Floods, baskets and Billie Jean King: how the rough and tumble WBL set the stage for the WNBA
It is 45 years since the Women’s Professional Basketball League played its final game. But it laid the foundation for the stars of today
New Jersey Gems' Ann Meyers and the Houston Angels' Paula Mayo battle for a rebound during a WBL game. Photograph: Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers/Getty Images It was the night before the 1980 Women’s Professional Basketball League draft in New York City and the Dallas Diamonds had the No 1 pick. But the team’s top brass was split.
Coach Greg Williams wanted to take the 6ft 5in Danish star Inge Nissen, and the team’s GM Nancy Nichols prized Nancy Lieberman, the American point guard people called “Lady Magic”. “We argued for days about Nissen versus Lieberman,” Nichols tells the Guardian. Nichols remembers the hours after dinner that night; everyone had retired to their rooms.
But hers was just one floor above Williams’s. In a last-ditch effort to convince the Diamonds coach, she put Lieberman’s name on a piece of a paper and, using coat hangers, dangled it down from her window to his. With her free hand, she called his room, “Hey, Greg,” she said.
“Look out your window and see if there are any signs from above! ” Related: Gossip around Azzi Fudd and Paige Bueckers’s relationship misreads the WNBA The next morning, the Diamonds’ team owner Mike Staver was late to the draft. The Diamonds’ staff looked around – who should we take?
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