Rare Blooms in the Field of Athletics

Today, when tennis star Steffi Graf knocks down $2.5 million a year and the Ladies Professional Golf Assn. tour offers $1.2-million purses, it’s difficult to recall just how exotic women athletes seemed a scant 20 years ago.

And in that rarefied--and condescending--atmosphere, there were no rarer blossoms than the short-lived L.A. Dandelions.

By day they were college students, typists, secretaries and housewives. By night, they put aside notebooks and dustpans to don pads, cleats, helmets and the distinctive yellow jerseys with green numbers that visually echoed the floral appellation they carried proudly onto the field as one of the country’s seven women’s professional football teams.

In 1972, the club’s owners--a group of six men, including the then-athletic coordinator at Hollywood High School and an electrician from Downey--put up $50,000 to join a league that included franchises in Buffalo, Toledo, Detroit, Cleveland and Dallas, as well as Los Angeles.

Their theory was that women’s tackle football would provide a profitable new form of family entertainment. That was a miscalculation, and over the league’s three-year life span the Dandelions considered it cause for celebration when they drew enough fans to pay the cost of renting the stadium and hiring officials.

The team’s first game turned out to be something of an omen. On July 22, 1973, the Dandelions took the field at Long Beach Veterans Stadium and lost, 16-12, to the Dallas Bluebonnets. A local television crew turned up to cover the opener, but spent most of its time filming voluptuous actress Edy Williams, who turned up wearing her signature attire--bikini top and hot pants.

The Dandelions went on to finish the season at 2-1, drawing crowds of 500 to 2,000 to their Sunday games.

But the women on the field continued to train as if they were on the verge of filling the Coliseum. When they weren’t working their day jobs, the team’s 34 players put in long hours of training, including tackling drills and lung-burning distance runs at Fairfax or Hollywood high schools.

The women ranged in age from 19 to 34 and in size from 5 feet 1 and 118 pounds to 5 feet 11 and 215 pounds. Most grew up playing football with their brothers or in the so-called powder puff leagues popular in the high schools of that era.

Despite their “professional” status, the Dandelions competed for rewards apart from the monetary ones. Linebacker Barbara Patton, who once cracked the helmet of an opponent with a hit, was paid $25 a game, the going rate in the league. Her son, Washington Redskins linebacker Marcus Patton, received a $2-million bonus when he signed with his team not long ago.

The Dandelions’ coach, Bob Edwards, a former college football player who taught art at Los Angeles City College, was helped by two assistants, two team doctors and two trainers.

They shared medical help with another local team called the California Earthquakes (formerly known as the California Mustangs), whose home field was Citrus Junior College in Glendora. The Earthquakes held workouts at La Salle in Pasadena--an all-boys high school at the time--that nonetheless boasted on its marquee that it was the “Home of California Earthquakes Women’s Pro Football.”

Like their floral namesakes, the Dandelions played a variety of fields. In the beginning, home games were played at Long Beach Veterans Stadium and later at Santa Monica City College.

Their locker room was open to male reporters, but none had the temerity to enter. In fact, the Dandelions’ biggest battle wasn’t against on-field opponents but against the stereotypes and stigmas that still attach themselves to women’s athletics.

Dandelion Jennie Talancon, for example, felt constrained to deny that she and her teammates were feminists. “Oh, we’re not for women’s lib,” she told an interviewer. “Equal pay, sure, but not that bra-burning stuff.”

Then, as now, particular prejudice was directed at lesbian athletes, and the Dandelions were at pains to declare their heterosexual orientation. One college student and halfback told an interviewer that female athletes did not fit the public’s stereotypical images: “People blow it out of proportion because they’re already looking for it; they want to label you.”

What people didn’t want to do was watch women’s football. In 1974, 1,500 fans showed up at the Santa Ana Bowl to watch the Dandelions defeat the California Mustangs, 20-0. That same weekend, 70,000 fans went to see the Rams play.

But although they may not have realized it, the Dandelions and their opponents were helping to sow the seed s of a women’s sports movement that one day would blossom beyond all expectations.

Last year, according to the National Collegiate Athletic Assn., more than 100,000 young American women participated in organized college sports. In Southern California, where the Dandelions flowered so fleetingly, the women of UCLA captured nine national individual and team championships.