Football Barriers Tough to Tackle for Women

The road has been long. The goal is not yet in sight. And, along the way, there have been precious few moments to savor for Jill Sturdivant and Teresa Ray.

One came the day the two six-footers went to see their lawyer in their shoulder pads, jerseys and cleats. An elderly woman stopped them on Wilshire Boulevard to ask: “Do you play football?”

“Yes ma’am,” they said.

And she said, “Good for you.”

Most of the time it has been only bruises, rebuffs and insults.

“Everybody either laughs at us or hates our guts or tells us that we’re homosexuals,” Ray, a lanky, garrulous brunette, said in a slow Kentucky accent.

Do they listen? No.

“You might as well get ready for it,” red-headed Sturdivant said in her gentle North Carolina drawl. “We’re not going to quit until we win or die.”

The “it” she speaks of is professional women’s football.

Multiple Roles

Sturdivant and Ray are the founders, president and general manager, and defensive ends, of the L.A. Scandals, a team of 25 women, give or take a few, who want to play football.

And they don’t mean flag.

“Once you’ve played football the way football is meant to be played, then you don’t want to go back,” Ray said.

The team is nearly a year old and hasn’t played a game. Promoting a women’s football game has proved more formidable than either Sturdivant or Ray imagined. But they appear to be building momentum.

The Scandals have a home in the Valley College stadium, where the girls have been practicing two or three times a week. They have a coach.

And the players suited up in full uniforms for the first time this fall.

“They’re so hot,” Sturdivant said, a blush of feminine pride coloring her cheek.

More important, the Scandals discovered that they are not alone. They recently met with members of half a dozen nascent teams such as the Dallas Darlings, the Houston Hustlers and the Miami Mermaids.

The teams formed the American Women’s Football League, which they hope will begin its first season next fall. The Scandals are scheduled to play the Cleveland Curls in the opener.

As a part of becoming professional, the Scandals incorporated, issuing 5 million shares of stock, none of which have been sold. Technically, that makes Sturdivant and Ray the owners of a professional football team.

But they don’t relish ownership.

“I don’t consider myself the owner of anything,” Sturdivant said one day recently in the team’s sparsely furnished but spacious new office high in the Hollywood Hills. “The owner is some guy you don’t like who sits up there in the president’s suite drinking martinis and telling people what to do. I’m a football player.”

“I don’t want to be some short, fat guy who shows up in a limousine and never sweats,” Ray, sitting beside her, chipped in.

These are not a couple of conventional women. They never have been.

Sturdivant, of Raleigh, N.C., was a football junkie even as a student at the University of Miami in the late 1970s. She started as a cheerleader but soon talked the coach into making her water girl.

Although she was studying to be a nurse, Sturdivant spent most of her time with the football players and got steered unexpectedly toward a career in music when she began singing at bars to earn beer money for post-game parties.

Someone suggested that she should go to New York to become a star. She went and had to settle for being a gofer while earning her credentials as a background singer for recording sessions. Eventually, her path led to Ray, who had left her home in Henderson, Ky., to get into the entertainment business as a personal manager.

“I kept hearing about this crazy redhead that talked like me,” Ray said. “She was just as crazy as they said she was.”

Ray became Sturdivant’s manager.

But in football matters, Ray was a late bloomer. She was studying ballet and for the first time really stopped to notice a football game on TV.

“How beautiful,” she thought.

Eventually the women tired of New York. Sturdivant married an old beau, former Virginia Tech linebacker Doug Thacker, and moved to his home in Roanoake, Va.

Ray headed for a less pressured job in Houston.

“I went through Virginia, where Jill was living her little married life,” Ray said.

“This town isn’t big enough for both of us,” Sturdivant later announced to her husband, asking him to go to Houston. He didn’t. She did.

Home in Sylmar

A year later, Sturdivant got a job as a studio singer in Los Angeles. By then her husband was ready to come along.

They bought a house in Sylmar.

This new manifestation of little married life didn’t stay dull for long, either.

Not long after, Ray came to town, looking for more adventure than she had found in Houston. She immediately renewed the old friendship.

She and her boyfriend were at the Thackers’ on Pro Bowl Sunday, 1985, the day the Scandals were conceived.

It happened when the women came in while the men were watching the game and Sturdivant asked, “What would they do?”

“My husband says to me--here he is, he’s blending margaritas--and he says, ‘How would you know what they did anyway? Women don’t play football,’ ” meaning, of course, that those who haven’t actually played a sport can never hope to understand it.

She, of course, snapped back that women could play football if they were ever given a chance.

“He just rolled over with laughter,” Sturdivant said. “It was hilarious. He said, ‘Women can’t play football.’ ”

Sturdivant and Ray reacted the way women are expected to react to that kind of remark.

“We rolled out the Master Charge,” Sturdivant said. But not for a shopping spree.

They used it to buy a newspaper ad summoning any women who wanted to play tackle football.

They weren’t really thinking of starting a professional football team.

“We were just thinking of Sunday football games,” Ray said. “We weren’t emotionally prepared to deal with what we got.”

Many Inquiries

They got more than 120 calls.

Since then, they’ve been opening one door after another, they said. Behind a lot of them they found trouble.

First they needed a coach. They drafted Sturdivant’s husband on a bet. He bet that they couldn’t field a team.

His current position as assistant football coach at Valley College helped solve the next problem--where to play. The Scandals got permission to make the college stadium their home field.

When 50 players showed up there at the first practice in February, Sturdivant and Ray learned why some women shouldn’t play football. They didn’t even try to hide their disdain.

“ ‘Hi, mah name is Suzie. Ahm a model,’ ” Ray said, imitating one of the recruits in her most derisive Kentucky drawl. “They want to be in movies,” Ray went on. “They want special considerations. Or they don’t make it to the practice. They wouldn’t ever put on a helmet because it could mess up their hair. . . .”

“Oh, no,” Sturdivant said. “Don’t want to mess up the ‘do.”

”. . . come out to practice with lipstick and makeup on. It’s a glory bid--prove to my boyfriend, show my dad. That works until you get one good lick,” Ray said.

Not All Make Team

Some of the women didn’t like getting hit. Some couldn’t relate to Coach Thacker.

“He screams at the girls, intimidates the girls, and some of them cry,” Sturdivant said.

“We couldn’t figure that out,” Ray said, supposing that coaches always yell at their players. “Did we do something wrong?”

Along the way, Sturdivant and Ray sharpened their managerial skills.

“We found out that the way you deal with athletes is, you don’t tell them anything,” Sturdivant said, except what you want to tell them.

“You tell them they have to be there at a certain time and they have to have their uniform on. You don’t let them vote on anything,” she said.

“Baby, don’t ever do that,” Ray said. “Don’t ever get together a gaggle of women to vote on anything. Once you go giving them choices, you’ve got 25 women running around like chickens with their heads cut off.”

Roster Declines

Through a turbulent spring, the Scandals’ roster steadily declined.

“We went all the way down to 12 girls,” Sturdivant said. “Doug goes, ‘What are you going to do? You need 22 people to play football. Forty million girls and you can’t get 22 of them to come out and practice?’ ”

He threatened to quit.

“You can quit if you want to,” Ray said she told him. “But we’re going to play.”

Maybe the Houston Hustlers don’t know it yet, but Thacker knew who he was dealing with. He stayed.

Eventually, however, even Sturdivant and Ray had to admit that the team just wasn’t coming together. They knew what the problem was. They didn’t have the money to buy uniforms.

“A lot of the girls got real upset,” Sturdivant said. “They’d sign up and then disappear because they can’t have uniforms. They wanted uniforms. It was like their little toy.”

Sturdivant and Ray decided to throw a dance at Myron’s Ballroom. They figured that, if each of the players sold 10 tickets, they would make enough to buy the uniforms.

“June 24. I’ll never forget it as long as I live,” Ray said. “Oh, lordy, lordy, lordy.”

The women rented the ballroom, bought cases of Champagne, paid $250 for invitations, hired a security guard.

“I was writing checks on my Ready Reserve account like you couldn’t believe,” Sturdivant said.

Nobody came. It turned out that the players expected Sturdivant and Ray to sell the tickets.

“Didn’t even bring their boyfriends,” Ray said. “They just stood up against the wall saying, ‘When are all the people going to show up?’ I just wanted to wring their little chicken necks. The next morning, my boyfriend wouldn’t even speak to me.” They lost $1,500.

Their next executive decision was to charge each player $150 to get on the team. Their roster dropped to nine.

But then they had some luck. A benefactor arrived.

He was John Adams, 48, a lawyer and a bachelor. The women went to him first for legal help. But he got caught up in their story.

“After about three meetings, he writes out a check,” Sturdivant said. “He said, ‘Go buy shoulder pads and helmets.’ He’s been our daddy. He’s written us checks, given us moral support. He’s been there when we need legal support.”

Adams, who represents a few entertainers along with his business clients, wasn’t just playing the part of the good feminist, although he doesn’t deny that motive.

“Girls who want to play tackle football should be able to play tackle football,” he said.

Mostly, though, he had an eye for the business and entertainment possibilities.

“I think we’re seeing the formation of an interesting new sport, if you will,” Adams said. “I think it’s going to be an excellent spectator sport developing between now and the end of the century. It’s about time.”

Previous Effort Failed

That idea isn’t entirely new. In the 1970s, a promoter invested several thousand dollars in a women’s football team called the L.A. Dandelions. The Dandelions played a few games and wilted.

Adams understands that danger.

“What they really need is a good corporate sponsor to come in and understand and appreciate what they are doing,” he said. “It has to be somebody with a deep pocket who can see the long-term benefits.”

He’s helping the Scandals look for a sponsor. In the meantime, he has also helped them find an opponent.

One night while searching a data base on his computer, he discovered the existence of the National Womens’ Football League, an organization that has women’s football teams in places like Lansing, Mich., Toledo, Ohio, and Grand Rapids, Mich.

Sturdivant and Ray decided that was what the Scandals needed. They applied for membership and almost joined.

Recently, Sturdivant and Ray flew to the league’s headquarters in Cleveland to meet with the leaders of five other new teams. But, instead of joining, the new teams decided to form their own league.

The reasons were a little fuzzy. Mostly, Sturdivant and Ray said, they would rather stake their future with teams like the Dallas Darlings and Miami Mermaids than with the Toledo Furies or the Lansing Unicorns.

Becoming part of a professional football league has given the Scandals new hope that they will be on the field soon, squaring off with other women in real football uniforms.

It has also subtly altered the roles of Sturdivant and Ray. Their administrative work is expanding. There are press releases to send, schedules to work out, conferences to attend, practices to organize, hours to spend on the telephone.

“The girls always have a problem of some kind,” Ray said.

Adams decided they needed an office. He cleared out a suite in the basement of his Hollywood Hills home. That’s where the women can be found these days, Monday through Friday, just like real team owners.

It gives the team a more professional look, even if the Scandals are still the only professional team in town whose members have to pay to play.

Ironically, after the first shock waves passed, the fee seemed to help the recruiting.

“We’re getting the kind of girls who are willing to hang now,” Ray said.

The players come with family support, too.

The Scandals’ new quarterback, a 21-year-old mother of an 8-month-old baby, was accompanied by her husband and her mother when she tried out.

“When we told her about the deposit, she sort of turned around and looked at her husband and looked at her mom, and her mom says, ‘I’ll pay for it, sweetie,’ ” Ray said.

The rest of the Scandals’ 24-woman roster is a diverse group of 20- to 36-year-olds, including several firefighters and secretaries, a manicurist, a machinist, a teacher, a student and a newlywed homemaker.

The team is holding regular practices. The players are learning things like the duck and roll and the three-point stance. More players are trying out all the time.

They have all suited up in their orange-and-black uniforms, although they usually don’t wear them while practicing. They are saving them for that first game, and an occasional TV appearance.

And, now that a real game may be in sight, it’s a bittersweet picture that Sturdivant and Ray look ahead to. They have grown aware that every day makes them more like the man with the martinis and less like the sweaty-browed defensive ends they long to be.

Someday, they know, a great defensive end may come along, and younger, too.

Sturdivant is 28. That may not be ancient. But she has been thinking that she may have to take a year on injured reserve. That’s football jargon for maternity leave.

Ray is just plain feeling the effects of age. At 36, she’s a year older than Ram defensive end Jack Youngblood was when he retired.

“You get slower,” she said. “There ain’t nothing you can do about it. We know the younger girls are going to kick in. If somebody came out and they had speed on me and they had skill on me, then I’ve lost it.”

She’s not conceding anything.

“I’ll fight for it,” Ray said. “If I ever have the opportunity to get on the field in a full uniform to play somebody that wants to play. . . .” She trailed off, looking up, as if the cheers of the fans distracted her.

Oh, lordy, lordy, please just one time before they retire her to the owner’s box.