1980-81 Season and Demise
In a game scheduled in Chicago on March 21, 1981, players of the Minnesota Fillies, one of only three teams to play in all three seasons that the league was in existence, walked off the court before the starting lineups were announced in a game against the Chicago Hustle in a protest over unpaid salaries. Referees and team coach Terry Kunze tried to cajole the players back onto the court to play their game, but were unsuccessful. The team, which had been averaging 1,000 to 1,500 in attendance per game were suspended from the WPBL by commissioner Sherwin Fisher, who called the walkout as "very detrimental to the league".
The Nebraska Wranglers won the league's 1980-81 title, defeating the Dallas Diamonds three games to two. In the fifth and final game, Rosie Walker led the victors with 39 points, while the Wranglers' defense held Nancy Lieberman of Dallas to 12 points, less than half of her season average.
Bill Byrne had founded the league hoping that the 1980 Summer Olympics would showcase the game's stars and bring media and public attention to women's basketball, but the United States-led boycott of the Moscow games only added to the league's misfortunes.
By the fall of 1981, the league was showing what The New York Times described as "feeble flickers of life." That November, commissioner Dave Almstead announced the league had disbanded, having generated $14 million in losses in its three years on the court. Almstead, who had succeeded Fisher as league commissioner in May 1981, announced the league's shutdown after trying unsuccessfully to contact the surviving eight teams' investors and team owners. Fischer, owner of the Chicago Hustle, insisted that he would field a team that would go barnstorming if the league went out of existence, and thought that teams would be fielded for a fourth season by Chicago, Nebraska and New Orleans. Some of the players were able to play professionally again in the 1984 Women's American Basketball Association.
Read more about this topic: Women's Professional Basketball League
Famous quotes containing the word season:
“When I read a story, I relive the moment from which it sprang. A scene burned itself into me, a building magnetized me, a mood or season of Nature’s penetrated me, history suddenly appeared to me in some tiny act, or a face had begun to haunt me before I glanced at it.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)