Pioneers traveled along rough road
Pro women fought for pay, battled stereotypes to league’s sudden end
Anita Ortega learned a lot about basketball and life playing for the San Francisco Pioneers. She learned that she could handle the considerable step up in competition from college ball at UCLA to the first women’s professional basketball league. In her rookie season, 1979-80, Ortega scored 24.1 points per game, fourth best in the league.
She also learned that if you were a female basketball player unhappy with your salary, it’s best to shut up and dribble.
The Pioneers seemed to be in a good position rolling into their second season, but early on the wheels began to wobble. The Pioneers lost five of their first six games under coach Frank LaPorte, a former St. Mary’s men’s coach. Owner Marshall Geller fired LaPorte and hired Dean “The Dream” Meminger, a former Knicks star, who quickly clashed with Ortega.
She had been asked to take a pay cut from $15,000 her rookie season, and she voiced her displeasure to Meminger.
In today’s WNBA, the players have pushed for bigger salaries, but about three quarters of the women also play overseas, where salaries are much higher. But the WNBA players of today are light-years ahead of the WBL players. The WBL had no formal salary structure, most teams were losing money, and some owners were simply hanging on,
hoping to sell their team for a profit. Players had no bargaining power or rights. No union, no agents.
“I made it known that I and other players deserved more,” Ortega told The Chronicle. “Sometimes you've got to stand up for what you believe in and what you feel is right. Dean, his approach to basketball was very different. He was an in-your-face kind of guy, I was more of, ‘You can't talk to me that way.' We bumped heads . ... They said, ‘You're not getting (a raise), we're shipping you to Minnesota.' ”
Ortega arrived in frozen Minneapolis just in time to walk onto the court with her new teammates, then turn and walk off with them in a protest over unpaid wages. The team folded and Ortega bought herself a Greyhound ticket back home to L.A., her pro career finished.
Ortega's exit was just the latest in a string of controversies swirling in San Francisco, according to “Mad Seasons,” a history of the league by Karra Porter:
• Earlier in the season, center Nancy Dunkle criticized LaPorte through the media, and he responded by ripping the entire team.
• Some of the players resented what they considered to be LaPorte's favoritism toward star player Pat Mayo. In a locker-room argument, Mayo punched a teammate and broke her nose.
• The Pioneers traded for Mariah Burton Nelson, and after joining the team she marched in a gay pride parade in San Francisco. Nelson, who came out as lesbian while at Stanford, was cut the next day. Nelson asked LaPorte why he cut her and the coach said, “You're not tall enough.” When the 6-foot-2 Nelson pointed out that no teammate was taller than her, LaPorte shot back, “Well, then, you're not quick enough.”
Meminger arrived in San Francisco breathing fire, spewing expletives and with a cocaine habit. (He later would acknowledge his addiction, and he eventually died of an overdose.) The previous WBL season, he had coached the New York Stars to the WBL title, whereupon that team folded.
“The Dream” was woke before woke was a thing. He was a champion of women's rights, calling himself a “liberationist” and saying, “Being Black, I've always had these feelings. The women's movement is nothing but a microcosm of the Black movement, one and the same.”
Meminger put his players through killer four-hour practices, nothing like LaPorte's leisurely two-hour workouts.
“Frank treated 'em like high school players,” Geller said. “It was a country club.”
Mayo and Meminger didn't click, and she walked out, retiring from pro basketball at 23.
Thus began the Pioneers' final act, the Dream & Machine Gun Era.
Shortly after Meminger arrived in San Francisco, “Machine Gun” Molly Bolin (now Molly Kazmer) became available. Bolin was the previous season's league co-MVP and top scorer (32.8, still a women's pro record). Her team, the Iowa Cornets, folded after that season and Bolin signed with a new league, the Ladies Professional Basketball League. Bolin played seven games with the LPBL Southern California Breeze, then that league folded, so Machine Gun Molly was back on the market.
“I was weighing offers from every (WBL) team,” Kazmer said. “San Francisco was kind of a no-brainer. They were a great organization and made me a great offer, and I was so happy to go up there and play for them. I pretty much wrote my own contract. I think it was, like, $30,000, and I had been making $1,400 a month (in the LPBL). The Pioneers bought me a home to live in, I had all kinds of perks and bonuses.”
Bolin — who joined the team before their 10th game — and Meminger connected instantly, two basketball lifers, two tough characters. The previous season in the WBL Bolin had scored 55 points in a game (still a women's pro record) despite dislocating her left shoulder in the second quarter. She was not looking to be babied.
The previous season, Meminger had tried to intimidate Bolin before a playoff game, and she scored 49 points, so he was eager to bring her to San Francisco, and Geller was happy to foot the bill.
“Dean told us, ‘You guys are a bunch of robots out there, you can't play like robots, you gotta improve your individual game, have a little creativity,' ” Kazmer said.
Meminger was passionate, he drove his players relentlessly, with long practices, non-stop cursing and haranguing, tough love. He brought his friend John Lucas, then a Warriors' star, to practices. Lucas would play the women one-onone.
“Dean would run line drills and say, ‘Keep up with me,' ” Kazmer said. “Then he'd line us up and make us take charges from him . ... Dean was completely opposite of any coach I'd ever had, and I was buying in, I was loving it, he was making me a better player.”
Most of the remaining Pioneers felt the same way. They were eager to kill the stereotype of women athletes requiring gentle treatment. Some WBL players, including Bolin, had played six-player basketball in high school, which is based on the premise that girls simply can't run full-court.
“I really liked Dean,” said Cindy Haugerjorde, a rookie that season. “He was the first real coach we ever had. Dean absolutely opened things up. He designed a couple plays for Molly and myself that I used later when I coached at Minnesota and the Penn State. He was quite an offensive mind. We really pushed the ball up the court. If you're open, take the shot. Go hard all the time.
“That guy was absolutely crazy, of course, and we did everything he asked us to do. If he asked us to run 20 killers, we'd do it, and we'd do it hard, and we'd compete. I think that builds up so much grit; we had grit, which is why we were pretty successful, and why we had so much fun, and camaraderie. We played so hard, no slackers.”
But Meminger was no dream for the team's owner.
“One game, I'm looking over at our bench and he's not there,” Geller said. “At halftime, I go in and say to one of the girls, ‘Hey, what happened to Meminger?' The son of a gun was sitting in the locker room smoking a joint. That was Dean the Dream.”
One of the few players not swept out in the early season purge was Cardie Hicks, an American who had been playing pro ball in Europe, and signed with the Pioneers late in the previous season. The 5-8½ Hicks had dunked in a game in Holland, the first woman to dunk. Along with her dynamic game, Hicks (who has since changed her first name to Cardte) had an ebullient spirit. She sang the national anthem before several games. She got along with everybody. Willie Brown, a part owner of the team, insisted Hicks call him “Uncle Willie.”
“Cardie was amazing,” Haugejorde said. “She could stand under the basket and jump straight up and grab the rim with both hands. It blew my mind.”
Meminger blasted his players for not playing as brashly as they talked. “I don't want to hear this rah-rah s—,” he told them. So the Pioneers began breaking huddles by shouting in unison, “Rah-rah s—!” One game, they pranked Hicks. The players all shouted “Rahrah,” then went silent as Hicks screamed “S—!” in the quiet arena.
Hicks was a star, but the team's headliner was Bolin, who had a national following because of her long-distance shooting, volume scoring and good looks. Playing in Iowa, she augmented her then-puny salary by selling cutey-pie posters.
Fortunately, Bolin had a more subtle talent, the ability to diffuse resentment teammates might feel towards such an attention-grabbing player.
“Molly was a big star, but that's OK, Molly didn't walk around like a diva,” said Muisette McKinney, a 5-9 guard who was “Cool Breeze” in college but was re-nicknamed “Moose” by her Pioneers' teammates, because she moved people around. “Molly earned her way — the shooting, the extra practice.”
Bolin, embroiled in a messy divorce and custody battle, brought her 2-yearold son Damien to practices. The players loved to crank up Damien's favorite song on a boom box, “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” and watch him dance.
“My teammates were so supportive of me,” Kazmer said. “Do you know how hard it must have been for them? These are really great players, and then I come in and it's, ‘OK, throw me the ball, every single time.' My god, they were amazing, they just brought me in. I bonded with that team. It was so much fun, we made lifelong friends, and we're still in touch.”
Bolin, Hicks and Haugejorde were voted to the West squad for the league's midseason All-Star Game in Albuquerque. Bolin scored 29 points. Hicks dunked in warm-ups, then tried a breakaway dunk in the game but was low-bridged by a defender.
The Pioneers' total makeover was showing results, but the early season turmoil had sunk the team in a deep hole. The Pioneers won seven of their last eight games, finishing the season with a 122-61 trouncing of the Minnesota Phillies. But at 14-22, the Pioneers missed the playoffs.
The women were optimistic, though. They were playing legit basketball in a tough league, for a coach who could take them higher.
BBB
The WBL was counting heavily on the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, where the U.S. women's basketball team was expected to dominate. That would give women's basketball major recognition, providing the WBL a lifeline through TV deals, sponsorships and ticket sales.
Geller had grand ideas. He was planning to go to the Olympics to recruit U.S. stars, and he was working to get the rights to WBL superstar Ann Meyers and sign her to a million-dollar contact.
“That was the way to open people's eyes that this is a professional sport,” Geller said.
But when Russia invaded Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter announced that the U.S. was boycotting the Olympics in Moscow.
“There were other problems with the league,” Geller said. “A lot of teams were underfinanced, we had poor leadership, but that (boycott) killed us.”
The WBL canceled its college draft, and several teams quietly folded. Like a dandelion in a hurricane, the league simply blew away.
“There was no closure,” Kazmer said. “We were ready to go back, and then there was no league. That was so hard. You're finding your way, you're finding success, this is what you want to do, you're getting better and better at it, and it's gone.”
All the Pioneers interviewed, and Geller, expressed pride for their role in advancing women's professional sports.
The league, however flawed, was a building block.
“We were more than the three years we played,” Kazmer said. “We basically paid it forward in the whole progression of women's (pro) basketball.”
Haugejorde said, “It would have been fantastic to keep playing, to really develop. You start developing when you're 23, 24. You see how Diana Taurasi and Sue Bird, they evolved. It would have been fun to evolve like that.”
The San Francisco Pioneers lived a dream. The only regrets are how quickly it ended.
“We had a banquet when the season ended, in the basement of an Italian restaurant,” McKinney said. “The next morning, I got a bag of Mrs. Fields cookies and took off. Later, we got a phone call and letter (from the team) saying, ‘We're done.' It just broke our hearts. We never got a chance to thank the people of San Francisco.”