SPORTS ILLUSTRATED 44The AIAW had a deal to televise its champi-
onship with NBC—until the network switched
sides. On March 28, 1982, it aired the NCAA
final. The Longhorns and Lady Knights game
was not televised.
The night before the game, Mary, Patty and
another local native, Jennie Hall, went to the
Finnegan playground in Southwest Philly for
old time’s sake. Mary ended up playing for two
hours. “I think it was my way of dealing with the
nervous energy,” says Mary. “Patty and Jennie
just watched like, You better not get hurt or Theresa
will kill you.”
The point guard came through unscathed, and
in the title game, Mary ran the show and Patty
dropped a career-high 30 points as Rutgers pulled
away late to win 83–77. The Lady Knights were
champs, and they didn’t care that it was of an
organization that would soon be defunct. “AIAW
had a lot of really good teams in it,” says Patty.
“You know, it wasn’t like chopped liver.”
No champagne f lowed, but the players had
the next best thing. “It was so hot and I was
just sweating like crazy, but walking back to the
hotel from the Palestra, I remember just meet-
ing up with friends and fans,” says Patty. “They
gave me a beer.” Later that night, Grentz took
the girls out to dinner at Bookbinder’s, a fancy
restaurant, where she and her husband put the
meal on three personal credit cards.
Before the Lady Knights left Philly, a couple
of players handled one last piece of business.
At the NCAA final in Norfolk, Va., they knew
that Louisiana Tech had beaten Cheyney State,
72–62. They also knew that it had been a grueling
year for the Cheyney coach, C. Vivian Stringer.
In November she and her husband, Bill, had
been told that their 1-year-old daughter, Janine,
had spinal meningitis. She would never walk or
talk and would require lifetime care. Stringer
spent many nights sleeping in Janine’s room at
the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, being
brought changes of clothes by an assistant coach.
The Rutgers players took a toy stuffed bear
and went to the Children’s Hospital to visit little
Janine and Bill Stringer, who had stayed home
while Vivian was with her team. “It’s the cama-
raderie, you know,” Grentz says of her players’
visit. “The camaraderie between the teams and
the women who were coaching—we had our own
sorority. We were there to take care of each other,
to support each other.”just feared women’s expenditures would cut into his budget, but that
didn’t matter to the AIAW crowd. “He wasn’t doing it for the right
reasons, but that was all right,” Iowa director of women’s athletics
Catherine Grant said years later. “We adopted him at that convention.”
The vote was a 124–124 tie. The recount showed that the nays had
won 128–127. As Lopiano and her victorious allies met with writers,
the pro-NCAA side came up with a plan. They realized that Cal had
voted no at the urging of its women’s athletic director. When she left
the room, the NCAA backers approached the Bears’ faculty athletics
representative and convinced him to introduce a motion to reconsider.
The motion passed, and a new vote was called. Sensing the shifting
winds, the delegates approved the measure by a count of 137–117. And
that brought about one of the great ironies of Title IX: It indirectly led
to women losing the authority to govern their own athletics.
Lopiano turned her attention to reforming the NCAA from within.
“Athletes don’t take their ball and go home,” she says. (She stayed at
Texas until 1992, leaving to head the Women’s Sports Foundation.)
But the AIAW had no choice but to go into what Lopiano calls “lawsuit
mode,” filing a futile antitrust suit against the NCAA as it planned
what turned out to be the last basketball tournament it would stage.T
HE 1982 AIAW final four featured a pair of regional
rivalries. Grentz’s Philly-heavy Lady Knights took on
Villanova in the semis, while the Longhorns played
Wayland Baptist, a small school in the Texas panhandle
that was the most storied program in the sport’s history.
In the 1950s, a local businessman named Claude Hutcherson who
owned an airplane company adopted the team, f lying them all over to
play. The rest of the teams at Wayland were known as the Pioneers; the
women’s basketball team was called the Hutcherson Flying Queens.
Recruits, often from rural outposts where commercial f lights were
rare, were dazzled by f lights to visit the school. The Queens won
131 straight games from 1953 to ’58 and were still a force in the ’80s.
Their regional was in Berkeley. “Right before we went to California it
had come out that we weren’t going to be able to go [to the] NCAA and
we were gonna have to go NAIA,” says former player Darla Armes Ford.
“My mom kept a scrapbook. the glory years are over for the
flying queens is one of the articles I have.”
And there’s the second irony of Title IX. As more schools committed
resources to women’s athletics, the early adopters, the often small, local
programs that outhustled everyone else when that—and maybe a f leet
of airplanes—was enough to win, lost their status. As the stage got
bigger, there was no room on it for Wayland Baptist. Or Immaculata,
which now plays in the NAIA. Or Cheyney State, the Philadelphia-area
school—and the nation’s oldest HBCU—that reached that 1982 NCA A
final. Two years ago, the school disbanded the team.
“It definitely is bittersweet,” says Ford. “The Queens had a lot of
history in getting the women’s game to where it is now.”
Wayland’s chance to go out on top ended with a loss to Texas. Rutgers
beat ’Nova to set up the final in front of a small but boisterous crowd at
the Palestra, where the Coyle family hung a banner from the scoreboard
that read welcome home. “We had come full circle,” says Mary.GE
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50 Y E ARS OF TITLE IX