IMMACULATA MIGHTY MACS UNIFORM
Made of wool, worn with bloomers, and accessorized with a rope-like sash, these uniforms were considered hideous even in the early 1970s, when most fashion was hideous. Plus, they itched. But however old-fashioned their kit, the Immaculata College Mighty Macs were anything but quaint on the basketball court. They won the first three women’s national basketball championships (1972–1974), then went to two straight finals (in polyester skirts and tops) and a Final Four (in shorts).
It was a different time, and not just because today’s players don’t wear uniforms almost as old as they are.1 Elite hoopsters also don’t have to sell toothbrushes to raise money to get to the finals, as Immaculata did. And when a team repeats as champions, it gets a little more notice than the single paragraph the New York Times offered in 1973. (Most newspapers chose not to waste even that much ink on a bunch of girls.) The tunic in these photos, then, is not just an artifact; it is also a reminder of how far women’s sports has come.
That the first national champion came from a Catholic liberal arts college near Philly shouldn’t come as a surprise. Philadelphia had a dense network of single-sex parochial schools, almost all of which fielded hoops teams for both boys and girls. As early as the 1920s, nice Catholic girls were encouraged to play ball. In official games, they had to play the turgid, six-a-side, two-dribble, stay-in-your-zone game designed to “protect” them from exertion. But they also played the real thing in parks, recreation centers, and driveways, often against boys. Catholic parents might not have approved if their girls took to shot-putting or rugby, but they loved basketball. On Friday nights girls routinely played before packed houses, and the high-school championships sold out Penn’s famous Palestra arena.2
Immaculata benefited from this tradition. The small women’s school, run by the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM), had fielded varsity hoops teams since 1939. And that, too, is not surprising. Women’s schools were much more likely to field teams and to treat athletes with respect; they are the unsung heroes who kept college sports going. “We were encouraged to believe that anything was possible,” recalled the Macs nifty point guard, Marianne Crawford Stanley.3
The same could not be said of many, perhaps any, coed schools. When it came to sports, the men simply would not share the sandbox. Well into the 1970s, it was not unusual for them to hog 99 percent of the athletic budget.4 At the University of Washington, men’s sports got $1.3 million; the women’s, $18,000.5 At Arkansas, the calculation was simpler: $2.5 million for men, zero for women.6 Sports Illustrated estimated in 1973 that in the entire country, women accounted for fewer than 50 athletic scholarships—less than the number allotted to a single Division I football team.7 And then there were the small daily humiliations and inequities: not having a trainer, or being kicked out of the gym, or having to panhandle for travel money.8
Things began to improve in the early 1970s. In 1971, having been ignored by the National Collegiate Athletic Association forever, a group of female educators organized the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women in 1971. The AIAW ran on a tiny budget, but it did its best, and in 1972 it arranged the first national basketball championship;9 after regional qualifying rounds, there would be a 16-team final tournament at Illinois State.
The timing was fortuitous; the five-on-five game had become standard only a year earlier, after a research study confirmed that playing full court posed no health risks to women.10 Really. Immaculata’s Cathy Rush, hired as a part-time coach in 1970 for $450, seized the moment. At the time, the Macs didn’t even have a gym; their court had burned down, and the nuns were still raising money to replace it. But the Macs had some seriously good players, schooled on the Philly playgrounds. Also, the 22-year-old Rush was married to a National Basketball Association referee and conversant with the full-court game. She drilled her players in a fast-break offense and a trapping, tenacious defense.11
When the Macs made it through the regionals, the school was both delighted and dismayed: it didn’t have the cash to send them to Illinois. So the players sold toothbrushes to raise money;12 other clubs at the school chipped in what they could, and the college scraped together some cash, too. Even so, there was only enough to send eight players. They shared two rooms and washed their uniforms in the sink between games.13 The Macs were seeded fifteenth out of 16 teams. But they beat South Dakota State, Indiana State, and then top-seeded Mississippi College for Women to reach the finals—against their rival and neighbor, West Chester State. The Golden Rams had thumped the Macs, 70–38, two weeks earlier. But this time the Macs played a patient, sure-handed game, and won, 52–48. When they arrived home—a Catholic benefactor flew them back first class because they missed their original flight—almost the entire school was waiting for them at the airport.
After winning national titles again in 1973 and 1974, the little school with the big game became a phenomenon. The Macs were the first women’s college team to play internationally (in Australia, in 1974); the first to play in a nationally televised women’s game (against Maryland, in 1975); and the first to play at Madison Square Garden (against Queens, in 1975), drawing 12,000 spectators.
Much of the credit for Immaculata’s aura must go to the nuns. The president of the school in 1972, Sister Mary of Lourdes, a former Philly high school star herself, would shoot around with the Macs on occasion and always found a way to get the team what it needed. The old and sick nuns who lived in a home on campus had the games piped in. If the Macs were losing, an announcement would go out, “Sisters, the Mighty Macs are in trouble!” And they would take to their walkers and wheelchairs, and hustle as well as they could to the chapel.14
A cohort of nuns attended every game, clustered near the floor in their dark blue-and-white habits. They were not always images of serene grace. The father of one of the players handed out metal buckets and sticks, which the nuns would bang with such religious fervor that they were eventually banned (the buckets, not the nuns). The sisters didn’t trash talk, but they did visibly deploy their rosary beads, which might have been more intimidating. And they had game. A sportswriter was stunned during a tense moment when he heard a sister shout, “Watch the pick and roll!”15 The whole thing was irresistible.
And doomed. In 1972 a part of the education bill known as Title IX stated, in effect, that schools that took federal money had to accommodate the interests of all students, even those who lacked a Y chromosome. This didn’t mean spending had to be equal; it did mean that women had to get a fair share of time, money, and other kinds of support—something more than 1 percent, or zero.
Over time Title IX has evolved, due to legal challenges and new interpretations. In the process, it has become more complicated, and more controversial, than it needs to be. As written, the rule was not meant to impose quotas. But it is also true that the surest way to stay out of court is to keep a keen eye on the numbers. If a school has, say, 45 percent female students, and 45 percent of its athletes are also women, then compliance is assumed. As a federal judge put it in a landmark case regarding Brown University, “a university which does not wish to engage in extensive compliance analysis may stay on the sunny side of Title IX simply by maintaining gender parity between its student body and its athletic lineup.”16 As part of its settlement, Brown University was required to deviate no more than 3.5 percentage points between female students and female varsity athletes.17
The problem is that the use of such metrics has led to unintended consequences, in which the need for compliance has trumped equity and even common sense. In one famous example, in 2001 Marquette cut its wrestling team—which cost the school nothing, because it was funded by outside sources—in order to hew closer to the right gender proportionality.18 The action closed athletic opportunities for Marquette men while creating no new ones for women, a lose-lose situation that was not unique.19
These are real issues, but they are also narrow ones. Title IX is the single most important and positive thing that has ever happened to women’s sports in the United States. In 1970 there were only 16,000 female college athletes; by 2012, there were more than 200,000. The figures for high school are just as dramatic, from 294,015 girls playing sports in 1971 to almost 3.2 million in 2012.
In a larger sense, Title IX helped to make it socially acceptable for girls to be competitive and athletic—to take pride in their bodies for their function as well their looks. In 1932 Babe Didrikson Zaharias’s muscles were considered off-putting, even freakish. In 1999, when Brandi Chastain ripped off her shirt at the end of the 1999 World Cup (see entry) to reveal her stellar abs, her physique was celebrated.
While Title IX greatly accelerated the pace of change, it’s not as if women were waiting around for the men in Congress to give them permission to play. Even before Title IX, many were getting involved in sports, and the AIAW was working to raise the level of competition. Ironically, then, the NCAA, which fought against Title IX bitterly, ultimately benefited from it. The AIWA, which fought for Title IX, was destroyed by it. Once women’s sports gained traction, the NCAA became interested and put the squeeze on the AIAW, which was gone by 1982.
The women of the AIAW had been trying, sometimes awkwardly, to develop a different model of sports—more participatory, less exploitive, more student-centered, and run by and for women—that would not replicate the mistakes of the NCAA.20 They might not have succeeded. Still, it’s a shame they never got the chance.
Title IX also spelled the end of schools like Immaculata as national powers. In 1977 Cathy Rush retired with a career record of 149–15; in 1978 UCLA won the national championship, ushering in the era of big-school dominance. The nuns gave in. “We do not want an image of a sports college,”21 President Sister Marie Antoine said. Knowing it could not compete with bigger, richer universities, Immaculata wisely decided not to try. Today, the school competes in Division III. But the Macs are not forgotten. In 2008 Cathy Rush was elected to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, and Immaculata, as a team, joined her in 2014.
How good were the Mighty Macs? Well, they would certainly be creamed by any Division I program. Compared to today’s top teams, the Macs’ perimeter shooting was not as precise; their play was slower and less sophisticated. But forget the temptation to patronize these working-class Catholic girls in the funny tunics: the Macs were good. One player at the 1972 tournament recalled seeing the Macs for the first time and marveling at the skills of these “fast, sharp-eyed, hard-elbowed easterners.” That was Pat Summitt, who would go on to lead Tennessee’s women to eight national championships (see 1995/2009 entry).
A number of Macs stayed with the sport after graduation and helped it grow. Marianne Crawford Stanley coached Old Dominion to three national titles and also coached at the University of Southern California, the University of California/Berkeley, and in the Women’s National Basketball Association. Rene Muth Portland coached Penn State for 27 years. Teresa Shank Grentz, once described by Sports Illustrated as the “Bill Walton of the East,” coached the US national team to a bronze medal in the 1992 Olympics. One of her players was Muffet McGraw, now the women’s coach at Notre Dame. Tina Krah directs the women’s national championship tournament for the NCAA.
In her Hall of Fame induction speech, Cathy Rush recalled that she told her mother of her Immaculata teams, “These girls start with a prayer, and then play like hell.”22 The nuns would have approved.