'll see that football is just a footnote in her life.
Twenty-two-year-old Essie Mae Davis was supposed to give birth in February 1933. She wasn't thinking about babies on Christmas Day 1932 and celebrated the holiday at a dance in her hometown of Moultrie.
By 2 a.m., the unmarried woman was back in the small home she shared with her parents, bringing little Charlotte into the world.
The baby was born Charlie Maud Davis on Dec. 26, 1932 - Chambers changed her first name to Charlotte when she was 28 because she thought Charlie sounded too masculine.
Chambers is sure she weighed less than a pound at birth. Neighbors came to the house at regular intervals to ask her grandmother, Gussie, if the baby had died yet.
"A seven-month baby just didn't live during that time, especially a black baby," Chambers said.
Charlie Maud moved to Orlando when she was 2 years old. Essie Mae had gone there to find work and sent for her daughter when Gussie died. By that time, she had married Wesley James, who raised Charlie Maud as his own.
Growing up in the Lake Mann projects in segregated Washington Shores on Orlando's west side, Charlie Maud blossomed into a competitive athlete when she attended then-segregated Jones High School.
She fell in love with Robert "Bubba" Chambers, a football and track star, and became pregnant with her first child, Robert Wesley. Charlie Maud married Chambers in 1950 as an 11th-grader, four months before the baby was born.
Chambers had four more children. They now range from 43 to 52, and her brood includes five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Granddaughter Shantai, 26, and her son, Chambers' great-grandson Isaiah, 7, live with Chambers.
Her marriage, which she describes simply as abusive, ended in 1963 when she'd had enough.
"We were just too young," Chambers said. "I knew I had to make my getaway."
So she moved to Hartford and stayed for 35 years. While there, she finished the studies - at the University of Hartford - that she'd started at historically black Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach. She became a teacher, and with the help of chemotherapy that has left her with thinning, salt-and-pepper hair, she survived breast cancer that was diagnosed in December 1987.
Five years ago, Chambers returned to Washington Shores to care for her mother, who had heart disease and died April 1, 2001, at 90.
It was the first time Chambers had lived in the ranch-style home her parents purchased in the early 1950s, after she had married Bubba Chambers. The house now welcomes visitors from around the world - as well as local callers, from the 10-year-old Washington Shores Elementary student waiting on the porch for a tennis lesson at Hankins Park, to Felix Cosby, a former teacher/coach and 1926 Jones graduate.
Neither Cosby nor Chambers expected the former high school sports star to play pro sports. She was despondent after her mother's death, but the poster advertising women's professional football tryouts intrigued her.
When she did, Beatty remembers reading Chambers' paperwork and assumed the woman had made a mistake.
"Are you sure you were born in 1932?" Beatty asked. "You meant, you're 32, right?"
There was no mistake. Chambers had been around so long, she remembered the namesake of Hankins Park - Dr. Sylvester Hankins, a physician and black community leader who died in 1991 at age 95.
Some of the players also hesitated when they saw Chambers.
"I remember the first day she came out," said Starz quarterback Kahs Sky-Deer. "I said, 'Marsha, how old is she?' Marsha said 69. I said, 'Is she crazy?' "
Beatty replied that Chambers said she'd waited 50 years for the chance to play football. Who was she to turn her away?
Ayesha Jones, a 22-year-old, 5-foot-9 strong safety, takes a protective role with Chambers, her partner in the secondary.
"During games, I'm always saying, 'Nobody better hit Miss Charlotte,' " Jones said. "I've seen her take some hits. She'll try to bounce right back, though, and always says, 'I'm OK, I'm OK, girls.' "
http://www.sunspot.net/sports/football/bal-sp.charlotte18may18,0,7100050.story?coll=bal-sports-football
But Charlotte Chambers was going to make them wait.
"Can I get out of here? I'm tired," she pleaded to Orlando Starz team owner/CEO Marsha Beatty halfway through the two-hour evening practice.
Asking for Beatty's permission was a formality. The 5-foot-4 free safety/kick returner for the second-year team in the Independent Women's Football League was as good as gone as soon as she fixed in her mind that she was ready to leave - television cameras or not.
She had spent the week entertaining reporters and making public appearances for the fledgling football team, and now she was just tired.
Besides, Miss Charlotte always has done her own thing.
No one gave her a chance to live when she entered the world two months premature on a cold December day in 1932. Back then, potbelly stoves - not hospital incubators - warmed premature black babies in segregated Moultrie, Ga.
But a combination of a grandmother's devotion and strong faith helped keep Miss Charlotte alive. Years later, the baby that Chambers' mother once compared to a little rat blossomed into a three-sport dynamo.
She played volleyball, basketball and track at Orlando's Jones High School during a period when girls were not expected to participate in sports.
Chambers could have remained with an abusive husband when her marriage began crumbling in the early 1960s. Women didn't often leave their husbands in those days, and the phrase "domestic violence" wasn't yet a part of the public lexicon.
Not Miss Charlotte. She ran off to Connecticut - a state she chose because it was the farthest place from Orlando where she knew anyone -and created a new life for herself and her five children.
She eventually returned. And when she left service one day last year at Washington Shores' Carter Tabernacle Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, decked out in pink chiffon suit and black hat, she passed a group of women playing football at nearby Sylvester Hankins Park.
Chambers changed into a T-shirt and shorts, returned to the park and declared that she was going to play tackle football.
At 69 years old.
"Back in my day, you were supposed to be a lady," Chambers said. "And ladies only could do certain things. Some men think that way now."
Chambers' already large brown eyes grew even wider, and her small face lit up with a gigantic grin.
"Roll over, men! The women are taking over!"
Chambers is no gimmick or marketing tool for a league in need of attention and funding. She played for the Starz in obscurity last season, enjoying another activity to add to her already full plate.
She retired from teaching 17 years ago, but still substitutes for Orange County Public Schools. She's active in 10 community organizations, regularly attends church services and choir practices at Carter Tabernacle, tutors children in reading and gives tennis lessons to kids in Washington Shores.
She rises early to prepare for her daily 5-mile walk at 6:30 a.m., before the Florida heat becomes oppressive. Bedtime comes 17 hours later, after she watches the news at 11 p.m.
There is something else, too.
"What's that thing I do three times a week?" Chambers asked Beatty.
"Aerobics?"
"Yeah! That's it!" she proclaimed. "Excuse me, I'm having a senior moment."
Her eyes grew wide again.
"I think I've earned it!" said Chambers, laughing.
Although Chambers was busy before the media discovered her story, she was always organized. She participated in entire football practices, leaving early only for evening church services on certain days.
"I was having fun last year," she said. "Nobody knew nothing about me."
On April 12, during the team's first home game of the season, a reporter serving as a celebrity guest noticed the 70-year-old strapping on a helmet. He did a few interviews, and a short piece on the woman aired on an Orlando television station the last weekend in April. CNN picked it up the next day.
Then the floodgates opened.
Visits to the team Web site, www.orlandostarz.com, quadrupled from the 105 average daily hits recorded before the story aired. Beatty's monthly cell phone bill has topped the $500 range because of calls she's fielded from newspapers, radio stations, television programs and two Japanese networks, among others.
CNN first stuck the moniker "Gridiron Granny" on Miss Charlotte. Now the Starz and Chambers embrace it.
Beatty and Chambers will travel to New York on Wednesday night for a Thursday appearance on "The Late Show With David Letterman."
Chambers has been a quick study in media savvy. Knowing that her story soon would be seen in Japan, she asked a Japanese member of her Women for Peace Interfaith Dialogue group at downtown Orlando's First United Methodist Church to teach her a phrase to say on camera.
While in Miami for a road trip on May 2-3, she handed out Orlando Starz keychains to children who recognized her while she toured South Beach. Miami Mayor Manny Diaz gave her a special mention during an official speech supporting the Fury, his city's home team.
But as her 15 minutes of fame stretch toward the one-month mark, she's getting a little testy. Media appearances are interfering with her active lifestyle and prohibiting her from substitute teaching.
"I'm losing money!" she cried. "I've got to go to work one of these days!"
Talk to Chambers long enough, and you'll see that football is just a footnote in her life.
Twenty-two-year-old Essie Mae Davis was supposed to give birth in February 1933. She wasn't thinking about babies on Christmas Day 1932 and celebrated the holiday at a dance in her hometown of Moultrie.
By 2 a.m., the unmarried woman was back in the small home she shared with her parents, bringing little Charlotte into the world.
The baby was born Charlie Maud Davis on Dec. 26, 1932 - Chambers changed her first name to Charlotte when she was 28 because she thought Charlie sounded too masculine.
Chambers is sure she weighed less than a pound at birth. Neighbors came to the house at regular intervals to ask her grandmother, Gussie, if the baby had died yet.
"A seven-month baby just didn't live during that time, especially a black baby," Chambers said.
Charlie Maud moved to Orlando when she was 2 years old. Essie Mae had gone there to find work and sent for her daughter when Gussie died. By that time, she had married Wesley James, who raised Charlie Maud as his own.
Growing up in the Lake Mann projects in segregated Washington Shores on Orlando's west side, Charlie Maud blossomed into a competitive athlete when she attended then-segregated Jones High School.
She fell in love with Robert "Bubba" Chambers, a football and track star, and became pregnant with her first child, Robert Wesley. Charlie Maud married Chambers in 1950 as an 11th-grader, four months before the baby was born.
Chambers had four more children. They now range from 43 to 52, and her brood includes five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Granddaughter Shantai, 26, and her son, Chambers' great-grandson Isaiah, 7, live with Chambers.
Her marriage, which she describes simply as abusive, ended in 1963 when she'd had enough.
"We were just too young," Chambers said. "I knew I had to make my getaway."
So she moved to Hartford and stayed for 35 years. While there, she finished the studies - at the University of Hartford - that she'd started at historically black Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach. She became a teacher, and with the help of chemotherapy that has left her with thinning, salt-and-pepper hair, she survived breast cancer that was diagnosed in December 1987.
Five years ago, Chambers returned to Washington Shores to care for her mother, who had heart disease and died April 1, 2001, at 90.
It was the first time Chambers had lived in the ranch-style home her parents purchased in the early 1950s, after she had married Bubba Chambers. The house now welcomes visitors from around the world - as well as local callers, from the 10-year-old Washington Shores Elementary student waiting on the porch for a tennis lesson at Hankins Park, to Felix Cosby, a former teacher/coach and 1926 Jones graduate.
Neither Cosby nor Chambers expected the former high school sports star to play pro sports. She was despondent after her mother's death, but the poster advertising women's professional football tryouts intrigued her.
When she did, Beatty remembers reading Chambers' paperwork and assumed the woman had made a mistake.
"Are you sure you were born in 1932?" Beatty asked. "You meant, you're 32, right?"
There was no mistake. Chambers had been around so long, she remembered the namesake of Hankins Park - Dr. Sylvester Hankins, a physician and black community leader who died in 1991 at age 95.
Some of the players also hesitated when they saw Chambers.
"I remember the first day she came out," said Starz quarterback Kahs Sky-Deer. "I said, 'Marsha, how old is she?' Marsha said 69. I said, 'Is she crazy?' "
Beatty replied that Chambers said she'd waited 50 years for the chance to play football. Who was she to turn her away?
Ayesha Jones, a 22-year-old, 5-foot-9 strong safety, takes a protective role with Chambers, her partner in the secondary.
"During games, I'm always saying, 'Nobody better hit Miss Charlotte,' " Jones said. "I've seen her take some hits. She'll try to bounce right back, though, and always says, 'I'm OK, I'm OK, girls.' "
http://www.sunspot.net/sports/football/bal-sp.charlotte18may18,0,7100050.story?coll=bal-sports-football
