Twenty years before the WNBA came the first national attempt at a women's pro basketball league in the United States: the Women's Professional Basketball League, or WBL, launched with eight teams in 1978, expanded to fourteen in 1979, and folded amid hard feelings and unpaid bills after the 1980-81 season. Some of its players and coaches-- Donna Orender, Nancy Lieberman, Muffet McGraw, Doug Bruno, Greg Williams, Anne Meyers, Carol Blazejowski-- remain prominent. Most-- along with their stories-- are now obscure.
They won't be if everyone reads Karra Porter's Mad Seasons, an exhaustively researched, mostly reverent, occasionally plodding, but mostly memorable account of the WBL's three-and-a-half-year ride. It's a book that meets the standards of academic historians (and of a pretty good university press), and a book that people who read this blog a lot will probably like to read (or, hey, to receive as a holiday gift). (Porter spoke with Kim Callahan about her labors; Callahan also put online three chapters cut from the print book for reasons of space.)
Porter, a Utah lawyer, presumably knows something about how it feels to have your team disappear: if her book has a through-line, a single question the chapters and anecdotes attempt to answer, it's simply Why did the WBL fold? Most of the answers should reassure WNBA fans.
One reason: the college game wasn't big enough to create a national audience for the pros. Another: the 1980 Olympic boycott, which prevented national exposure for that year's crop of USA stars. Though the Chicago Hustle drew crowds, most teams did not.
The biggest reason, by far, for eventual failure: the league, as a league, had neither the financial strength, nor the leadership abilities, to become self-sustaining, offer good advice, train new owners, or prop up weak teams. Especially after the first year, Bill Byrne and his peers (who later fired him) accepted franchise fees from local entrepreneurs who came in with unrealistic hopes, then couldn't make payroll when those hopes didn't pan out.
Whole teams, like the 1979 Washington Metros and the 1980-81 New England Gulls, went months without getting paid; "more than half of the WBL players experienced no pay or slow pay," and many held down second jobs during the season for groceries or rent. "Most of the men willing to take a chance on a WBL team did not have the financial ability to withstand the early years of huge losses"; the league office didn't, perhaps couldn't, help.
Nor could the WBL consistently recruit, maintain and pay the nonathletes-- scoreboard operators, officials, PR folks-- who create the conditions under which pro athletes should play. One 1980 game's play-by-play sheet warned "due to scoreboard errors, score is not totally accurate." Teams had their own travel standards; many rode intercity buses, though the San Francisco Pioneers (co-owned by Alan Alda) flew to their games. The Houston Angels, who won it all in their first year, once had to practice in a high school gym because their normal facility turfed them out for nonpayment.
Porter excerpts a 1981 report explaining what the WBL needed: "strong centralized league leadership"; "avoid expanding into new markets at the expense of the talent pool"; "balanced ownership" (that is, don't sell franchises to folks who can't afford to run them); commitment to consistent live, in-arena experience; and "non-gate sources of revenue" such as sponsorships, marketed and sold out of league HQ. The WNBA has at least three, maybe five; the WBL, by the end, had none.
Some of the discourse around the league's first season will sound familiar to WNBA fans; other controversies show how far we've come. Many WBL players "had never been coached by men, or by coaches who raised their voices." Owners "worried about how pretty their people were," and sometimes promoted (mostly white) sex symbols over (often black) superior athletes. The California Dreams sent players to charm school; the Iowa Cornets got mileage from a poster of Machine Gun Molly Bolin, who should be remembered for her scoring prowess, and for her later role in an important divorce case.
The most surprising parts of the book tell stories of individual players (such as Bolin), even stories of individual games... and of the game ball. The now-standard women's collegiate and pro ball came into existence as a result of the WBL, in part because Wilson Sporting Goods wanted the sales.
There are scary stories: those about murdered Nebraska star Connie Kunzmann, and mentally ill Canadian scorer Liz Silcott. There are comically awful ones-- some say the league's fate was sealed the night the Minnesota Fillies refused to take the court unless they were paid. And then there are the dozens of women with whom Porter spoke, who loved-- for a month or a year or three-- the chance to get in the record books and play the game.
They won't be if everyone reads Karra Porter's Mad Seasons, an exhaustively researched, mostly reverent, occasionally plodding, but mostly memorable account of the WBL's three-and-a-half-year ride. It's a book that meets the standards of academic historians (and of a pretty good university press), and a book that people who read this blog a lot will probably like to read (or, hey, to receive as a holiday gift). (Porter spoke with Kim Callahan about her labors; Callahan also put online three chapters cut from the print book for reasons of space.)
Porter, a Utah lawyer, presumably knows something about how it feels to have your team disappear: if her book has a through-line, a single question the chapters and anecdotes attempt to answer, it's simply Why did the WBL fold? Most of the answers should reassure WNBA fans.
One reason: the college game wasn't big enough to create a national audience for the pros. Another: the 1980 Olympic boycott, which prevented national exposure for that year's crop of USA stars. Though the Chicago Hustle drew crowds, most teams did not.
The biggest reason, by far, for eventual failure: the league, as a league, had neither the financial strength, nor the leadership abilities, to become self-sustaining, offer good advice, train new owners, or prop up weak teams. Especially after the first year, Bill Byrne and his peers (who later fired him) accepted franchise fees from local entrepreneurs who came in with unrealistic hopes, then couldn't make payroll when those hopes didn't pan out.
Whole teams, like the 1979 Washington Metros and the 1980-81 New England Gulls, went months without getting paid; "more than half of the WBL players experienced no pay or slow pay," and many held down second jobs during the season for groceries or rent. "Most of the men willing to take a chance on a WBL team did not have the financial ability to withstand the early years of huge losses"; the league office didn't, perhaps couldn't, help.
Nor could the WBL consistently recruit, maintain and pay the nonathletes-- scoreboard operators, officials, PR folks-- who create the conditions under which pro athletes should play. One 1980 game's play-by-play sheet warned "due to scoreboard errors, score is not totally accurate." Teams had their own travel standards; many rode intercity buses, though the San Francisco Pioneers (co-owned by Alan Alda) flew to their games. The Houston Angels, who won it all in their first year, once had to practice in a high school gym because their normal facility turfed them out for nonpayment.
Porter excerpts a 1981 report explaining what the WBL needed: "strong centralized league leadership"; "avoid expanding into new markets at the expense of the talent pool"; "balanced ownership" (that is, don't sell franchises to folks who can't afford to run them); commitment to consistent live, in-arena experience; and "non-gate sources of revenue" such as sponsorships, marketed and sold out of league HQ. The WNBA has at least three, maybe five; the WBL, by the end, had none.
Some of the discourse around the league's first season will sound familiar to WNBA fans; other controversies show how far we've come. Many WBL players "had never been coached by men, or by coaches who raised their voices." Owners "worried about how pretty their people were," and sometimes promoted (mostly white) sex symbols over (often black) superior athletes. The California Dreams sent players to charm school; the Iowa Cornets got mileage from a poster of Machine Gun Molly Bolin, who should be remembered for her scoring prowess, and for her later role in an important divorce case.
The most surprising parts of the book tell stories of individual players (such as Bolin), even stories of individual games... and of the game ball. The now-standard women's collegiate and pro ball came into existence as a result of the WBL, in part because Wilson Sporting Goods wanted the sales.
There are scary stories: those about murdered Nebraska star Connie Kunzmann, and mentally ill Canadian scorer Liz Silcott. There are comically awful ones-- some say the league's fate was sealed the night the Minnesota Fillies refused to take the court unless they were paid. And then there are the dozens of women with whom Porter spoke, who loved-- for a month or a year or three-- the chance to get in the record books and play the game.
posted by Jessie B at 2:07 AM
