Brakettes at 75: Joyce set standard of excellence
STRATFORD — Kathy Arendsen brought her glove to a softball game in Michigan when she was 12 years old. By the end of the day, she’d had it signed by all the players on the visiting team, the Raybestos Brakettes.
But one of those players made a particular impression on Arendsen, so much so that in a few years Arendsen followed her to Stratford, then to the national softball Hall of Fame.
“When I saw (Joan Joyce) play when I was a kid, I saw that a woman can be strong, can be dominant,” Arendsen said. “She had an air about her. She had her skill set, obviously, but watching her gave me a picture of what women can be as athletes.”
Joyce, now 80, has one of those pre-Title IX resumes that beggar belief today, a list that goes on so long that “I can’t even tell what’s important anymore,” she said recently. It’s a life that recently became a musical.
She made her name first with the Raybestos Brakettes, becoming a softball legend, at or near the top of the leaderboard in all kinds of pitching and hitting categories.
“She was — if I was ever starting a team, the first person I’d pick would be her,” said Bob Baird, Brakettes general manager since 1988 and a reporter who covered the team before that. “She could hit. She played second base, she played first base, she could do anything.”
Anything: When her softball career ended, she started a pro softball league and became a pro golfer, once completing a round with only 17 putts. She played volleyball and basketball.
“She was good at everything. My opinion, she’s the best all-time athlete in any sport,” Baird said.
“She was a great basketball player. Raybestos had a team in the industrial league. They played Bullard-Havens . ... I was working at the Stratford News and covered the games. She was just born too early. It’s too bad she wasn’t born in the Olympic era to get the notoriety she deserved, but she was the best hitter on the team, and that’s when you used wooden bats.”
As a girl in Waterbury, Joyce said she’d help one of her father’s teammates, who was the local mailman, get his deliveries done so they could have a catch for a few minutes. He’s the one who suggested that one day she should try out for the Brakettes. She made the team when she was just 14. And her mother told her she couldn’t go.
But Mom relented when Joyce caught a ride with the parents of teammate Bev Mulonet (later Danaher), and a monumental career was underway.
With the Brakettes, she went 429-27. She struck out 5,677. And if her mother stood in against her, she said, she’d have to strike her out, too.
“Ask Johnny (Stratton, Brakettes manager), just even play cards with me and I don’t like (losing),” Joyce said. “I’m also not a bad loser. I just know you’re not going to do it again.
“It must be innate, I don’t know. I just didn’t like anybody beating me at anything.”
She competed in the 1970s Superstars television show against athletes from a variety of sports, which featured what she said was the only time she felt she ever choked, playing tennis against diver Micki King, who coached tennis and who’d later join Joyce in the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame.
“I thought to myself, I’m playing against a tennis coach,” Joyce said. “I’m just probably an average, maybe not even average tennis player. Can I hit the ball? Yeah. Will I knock it over the fence? Absolutely. Hard to say.
“When I went to play the match, I thought I was defeated before I even started because of who I was playing. I did lose, but I could have won, and I was mad that I put it in my head before it happened.”
She came home and worked on her tennis game until she finished second to a tennis pro the next time around. She’d chip ice off a boat to practice rowing on a local lake.
In the 1973 national tournament, the Brakettes lost in the winner’s bracket semifinals 1-0 after Joyce had retired the first 20 Sun City Saints. Joyce remembered fans turning in tickets for the final day because they didn’t expect to see the Brakettes then.
“Whoever won the ’73 nationals would host the (1974) world tournament. That was cut in stone. There was no getting around that,” Baird said. “Raybestos was hosting it. They put a lot of money into it. And boy would that be an embarrassment if we didn’t win.
“And within like 48 hours,” Baird said, “we beat Orlando, the Orange Lionettes — we beat like the five best teams. We beat Santa Clara twice.” All five were shutouts. “And what a Herculean effort that was. And they just couldn’t touch her.”
That one run was the only one she allowed in 692⁄3 innings in the tournament. And in the meantime, Joyce said, those fans “all got their tickets back”: a crowd of 11,573 watched the finals. The Brakettes won their first world championship at home a year later.
Joyce is still the softball coach at Florida Atlantic and still enjoying it. And some things will never change.
“We were at a tournament over in Tampa. We were staying at a place that had a ping-pong table,” Joyce said. “(The players) badgered me to play pingpong because they wanted to kick my butt in something. I told them you don’t want to play ping-pong against me.
“I go out, kick their butt, and they said all right, coach, you don’t have to play with us anymore.”