January 15-21, 2004
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O God of Players: The Story of the Immaculata Mighty Macs
By Julie Byrne Columbia University, 320 pp., $22.50
When the UCLA men's basketball team was in the midst of its 88-game winning streak in 1973, one newspaper headline puckishly called them "the Immaculata College of the West." The small women's college outside of Exton (now Immaculata University) won three straight national basketball titles from 1972 to 1974, and brought unprecedented attention to women's collegiate sports in the early days of Title IX. "People say it was a Cinderella team," one Immaculata professor said. "It was a Cinderella time."
The Immaculata story has long needed a comprehensive telling, and Julie Byrne does an excellent job in O God of Players. A religion professor from Texas Christian University, Byrne interviewed and surveyed more than 90 women who played for the school over the last half-century.
Thirty years after the national wins, the question remains: How did women's basketball flourish at, of all places, Immaculata? Byrne concludes that the school's size (an enrollment of 800 during the 1970s) and remoteness worked to its advantage. "Many late sixties and seventies players remembered being sheltered from the outside world," she writes. "Some say they finished college largely unaware of Vatican II and turn-of-the-decade turmoil." As late as 1963, in fact, Mighty Mac players still wore skirts with black tights and four layers of clothing for uniforms, looking like extras from The Magdalene Sisters. "Times had changed, but we were still in 1910 -- to be modest," Byrne quotes one player. With the emphasis on phys ed in mid-20th-century Catholic education, basketball became one of the few available creative outlets for Immaculata students.
O God of Players (the title comes from a pre-game prayer: "O God of Players, hear our prayer/ To play this game and play it fair ") details the growth of basketball at Immaculata. After a fire destroyed the campus field house in 1967, it took four years for a new gym to be built. By then Cathy Rush, the new coach at $450 a year, was assembling a championship squad. With no recruiting or scholarship money available, the team sold bumper stickers, T-shirts and toothbrushes to raise money. And with no money for a pep band, Mighty Mac fans banged metal buckets in the stands to rally the team and rattle the opposition. Upon defeating archrival West Chester in the national finals in 1972, Immaculata's president told the team, "I want you to fly home first-class. We'll figure out how to pay for it later."
Byrne has written a scholarly, sociological book, with almost 50 pages of footnotes, and fans expecting a breezy look back at local hoops history may well be disappointed. But with many of Immaculata's championship players still on the scene -- Mighty Macs coaching today include Rene Portland (Penn State), Theresa Shenk Grentz (Illinois) and Marianne Stanley (the WNBA's Washington Mystics) -- O God of Players is a necessary addition to basketball literature.
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