Shattering the Glass tells the story of American women's basketball from Senda Berenson's first game at Smith College, through the Val Ackerman era of the WNBA, the first ten-- or is it fifteen?-- years of the Geno-Pat rivalry, and the last game of the 2004 Olympics. It's a good read.
It's not quite an oral history, but it's based on what seem like thousands of interviews, and its great strengths involve coverage of the game in decades when it was hard to document, but from which living participants still remain-- roughly, from the Depression to the early Eighties.
It's illuminating on earlier periods, too: I learned, for example, that Berenson's father was a Jewish immigrant who began as a street peddler, and that her brother was the extraordinarily influential art collector Bernard Berenson, who all but told the Metropolitan Museum in New York what Italian paintings to buy.
Something else I didn't know, though it's no surprise: black Philadelphia in the 1930s was the center of a competitive adults' game just as exciting as anything played in the better-documented industrial and rec leagues of the upper South.
All good stories have not just heroes, but blocking agents, villains (sometimes well-intentioned) who get in the way. If the heroes are players and coaches who advanced the game, encouraging competitive girls and women to develop their talents and pursue their hopes, the principal blocking agents-- from the start of the century right up until the early 1970s-- were "physical educators," many or most of them women, who considered exercise good, but competition bad-- they didn't like games that made talent stand out. Instead the physical educators promoted school-wide "play days," where everyone got a workout, but nobody won.
The authors make clear that West Texas hoops success in the Fifties and Sixties has something to do with the big crowds Texas Tech draws today. They might have said more about what-- and who-- the game inherited from the postwar industrial-league era. Is Pat (Head) Summitt related to John Head, who coached the Nashville Business College teams of the 1950s, on which Sue Gunter played? Is N.C. State coach Kay Yow related to Virgil Yow, whose Hanes Hosiery teams dominated North Carolina just after the Second World War?
Some of the people the authors interviewed were pre-NCAA players who did not succeed in coaching careers. You've probably never heard of them, which is too bad: let us know if you ever saw Nera White play.
Other pre-NCAA players, of course, became prominent. My favorite anecdotes come from C. Vivian Stringer, whose high school had no girls' sports-- so she tried out for cheerleading. The school had both black and white students, but the cheer squad had only white kids. After Stringer failed to make cheerleader, the NAACP sent a rep to her house:
"I was upstairs doing my homework, and my father called me downstairs. The man said 'Look, I just want you to know that I was so hurt you didn't make the squad. You were clearly the best cheerleader there... Everybody in the gym knew it. We need you to allow us to go down and speak on your behalf."
Perhaps ten years later, Stringer was coaching at Cheyney State, a historically black college which she took to the Final Four in 1982. At the beginning she had to drive the team bus: "I'd slow down but not enough to stop because we weren't sure [the bus was] going to start again, so my assistant would crane her neck out the window [at intersections] and yell, 'Vivian, keep going, no one's coming.'" (Could this be the origin of the Rutgers pressure defense?)
The NCAA fought against the application to sports of Title IX almost all the way through the 1970s, while the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women ran national tournaments for college ball. No wonder the AIAW got angry when they learned that the NCAA wanted to take the game over; they ran competing tournaments for a few years. But the NCAA had the money to grow the game further-- the AIAW did not.
If you read this blog regularly you won't learn much from Shattering the Glass about current teams and institutions, nor much about the WNBA-- the remarkable access here is to the past. But that past is still evident, for example, in the structure of the institutions that now support women's hoops, and in what those institutions have done, or not done, to remedy their history of neglect.
Donna Lopiano, who now runs the Women's Sports Foundation, made an enormous impact as director of women's athletics at the University of Texas, which hired her to that new post in 1974. (It was Lopiano who hired Jody Conradt in 1976.)
Lopiano told the authors: "I stayed in sport because I had been denied the chance to play Little League. I always regretted that I never got a chance to see how good I could have been pitching a baseball."
How many other departments, programs, conferences, leagues, took shape-- or didn't take shape-- because an inspired woman had earlier been denied something that she deserved? And how many more now depend on Title IX?
It's not quite an oral history, but it's based on what seem like thousands of interviews, and its great strengths involve coverage of the game in decades when it was hard to document, but from which living participants still remain-- roughly, from the Depression to the early Eighties.
It's illuminating on earlier periods, too: I learned, for example, that Berenson's father was a Jewish immigrant who began as a street peddler, and that her brother was the extraordinarily influential art collector Bernard Berenson, who all but told the Metropolitan Museum in New York what Italian paintings to buy.
Something else I didn't know, though it's no surprise: black Philadelphia in the 1930s was the center of a competitive adults' game just as exciting as anything played in the better-documented industrial and rec leagues of the upper South.
All good stories have not just heroes, but blocking agents, villains (sometimes well-intentioned) who get in the way. If the heroes are players and coaches who advanced the game, encouraging competitive girls and women to develop their talents and pursue their hopes, the principal blocking agents-- from the start of the century right up until the early 1970s-- were "physical educators," many or most of them women, who considered exercise good, but competition bad-- they didn't like games that made talent stand out. Instead the physical educators promoted school-wide "play days," where everyone got a workout, but nobody won.
The authors make clear that West Texas hoops success in the Fifties and Sixties has something to do with the big crowds Texas Tech draws today. They might have said more about what-- and who-- the game inherited from the postwar industrial-league era. Is Pat (Head) Summitt related to John Head, who coached the Nashville Business College teams of the 1950s, on which Sue Gunter played? Is N.C. State coach Kay Yow related to Virgil Yow, whose Hanes Hosiery teams dominated North Carolina just after the Second World War?
Some of the people the authors interviewed were pre-NCAA players who did not succeed in coaching careers. You've probably never heard of them, which is too bad: let us know if you ever saw Nera White play.
Other pre-NCAA players, of course, became prominent. My favorite anecdotes come from C. Vivian Stringer, whose high school had no girls' sports-- so she tried out for cheerleading. The school had both black and white students, but the cheer squad had only white kids. After Stringer failed to make cheerleader, the NAACP sent a rep to her house:
"I was upstairs doing my homework, and my father called me downstairs. The man said 'Look, I just want you to know that I was so hurt you didn't make the squad. You were clearly the best cheerleader there... Everybody in the gym knew it. We need you to allow us to go down and speak on your behalf."
Perhaps ten years later, Stringer was coaching at Cheyney State, a historically black college which she took to the Final Four in 1982. At the beginning she had to drive the team bus: "I'd slow down but not enough to stop because we weren't sure [the bus was] going to start again, so my assistant would crane her neck out the window [at intersections] and yell, 'Vivian, keep going, no one's coming.'" (Could this be the origin of the Rutgers pressure defense?)
The NCAA fought against the application to sports of Title IX almost all the way through the 1970s, while the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women ran national tournaments for college ball. No wonder the AIAW got angry when they learned that the NCAA wanted to take the game over; they ran competing tournaments for a few years. But the NCAA had the money to grow the game further-- the AIAW did not.
If you read this blog regularly you won't learn much from Shattering the Glass about current teams and institutions, nor much about the WNBA-- the remarkable access here is to the past. But that past is still evident, for example, in the structure of the institutions that now support women's hoops, and in what those institutions have done, or not done, to remedy their history of neglect.
Donna Lopiano, who now runs the Women's Sports Foundation, made an enormous impact as director of women's athletics at the University of Texas, which hired her to that new post in 1974. (It was Lopiano who hired Jody Conradt in 1976.)
Lopiano told the authors: "I stayed in sport because I had been denied the chance to play Little League. I always regretted that I never got a chance to see how good I could have been pitching a baseball."
How many other departments, programs, conferences, leagues, took shape-- or didn't take shape-- because an inspired woman had earlier been denied something that she deserved? And how many more now depend on Title IX?
posted by Jessie B at 2:16 PM
