Jan. 18, 2012 - Issue #848: City of champions

The game must go on

The Edmonton Grads changed the way basketball was played

The Grads are Playing Tonight!
By M Ann Hall
University of Alberta Press, 352 pp
 

In June of 1934 Edmonton telephone lines were jammed. The massive volume of calls to one number resulted in a complete phone blackout throughout the city for over 20 minutes. Fifty thousand Edmontonians wanted to know the result of one game: the Edmonton Grads' third game against the Oklahoma Cardinals—the deciding game in the competition to make the Women's World Games in London.
While the Grads would lose that series, it would be one of very few losses for the team which holds the most victories in the history of North American sport. The Edmonton Grads were a women's basketball team that held North America's attention for 25 years as the team challenged preconceptions about gender and sport.
Former University of Alberta professor and author M Ann Hall can remember hearing about the legacy of the Grads when she started playing for the University of Alberta Pandas in the '60s, but she was surprised to find there had been no book written on the subject despite the team's hold on the public's attention for over two decades. Already an author on a comprehensive book on women in sport, The Girl in the Game, Hall took on the challenge of depicting the Grads not only as a team, but also as a history of the girls who played. Hall recently spoke with Vue about her book, The Grads are Playing Tonight!
 

Vue Weekly: It's interesting that in a city that talks about sport so much, we don't hear more about this team.
M Ann Hall: It's an old story. And unfortunately women's sport history is not a big area, and Canadian women's sport history even smaller.
Men's professional sport has eclipsed any recognition of women's sport. You just look at the hype around the world junior championships in hockey recently, but that same level of hype was there for the Grads, in many ways because the media was there. You go back and look through the media coverage in the Edmonton Bulletin and the Edmonton Journal and it's amazing. You pick up a paper today and women's sports are invisible. J Percy Page, he was recognized in those days, as the coach of the Grads. Everyone in town knew who he was.
 

VW: You could have focused a lot of attention on Percy Page in the book, and you credit him, but you also give a lot of attention to the team as a whole.
AH: I hadn't realized the extent of the organization, which Clare Hollingsworth, Page's son-in-law, called "a basketball factory." Page was overseeing it all.
The business community in Edmonton became extremely supportive of it, particularly the Rotarians, not through money, but through jobs. Businesses gave the Grads jobs with vacation time when the team was travelling. They knew the importance of the team because at the time the city was known as "The Edmonton of the Grads." Business leaders realized they could attract business to the city. I think that has been lost through time, the role of this team in drawing attention and business to the city.
 

VW: Is it troubling to you that this story of the Grads and women's sport in general isn't getting the recognition that it should?
AH: I take the long view on this. I can see lots of improvement. I see lots of things that we never thought would happen. Olympics are pretty much on equilibrium. But the media is one area where it is worse and worse. What we're going to do about it, I don't know. When those Olympics are on, where there are women athletes the coverage in those areas has improved.
 

VW: The Grads played basketball by the men's rules, not the less competitive, and less active, women's rules. What impact then do you think the Grads had on the sport of basketball?
AH: One of Percy Page's objectives in all the trips to Europe was to get women's basketball in the Olympics. For men it was accepted in 1936 but it wasn't until 1976 that it was accepted for women. He believed in the game, that it was a highly suitable sport for women, and so he constantly tried for the improvement of the game and for the team itself.
As well, those [women's] rules remained a huge problem in this country. Even when I played in the '60s I played women's rules. Now everyone looks back on those rules as silly.
I trained as a phys ed educator and was part of a movement by the younger generation saying women need to compete as men; women need to compete at the same level as men. The Grads were an exemplar group of women who could play at that high level. In fact they were way above the competition.
In the '30s there was tremendous discussion of whether women should compete at this level because, the argument was, they're not going to be able to have children. The Grads were able to get above, and in essence act as an example against that argument.
 

VW: The desire to feminize sports remains today, for example, with female boxers being told they should wear skirts. What sort of impact did the Grads have on that discussion of women playing men's sport?
AH: Page always said they're basketball players second and ladies first. Being a lady in those days meant something clear: how you dress, how you spoke, the company you kept, your deportment—everything was by example. He and his wife Maude were upstanding citizens. Maude Page was a cultured woman who spoke French and had been a teacher. So the preconception and argument was that sports 'masculinized' women, and the Grads were an example that this wasn't the case.

I've had students ask if this is comparable to the All American Girls Baseball League, but that was a feminiziation of players playing a masculine sport. They were feminized—had to wear short skirts, had to take classes in deportment—they were clearly feminized because they had to sell that team as women who were looking and dressing like women but playing a men's game—baseball, not softball. The Grads were never feminized. Because of the standards the Pages' set as how you would behave as a young woman, I'm convinced if anyone went outside those boundaries you wouldn't have got on the team in the first place.
 

VW: What would the media reaction be to a team like this today.
AH: I'm not sure you could have a team like this today. It goes back to my earlier comments about how men's professional sport takes over everything in the media. We have some of the best women ice hockey players in the world and many of them have had careers as Olympians and now they're struggling in a professional league that gets no support.

For women in sport in Canada, the golden age for sport is in the '20s and '30s. Even when you look today at the amount women athletes have accomplished, they are not gaining the same level of attention that women had back in the '20s and '30s. And the factor I come to everytime is television. I can remember television coming in '52. Men's professional sport, particularly hockey, was one of the prime television programs that you watched. And there was no comparable women's sport to be televised because the war had a remarkable effect on women's sport in Canada. Even though women accomplished much during the Second World War, after the war in Canada there was a period of normalization—moving into the suburbs, raising a family getting everything back to normal—women's sport suffered unless it had some sort of feminine appeal, so this is when you get the popularity of skaters like Barbara Anne Scott and competitive team sport falls to the side.

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