by Susan Ware
The 1970s also represented the peak of tennis’s popularity, a factor that goes a long way to explaining the opportunities Billie Jean King both seized and created at the height of her career. In the peak year of 1974, some 41 million Americans played the game, competing for court time at their local public parks or clubs as well as fueling consumer demand for rackets, tennis shoes, and clothes. Tennis tournaments such as the U.S. Open became big draws, both for spectators and the impressive television revenues they generated. Tennis stars such as Billie Jean King, Jimmy Connors, and Arthur Ashe commanded attention in popular culture commensurate with football and baseball stars. For a sport that had until recently been associated solely with stodgy country-club ways, this was a huge breakthrough.40
All this activity gave a sense of rapid change, tempered, as always, by HEW’S foot dragging as it debated how to implement Title IX in late 1973 and early 1974. Despite the stalling in Washington, the momentum really seemed to be with women. As sports activist Jan Felshin was quoted in Sports Illustrated in 1974, “The day is over when you can tell women who want to take part in athletics, ‘Go away, we haven't room. Men are using all the equipment and fields.’ “By 1978, Joan Warrington, executive secretary of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, could assert, “Women no longer feel that taking part in athletics is a privilege. They believe it is a right.”41
The AIAW, which went into operation in 1972 just as women's sports began to explode, found itself functioning in an exciting but challenging environment, one not always of its own choosing. Before, women's sports had been a backwater, of little interest except to those in the phys ed department. Now women athletes were players, literally. All the changes underway proved quite unsettling, both for the student athletes and especially for the educators who had spent most of their careers dedicated to a participation-based ethos that set itself deliberately at odds with the prevailing male model of sport. In part this was a generational issue—younger, more political (although not necessarily feminist)42 activists all hopped up about the exciting new opportunities for women's sports versus an old guard wedded to the status quo, inadequate as it was. The differences were as much philosophical as generational, and they manifested themselves first over the issue of athletic scholarships 43
Why would physical education leaders be opposed to scholarships for their students? To their minds giving a student a scholarship based on athletic ability undercut the real reason that students should be coming to college in the first place: to get an education, not to play on a team. Giving female athletes scholarships, they feared, would mean aping a male model based on competition and winning that put the needs of the institution above the needs of the student athlete. So strongly did the AIAW believe in their antischolarship stand that they initially barred any school that offered athletic scholarships (a tiny number in the early 1970s, but there were some) from competing in their national championships.44
Female students had different ideas. If their brothers could qualify for athletic scholarships, why couldn't they? Wasn't it patronizing to be told that accepting scholarship money in return for playing a sport would corrupt or demean them? Why shouldn't they be able to make that choice for themselves? Even within the AIAW there was hearty debate over whether scholarships were okay: “That kind of thinking—the kind that says ‘if you give a girl an athletic scholarship, she'll be tainted’—has held back women's athletics too long,” reasoned one proponent of change.45
At first the prohibition against scholarships held, but then in February 1973 tennis players at Marymount College and Broward Community College in Florida went to court to challenge the rule. The Kellmeyer case never went to trial, but it accomplished its purpose. Within months, the AIAW reluctantly withdrew its ban. In retrospect, this change was inevitable. Even if students hadn't sued, denying women access to scholarships that men received would surely have been deemed illegal under Title IX, one of the few clear-cut issues in the otherwise murky field of athletics.46
The issue of recruiting proved just as troubling to the AIAW. Recruiting excesses in men’s athletics were well documented; when they started to happen in women's sports, educators and parents were appalled. The father of a six-foot-tall high school volleyball star compared recruiting to runaway inflation, noting that his daughter had been offered scholarships to seven colleges without anyone even asking about her grades. “Do you think anybody really cares about my kid?” he asked. “They never talked about anything but the volleyball program.” On the other side of the equation, longtime physical education leaders were appalled at the entitled attitudes of recruits who basically demanded, “What can you give me if I decide on your school?” “That really bothers me,” said Nancy O’Connor, head swimming coach at Colorado State University, in 1976. “I know that’s being naive, but you’d like to see people doing things for the love of it.” Reflecting its ambivalence, the AIAW adopted a complicated set of restrictions designed to put steep limits on scouting and recruiting while also grudgingly admitting that these practices were going to take place.47
The AIAW transfer policy, which allowed students to transfer to another school without sitting out a year of sports eligibility like the NCAA demanded, also became progressively out of sync with the increasingly competitive world of college athletics. Its justification was noble: the right of a student to seek out a better education. But the transfer rule was ripe for abuse as coaches and administrators attempted to lure female athletes with promises of larger programs and more resources without any cost or penalty to either the school or the athlete. In part this was a straightforward example of supply and demand: the supply of gifted female collegiate athletes in the 1970s was far smaller than the needs of a range of institutions committed to building up their women's programs in response to Title IX. It was also an unexpected byproduct of the new focus on winning as the justification for all the resources institutions were redirecting toward women's sports. “I’d be dumb to say I wasn't supposed to produce winning teams,” said Judith Holland, director of women's intercollegiate athletics at UCLA, in 1976. As big schools stepped up their recruiting, scholarships, and commitment to building successful (i.e., winning) women's programs, smaller schools felt the squeeze.48
Within just a few years of the founding of the AIAW, therefore, spurred in part by Title IX and in part by broader changes in the field of sports, a governance model that tried to chart a separate path from the prevailing model of sports organization was already proving itself ill suited to the new demands of the 1970s. Ironically, when the AIAW made a commitment to support Title IX, many of the steps that the organization took to comply with the law, such as sanctioning athletic scholarships and allowing recruiting, moved it further along the slippery slope of accepting a competitive model of sports instead of its woman-centered, women-led approach. As Cal Papatsos of Brooklyn College told Sports Illustrated in 1978, “When Title IX came along we had to take the whole bag, and that started the dilemma. Men were getting blazers, so we wanted them too. Women are no different from men when it comes to handling power. When we get it, the same negatives will apply.”49
Sports Illustrated summed up the philosophical split in the AIAW in this way: “The problem is that half of the AIAW membership wants to run a sophisticated physical-education program for college women; the other half wants to get involved in the business of big-time sports.” In a period of explosive growth and under pressure to conform to the dominant athletic model, many women's programs began to look and act a lot like men’s, even before the NCAA formally took over the governance of women's collegiate sports in the early 1980s. “It’s funny,” observed Judith Sweet, athletic director at the University of California, San Diego, in 1977. “Before Title IX, women were saying they never wanted their athletic programs to be like men’s. They were not going to stumble into those pitfalls. They didn't want that grind, all those pressures. Suddenly, because of federal legislation, they’re doing exactly what the men did.” Nowhere
were these changes more evident that in the field of women's basketball.50
FROM THE 1890s, when Senda Berenson introduced the sport to her students at Smith, to the present, basketball has been the most popular sport played by women and girls. Even though the history of the game now spans more than a century, its story, at least where women are concerned, is hardly one of linear progress. As such, it offers a window on the history of women's sports before and after the passage of Title IX.51
As was common with many other sports, rules were developed for basketball to make it acceptable—that is, less strenuous, sweaty, and rough—for the supposedly weaker, more excitable sex. Berenson divided the court into three sections, to which players were restricted; contact was banned, and dribbling limited. In 1936 most schools switched to a two-court, six-player format, but this still made for a slow, plodding game with a lot of standing around while the action was in the other half of the court. In 1962 a roving forward was allowed to cover the entire court, and in 1966 unlimited dribbling added. Finally between 1969 and 1971, the five-player men’s game prevailed. These restrictions were done in the name of protecting women from undue exertion and competition, but they could not take away the sheer pleasure that many girls and women got from the game. Novelist Caryl Rivers, who played Catholic Youth Organization basketball in the 1950s, boasted: “If you have played basketball—really played it with pride and passion—you can never really be docile again.”52
Basketball proved a popular sport in many schools and communities, both white and African American. It was much cheaper for a community or school to support than football, was open to both sexes, and did not place too many demands on gymnasium space. In the 1920s thirty-six states had high school tournaments for girls, and many colleges also fielded teams, including historically black colleges in the South. Reflecting her school’s insistence on proper etiquette for African American young women, one Bennett College player from the 1930s remembered, “We were ladies too,” before adding subversively, “We just played basketball like boys.” Even such subterfuges were not always enough in the anticompetition atmosphere of the 1920s and 1930s. For example, educators concerned that basketball was “too strenuous for young ladies” decided to shut down the program entirely at Delta State in Cleveland, Mississippi, in 1933. “We cried and burned our uniforms,” remembered Delta State player Margaret Wade, “but there was nothing else we could do.” Delta State did not reinstate women's basketball until 1973.53
With the college game under attack in the interwar period, the only way for most skilled players to keep playing after high school was AAU competition, which added a national basketball tournament in 1926. According to historian Robert W. Ikard, the AAU is the missing link in the history of basketball between Senda Berenson and her physical education students at the turn of the century and the revitalization of the game from the 1970s on because of Title iX.54
Most of the women competing in AAU events played on industrial teams sponsored by their employers. These teams were especially popular in the South and Texas in the 1940s and 1950s, where they provided cheap and wholesome entertainment for small towns and communities in the days before television. The powerhouses of the game—such as Nashville Business College (NBC) from Tennessee or the Hanes Hosiery team from Winston-Salem, North Carolina—became legendary for their domination of the game and the skill of their players; many consider NBC’S Nera White the finest all-round female basketball player ever. Even though many of these women played pickup games using the full-court, five-player format, the AAU still fielded six-person teams. Remembered Hanes star Eunie Futch: “I would have given anything to play men’s rules. But the people over in Greensboro [professional educators] said it was too hard on us.”55
In the 1950s and early 1960s, a time which two historians of women's basketball call “a dark age” for the sport, AAU basketball was practically the only game in town. Perennial contender Hanes Hosiery disbanded its team in 1954, which left Nashville Business College as the dominant force. Then for the first time a four-year-college team, the Wayland Flying Queens, challenged in the AAU. (Remember there were no national collegiate championships until the CIAW and AIAW began offering them.) Wayland Baptist College in Plainview, Texas, was not your usual college team. The players, lavishly backed by prosperous local business leader and Wayland alum Claude Hutcherson and his wife, Wilda, traveled by private Beech-craft airplanes (hence their name), attended school on scholarships, wore spiffy blazers and matching skirts off the court, and were literally treated like queens. Starting in 1954, they won the first of their seven national championships.56
Teams such as the Wayland Flying Queens and National Business College also provided the majority of players for the international competitions that began in 1953. Playing in South America or Europe was a wonderful dream for many small-town girls, but the U.S. teams were hampered by lack of support and the difficulties of switching to a full-court game. Just as in the Olympics, which added women's basketball in 1976, a Cold War desire for American women to hold their own against foreign, especially Soviet bloc, competition, worked in favor of changes on the homefront.57
The one place where girls’ basketball truly flourished was the state of Iowa, a shining beacon of what can happen when girls’ sports are given the same kind of community encouragement and support as boys’. Iowa girls’ basketball was like Friday Night Football in Texas. When sportswriter and broadcaster Heywood Hale Broun was asked to describe the most exciting sporting event he had ever covered, he chose not the Kentucky Derby or the World Series or the Super Bowl but the Iowa girls’ state basketball championship.58
Even in Iowa, girls’ basketball faced challenges that almost killed it. When female educators called for the abolition of the increasingly popular girls’ tournament in 1925, dissenting schools decided to form their own organization, the Iowa Girls’ High School Athletic Union (IGHSAU). Why did basketball do so well in Iowa over the next five decades while it declined elsewhere? Having its own organization was critical, especially under the farsighted leadership of its longtime director, E. Wayne Cooley. So too was the generally rural nature of Iowa: basketball flourished in small towns and communities, plus Iowa girls were used to hard labor on the farm, so questions about the strenuousness of the game were moot. In fact, the girls’ tournament consistently outdrew the boys’. In the often-quoted baseline pre-Title IX figure of 294,000 female high school athletes throughout the country in 1970–71, 20 percent of them were from the state of Iowa alone! Bucking the national trend, Iowa kept the six-player game until the 1993–94 season.59
As the rest of the country abandoned girls’ rules, the AIAW came into existence. For the first three years, 1972–74, the AIAW national basketball title was won by the Mighty Macs of Immaculata College, a small Catholic girls’ school outside Philadelphia. Girls who went to Immaculata weren't recruited, they didn't get scholarships, and they didn't play in a fancy gymnasium; the nuns banged buckets in the stands to cheer them on and their part-time coach, Cathy Rush, was paid $450 a year. But the players were competitive and talented, and they loved the game. In 1972 the Mighty Macs almost could not go to the inaugural national tournament in Normal, Illinois, for lack of money—there wasn't time to drive, and flying was too expensive. So players sold toothbrushes to raise money; college trustees each adopted a player; and finally they scraped together enough to fly eight players (less than their full roster) and their coach—standby. When they won the tournament by defeating their crosstown rival, West Chester State, the president of the college told them to fly home first-class, no matter what the cost. They repeated as champions the next two years.60
In 1975 the AIAW crowned a new champion, Delta State, which beat Immaculata in the finals. What a sweet victory for Delta State’s coach, the same Margaret Wade who had burned her uniform in protest when the school shut down her program in the 1930s. “The ball is still round,” observed Wade. “I guess that’s about all that’s the same as it was in my p
laying days.” Showing yet another sign of change, the Mississippi team included both white and black players (Wade’s teammates in the 1930s had all been white), including the talented Lusia Harris. Delta State repeated as champions the next two years.61
By the mid-1970s, however, the days of a small college winning a national title were fast receding, in large part because of changes brought about by Title IX. Said one Immaculata starter, “It was a very narrow window. I mean, you could see it. You knew it was going to change and it did.” As larger college programs began to beef up their women's offerings, largely in response to Title IX, the popular sport of basketball was an obvious place to start. Once the AIAW rescinded its ban on athletic scholarships in 1973, schools could aggressively recruit high school standouts or transfer students. In 1974 Ann Meyers, the younger sister of a male UCLA basketball star, became the first woman to win a full athletic scholarship to the school. In 1978, UCLA won the national title, the first time that a large school was victorious. Never again would schools like Delta State, West Chester, Queens College, or Immaculata contend for the title.62
By now women's basketball was well launched on its journey as the success story of the new women's athletics. In January 1975 the first televised women's basketball game saw Immaculata beat Maryland, the same year Immaculata and Queens College filled Madison Square Garden for a closely contested match.63 Coverage of the 1976 women's basketball silver medal team at the Montreal Olympics also boosted the sport’s profile. Rivaling the records of legendary coaches such as John Wooden at UCLA, the seeds of new female dynasties were being laid: in 1974 Pat Head Summit, age twenty-two, took over the program at the University of Tennessee and started her historic rise to prominence as the highest-paid women's coach in history, and the first to crack the million-dollar salary barrier in 2006.64 As far back as the 1970s, the women's game was already beginning to mimic the men’s in terms of level of play, exposure, and fan support, but also in things such as recruitment scandals, declining opportunities for female coaches, and the like. After all, this was what women wanted from Title IX, right? Or was it?