Mad Seasons: The Story of the First Women's Professional Basketball League, 1978-1981
352
Mad Seasons: The Story of the First Women's Professional Basketball League, 1978-1981
352Paperback(First Edition)
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Overview
As the popularity of women's basketball burgeons, Karra Porter reminds us in Mad Seasons that today's Women's National Basketball Association, or WNBA had its origins in a ragtag league twenty years earlier. Porter tells the story of the Women's Professional Basketball League WBL, which pioneered a new era of women's sports. Formed in 1978, the league included the not-so-storied Dallas Diamonds, Chicago Hustle, and Minnesota Fillies. Porter's book takes us into the heart of the WBL as teams struggled with nervous sponsors, an uncertain fan base, and indifferent sportswriters. Despite bouncing paychecks, having to sleep on floors, and being stranded on road games, the players endured and thrived. Bolin, who set lasting scoring records-then faced an historic custody battle because of her basketball career; Connie Kunzmann, a popular player whose murder rocked the league; Liz Silcott, whose remarkable talents masked deeper problems off the court; Ann Meyers, who went from an NBA tryout to the league she had rebuffed; Nancy Lieberman, whose flashy play and marketing savvy were unlike anything the women's game had ever seen. A story of hardship and sacrifice, but also of dedication and love for the game, Mad Seasons brings the WBL back to life and shows in colorful detail how this short-lived but pioneering league ignited the imagination of a new generation of female athletes and fans. Karra Porter is a lawyer in Salt Lake City, Utah. She has represented a number of WNBA players in her practice and has given speeches on the history of women's basketball and the law of professional basketball.
Karra Porter is a lawyer in Salt Lake City, Utah. She has represented a number of WNBA players in her practice and has given speeches on the history of women’s basketball and the law of professional basketball.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803287891 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bison Original |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2006 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Karra Porter is a lawyer in Salt Lake City, Utah. She has represented a number of WNBA players in her practice and has given speeches on the history of women’s basketball and the law of professional basketball.
Read an Excerpt
Mad Seasons
The Story of the First Women's Professional Basketball League, 1978-1981
By Karra Porter
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright © 2006
University of Nebraska Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8032-8789-5
Prologue
Birth of a League
COLUMBUS, OHIO 1977
Bill Byrne left his office and drove to a local sports bar, where he ran across
half a dozen friends seated around a table. An idea had been germinating in
Byrne's head for some time, and tonight seemed as good as any to mention it.
"I'll spring it on these guys," he decided. "They're all jocks."
A couple of drinks later, Byrne opened the conversation. "What do you
think of women's pro basketball?" he asked. Not much, as it turned out, but
Byrne persisted. Did they know how many colleges now had women's basketball
teams? How many scholarships were now being offered to women? Byrne knew.
In 1971 fewer than three hundred thousand girls in the United States
competed in interscholastic athletics, only 7 percent of all participants. Eleven
states had no girls' programs at all. By the 1976-77 school year, that figure
had grown to 28 percent, and participation by women at the college level had
tripled. More than eight hundred colleges now sponsored women's basketball
teams, a number expected to double in the next few years.
It didn't take a genius to see that big action was coming to women's
sports, Byrne figured. He had seen the signs with hisown eyes, as he drove
past schoolyards with young girls playing basketball under the 100-degree
sun. Crowds were growing for Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), high school,
and collegiate women's basketball games-five hundred here, fifteen hundred
there-and some women's teams were drawing better than a minor league
football team that he operated. "What the hell is happening here?" he mused.
The six men in an Ohio bar remained unimpressed. "Well, I'm going to do
a women's pro basketball league," he declared. His friends laughed, and Byrne
stood up, more determined than angry. "I can do this," he insisted. Byrne
walked out of the bar shortly before midnight, thinking about his friends'
derision. No, he was not an idiot, he decided, and, no, he had not lost his mind,
but anything that could arouse that much negativity must have potential. The
next morning, Byrne called his staff together and announced the formation of
the Women's Professional Basketball League.
This was not the first time that friends had heard Bill Byrne enthusing about
some unconventional sports venture. Since graduating from Ohio State
University sixteen years earlier, William J. Byrne had gone from operating
a sporting goods store to the presidency of the semi-pro football team
Columbus Bucks. In 1974 he became director of player personnel for the
Chicago Fire, a franchise in the short-lived World Football League.
Shortly after that venture, Byrne founded two more entities: the National
Scouting Association, which provided player information to the National
Football League and other sports leagues, and the American Professional
Slo-Pitch League. "In the 1950s, I was known as a hustler. In the '60s, I was
a promoter. In the '70s, I was an entrepreneur," he says. The difference? "I
just paid my bills in the '70s."
Byrne was, by all accounts, a salesman-which was not always a compliment.
"I think you either loved him or you hated him," says Kate
McEnroe, director of public relations for the WBL in its first season. "He
was absolutely an entrepreneur and I liked him, but I also understood that
he was demanding and, I think, a little before his time. He talked big, and
I think he dreamt big, and his vision of the league is what the WNBA is
today. He might have stretched the truth at times, but part of it was to keep
enthusiasm up and running."
Lynn Arturi, a WBL player who also worked in the league office, puts it
a little more bluntly. "I have to say that sometimes I thought of him as the
flim flam man," she says, "a guy who would talk you out of your last dollar.
He was good with people. He was a likeable guy, but you always had a sense
that you were talking to someone that was trying to get the most out of you
and might take advantage of you."
Joining Byrne's new venture were some key staffers from the slo-pitch
league. Byrne's right-hand man was David S. Almstead, a business major
from Ohio Wesleyan who sold insurance to help put himself through
college. Byrne met Almstead when the young man tried out for a kicker
position with the Fire. Driving away from the field, Byrne saw one of the
hopefuls walking along the road and offered a lift back to the hotel. No,
thanks, Almstead declined pleasantly, he'd like to walk. "It was five miles!"
Byrne exclaims. He liked Almstead's gumption, and when Byrne needed
help with a professional softball league, he gave Almstead the job. Byrne
now tapped Almstead again to help run his new basketball league.
Another, less enthusiastic transplant from slo-pitch was Tim Koelble, a
former sportswriter who handled public relations for the softball league.
Koelble was not high on the notion of women's professional sports, Byrne
says. "He hated women. Hated them," at least when it came to athletics.
"It was a trial for Tim," he recalls. "There's women's women and there's
men's men. He was a man's man." Nonetheless, Koelble agreed to take on
communications duties for the new venture.
When Koelble transferred to management of the WBL's Dayton franchise,
Byrne replaced him with twenty-four-year-old Kate McEnroe, a University
of Colorado graduate he had met when she wrote a freelance article about
the WBL. McEnroe was interested in sports but hadn't had many opportunities
at her high school ("Competitive sports there was cheerleading"). "I
felt like it was important for women to learn how to compete and have that
team experience," she says of her WBL days. "I also felt to some degree that
if we could make this successful, generations behind us wouldn't have to
work so hard and have to prove themselves."
Although the league's official title was the Women's Professional Basketball
League, Byrne dropped the P to keep the moniker three letters long.
"NFL, NBA, WBL, end of story," he figured. "If they can do it, we can do
it." (Some newspapers, however, refused to recognize the league's preferred
abbreviation and insisted on using the letters WPBL, even going so far as to
change quotes from league personnel to insert the extra P.)
The new league needed a logo, and Byrne approached a local graphic
artist named Rick Mock, who had created a logo for one of the slo-pitch
franchises. Mock had heard of Byrne-which wasn't good. His own softball
team had nearly joined Byrne's slo-pitch league, only to have the deal fall
through when the owner heard about certain unpaid bills.
When Byrne approached him about creating a logo, Mock was glad to get
the job but wasn't sure he would actually see his money. As for the idea of
a women's league, "I guess I was like most people," he says, figuring "here's
Bill again, trying something that nobody else has tried, and you know, it
may work and it may not."
The artist sat down with a black Rapidograph pen and brush and went
to work. The design should look feminine, he decided, so he sketched a
woman with long hair with her arms raised, shooting a basketball. "I didn't
want to get into other parts of the body and have to deal with not pleasing
somebody who'd say, 'Well, you know, all the players aren't as petite as this
player,' or 'The players don't have that type of body,'" Mock says. He worked
the sketch into a B, giving the letter soft, rounded corners, and drew the
other two letters to match.
In June 1977 Mock was paid $300 for the completed logo ("that ugly
thing, I loved it," Byrne says), and the WBL had an image to go with its title.
What the league needed now was a "name," a spokesperson who would
have credibility with sponsors, the media, and players. Byrne picked up the
phone and dialed a number in Logan, Utah, where the woman he wanted
was working on her postgraduate degree at Utah State University. On the
other end of the line, Karen Logan listened to what Byrne had to say, but
she was wary. She had fallen for this before.
A few years earlier, women's athletics was just beginning to attract national
attention. A paucity of meaningful athletics programs for women in
high school and college had drawn relatively little attention until Congress
enacted Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, designed to improve
opportunities for females in education. The controversial law placed a
spotlight on the status of women's and girls' sports, generating more than
ten thousand comments during the regulation process and an unsuccessful
lawsuit by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) seeking to
exempt athletics from its reach.
In 1973 a record 40 million viewers watched tennis player Billie Jean King
defeat self-proclaimed male chauvinist Bobby Riggs in a famed "Battle of
the Sexes." A year later, ABC added women to its annual Superstars program,
which pitted athletes against each other in events other than their normal
sport. Among the contestants that year was a woman named Karen Logan.
Logan had earned her spot on the Superstars roster through her role as
Most Valuable Player for three years on the All-American Redheads, a barnstorming
women's basketball squad that combined Harlem Globetrotter-style
antics with genuine basketball skill. An influential 1974 piece about the
Redheads in Sports Illustrated opened with an eye-catching declaration: "If
they were men, they would be famous. They would be rich. They would be
on a first-name basis with Cosell, Schenkel, Whitaker and Gifford, perhaps
even Cavett and Carson. They would have played before hundreds of
thousands in the Garden, the Spectrum, the Forum, the Astrodome-tens
of millions on television."
The SI writers joined seven Redheads (four of whom later played in
the WBL) on the road and painted an appealing picture of the potential
entertainment value of women's basketball:
The Red Heads are slick ball handlers and their passes snap with
precision. Many are thrown behind the back, perfectly. The women are
wearing bright red lipstick and blue eyeshadow, as if they were going
to the theater. But here they are, perspiring like mad and playing
basketball like demons. They drive swiftly down the court. They shoot
with deadly accuracy. They shout at each other, shrilly, crying out
play patterns. Sometimes they shriek jokes at the men. Their precision
dazzles the crowd and, even though they are playing against butchers
and insurance men and car salesmen, the All American Red Heads are
plainly a splendid basketball machine.
The star of the team, the article said, was Logan, "who is perhaps not
very far below the unmatchable Babe Didrikson in natural abilities." Seeing
her play, the authors wrote, "is like seeing a work of art. Her moves remind
one of Pete Maravich." During her three years with the team, Logan scored
12,400 points, averaging 25 points per game.
After the article, Logan began receiving phone calls. One was an invitation
to the Superstars competition. Another was from an attorney in
Phoenix, Lee Bakunin, who had a fairly concrete proposal. With Logan's
help, a traveling squad would serve as the prototype for other teams in a
professional league to be called the Women's Basketball Association.
The timing seemed right to Logan, who disliked the level of control
exerted by Redheads owner Orwell Moore. Another ex-Redhead was also
interested, and the result was the Phoenix (later Indianapolis) Pink Panthers,
which would generate interest in a pro league by playing men's
teams, but without the comic aspects of the Redheads. The Pink Panthers
hoped for a game against the Redheads, envisioning a Madison Square
Garden appearance for what would have been the first professional women's
basketball game.
"The league now consists of one team-admittedly an unusual format,"
the San Francisco Chronicle remarked, but landing investors wasn't easy. "If
they expect to make money the first couple of years, we'll probably fold,"
Logan said. A number of people had expressed interest, but no one took
the plunge. "It'd be the first women's pro league in history and everyone is
waiting for someone else to do it so they can join in."
Time ran out, and backers never materialized. "We were just getting our
heads above water when we decided it was too hard," Logan said. "It wasn't
worth it any more." The Pink Panthers were out of business, and the first
professional women's basketball league would have to wait.
Meanwhile, women's basketball continued to make inroads into the
public eye. The first televised women's basketball game was on January
26, 1975, between Immaculata College, the dominant team in women's
basketball at the time, and the University of Maryland. A month later,
the "Mighty Macs" faced Queens College in the first women's basketball
game ever played at Madison Square Garden. The game drew nearly twelve
thousand spectators, many of whom left before the men's college game that
followed-much to the surprise of Garden promoters, who paid the men's
teams twice what the women received.
Later that year, Logan again drew attention to women's basketball by
taking on former Los Angeles Lakers guard Jerry West in a nationally
televised game of H-O-R-S-E, part of a Battle of the Sexes series inspired
by the King-Riggs match two years earlier. The first two misses (West's H
and O) were straight jump shots; then Logan, encouraged by the show's
promoters, used a trick shot, spinning the ball on one finger, which she
used to propel the ball into the hoop. West could not get the ball to spin,
let alone finish the shot. Logan was still at H when West hit E on a missed
outside jumper. "I can't believe it!" a teenage girl screamed.
In 1976 women's basketball was played for the first time at the Olympic
Games in Montreal. No one gave the unheralded Americans much of a
chance after finishing eighth in the World Championships the year before;
indeed, expectations were so low that when the team actually qualified at
the preliminary tournament in Ontario, the U.S. Olympic training grounds
weren't ready for their arrival. "We had to kind of lay low for a couple of
weeks until they could get the uniforms, bags, and all the paraphernalia
that goes with it," Gail Marquis laughs.
The real contest in Montreal, everyone knew, was for the silver medal.
The gold was assured to the venerable Russians, led by twenty-four-year-old
Uljana Semjonova, one of the tallest women in the world at seven feet, with
impressive skills to go along with her height. After being trounced by Japan
and Russia, the United States upset Czechoslovakia to come away with the
silver.
A few months later, Logan's phone rang again. This time a man named
Jason Frankfort was on the line. Frankfort, a restaurateur and former stockbroker
from New York City, was planning a twelve-team Women's Basketball
Association to play a six-month, sixty-two-game schedule beginning in
October 1977.
The WBA's commissioner would be Lois Geraci Ernst of Advertising to
Women, Inc., creator of such memorable advertising campaigns as the
Coty perfume's "If you want him to be more of a man, try being more of
a woman" and the Clairol slogan, "You're not getting older, you're getting
better." Ernst had a goal for the WBA: "I hope one day that little boys might
say, 'When I grow up, I want to be a great basketball star-just like my
mother.'"
In January 1977 Frankfort staged a press conference in New York City
to announce the league's formation. While cocktail waitresses in spiked
heels and satin shorts served drinks, Ernst opened the proceedings: "For
centuries, you know what they've been saying about us women. 'Keep 'em
barefoot, pregnant, and praying. But today we're changing that to 'keep
'em well shod, well paid, and playing.'" She then introduced Frankfort, the
"chairman of the broads."
A company based in Columbus, Ohio-run by a man named Bill
Byrne-announced that it would provide scouting reports to the league,
and Byrne's National Scouting Association began contacting college coaches
across the country. Reportedly, four franchises had been snatched up for
$50,000, but in reality, Frankfort had no takers yet. "Everybody waited for
somebody else to lend the credibility of his or her name or money to the
WBA," womenSports later wrote. "Midway through this $100,000 waiting
game, Frankfort's money ran out. So did his backers." Logan, meanwhile,
wound up stuck with a $250 hotel bill.
Now, less than a year after that debacle, Logan found herself listening to
Byrne's plans for yet another try at professional women's basketball. This
time, she thought, maybe investors would actually materialize. "I just hope
the people who are behind it have enough money to see it through for
maybe four or five years," she said, "because by then there will definitely be
a market for it and enough players with the skills to play professionally."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mad Seasons
by Karra Porter
Copyright © 2006 by University of Nebraska Press .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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