Book Excerpts: Hail Mary- The rise and fall of the National Women’s Football League

Why there is no female NFL. A book by Frankie de la Cretaz and Lyndsey D'Arcangelo.

(This is not a book review. Think of it as a collection of my highlights from this book, grouped thematically.)

One thing has always amazed me about the USA: It’s home to three of the biggest sports leagues in the world. And two of those leagues, the NFL and MLB, don’t have any women’s equivalents. This despite the USA being a country where liberty and equality are buzzwords.

And so when I came across a book that described how in the 1970s, there was a women’s football league, how it bloomed, and (spoiler alert!) why it failed, it became a must-read.

A quick summary: 19 women’s football teams existed between 1972 and 1988. Some faded after a year or two, others lasted close to a decade, and some wrote themselves into legend, like the Toledo Troopers, the ‘winningest team in professional football history, men’s or women’s’. Most of these teams started independently, and when there were enough around at the same time, there were attempts to tie things together with a league. Attitudes towards women’s sport at the time, which determined participation, visibility and investment, are probably the biggest reason why those attempts eventually failed.

I’ve laboured through the book, taking over a year to finish it, partly because I have little affinity to American football as a sport, and partly because the characters in this book are unknown to me, and it’s hard to build a bond with an athlete only from pages on a book. Sport is only visceral for me when it is visual, a good reminder of why visibility is such a big part of the growth of a new sport, especially women’s sport.

But the themes the book explored were all too familiar, and I’ll recount a few of them here with excerpts from the book:

Policy drives progress: ‘Professional’ women’s football took hold shortly after the passage of Title IX in 1972 and Billie Jean King’s victory in the “Battle of the Sexes” in 1973. The NWFL debuted the following year.’

And the book paints a picture of what women’s sport was like before Title IX:

Before Title IX passed in 1972, women were only allowed to participate in limited athletic activities. Football was definitely not one of them. “We couldn’t do what the boys did,” Low recalled. “Even run a mile around the track—the boys ran and the girls had to walk. We were like, ‘What’s wrong with us?’”

There are reports of ‘a handful of women’s football teams popping up throughout the 1930s in different parts of the country. Two teams in Ohio butted heads regularly in 1930 and 1931 and attracted a lot of national attention, until they got a letter from Lou Henry Hoover, the First Lady of the United States at the time. She complained that the team owners were exploiting womanhood, and things cooled off after that.

The book describes how Title IX created an attitude that is familiar today, a resentment in having to invest in both men’s and women’s sport.

At the time, the attitude on campus was that the women were taking something from the men. “By having to give [the women] equal money and equal sports,” in some people’s eyes “you’re taking something away from the men that was traditionally and rightfully theirs,”

Even by the ‘70s, was certainly an element of the exploitation the First Lady was worried about in the ‘30s: Some of the teams were born of the desire to create a curiosity, a spectacle, rather than for the love of women’s sport. This is how the book describes one of the promoters: He declared that he was starting a women’s football team that would compete against amateur and semipro men’s teams. And they’d do so around the country, in a must-see barnstorming tour for the ages.

But build it, and they will come. When invitations for tryouts started showing up, women who wanted to play, who were good athletes, turned up. Some students. Some mothers. Some wives. Some ‘stereotypically attractive’, who became the faces of the teams, the ones used by male owners to attract media for the owners to speak to. It’s an interesting dynamic: the photos of women to sell the team, the voice of men to legitimize it. Others who were too big, too black, too gay, to be welcomed into society otherwise.

The football field became a place of acceptance, love, and appreciation for women like Kelley who, as a large, Black woman, often felt ostracized and unwelcome in a society that held such staunch standards for how women should look, act, and live.

The media at the time didn’t find these dynamics very attractive for very long. The book is littered with recollections of how most media ignored this sport, and when they paid attention, reported on almost everything except the sport.

A 1974 story in the Fort-Worth Star Telegram called a game between the Shamrocks and Bluebonnets “a hen party with helmets, a gabfest with cleats.”

Paul Rowan wrote a decent recap of the contest, complete with quotes from players and some fans. But whatever good intentions he may have had in writing a respectful article, his words were sullied by a large, offensive editorial cartoon that was placed directly in the middle of it. The cartoon featured a voluptuous woman dressed in a tight-fitting football uniform, with her hair done up and makeup on her thin and pointy, seductive face, and the “measurements” 36-24-36 printed across her chest

The book also documents many well intentioned owners, some female, who poured a lot of their own money into their teams. But a sport without media attention struggles financially, and a lack of financial sustainability was the biggest reason the NWFL did not succeed.

Travel costs overall were a big financial impediment for the league. It cost the Dandelions almost twelve thousand dollars to bring the Bluebonnets to California for a game, which is why one time the teams decided to meet halfway and play in Albuquerque. And since it was far too expensive for the Dandelions to travel from Los Angeles halfway across the country to play the Troopers in Toledo, the Troopers—who averaged a paid attendance of thirty-five hundred to thirty-eight hundred fans—offered to help shoulder the cost of the trip. But it never happened.

But the book points out that financial challenges weren’t exclusive to women’s leagues of the time.

For example, the NFL began in 1920 and in the first decade of its existence, there were over forty teams. Ninety percent of those teams failed.

Owners have been willing to pour millions and millions of dollars into losing men’s teams year after year. Meanwhile, men have shown themselves unwilling to make the same kind of “losing” investment in women’s teams.

Where does this leave women’s football today? Fragmented, with multiple women’s football leagues in existence (don’t even get me started about the sickening, fortunately former, Lingerie Football League). The authors pointed out that this isn’t an uncommon situation in the history of sports leagues.

The NBA and the American Basketball Association (ABA) competed for market share, audience, sponsors, and players from 1967 until 1976, when four ABA teams finally joined the NBA to form one league. The NFL and the AFL operated separately for ten years from 1960 to 1970, when they merged together to form the football powerhouse the NFL is today. And when the WNBA officially launched in 1997, the American Basketball League (ABL) had already begun playing games in the fall of 1996. But with the weight of the NBA behind the WNBA, the ABL folded two years later, and the WNBA has been evolving and expanding ever since.

The football, the quality of it, the intensity, the technicalities, the violence (yes, there were fights!) is well covered in this book. It gives those games the historical coverage that they never got at the time. It tells the media and financial story, but also the human ones. Stories of women feeling like they belong, claiming agency, finding expression in a sport they may have played with their brothers growing up but never thought they’d get to play themselves, let alone somewhat professionally. There are a number of examples in the book that tell us that the women on the field were just there for the love of the game.

But when Eagan, who was quick to shave expenses, decided not to purchase medical insurance for his players, all four coaches quit the team in “protest and disgust” the night before their first game. The fact that the women were willing to play without insurance coverage indicates how badly they wanted to be out there, how deeply they understood what a rare opportunity they had.

The book has multiple examples of player power: the female players getting tired of being treated poorly, and taking matters, and teams, into their own hands.

One team, the Detroit Demons, were also independent of male ownership after rejecting Friedman’s vision for them: the team was owned by six players, and they employed five male coaches who said they were “proud” to work for the women.

Players of another team, the Columbus Pacesetters, did the same. The move by the Pacesetters to buy their own team fits into a larger theme of players trying desperately to self-determine.

I’ll end with this moment, which is a sign of success for those of us working in women’s sport:

One of the most memorable moments from Hoxie’s pro football career was when a little boy asked for her autograph. It has remained close to her heart all these years

Buy the book here.