New Books In Sports

Today we are joined by Frankie de la Cretaz, a sports journalist whose work focuses on the intersection of sport and gender, and one of the authors alongside Lyndsey D’Arcangelo of Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League (Bold Type Books, 2021). In our conversation, we discussed the beginnings of women’s gridiron football in the United States’ the reason why so many women wanted to play a “man’s game” in the 1970s and 80s; and the successes, failures and legacies of the NWFL. In Hail Mary, de la Cretaz and D’Arcangelo recover the lost history of the National Women’s Football League, a professional gridiron competition that ran from 1974 to 1988. To revive this hidden history of women’s football, the authors interviewed dozens of women from and consulted archives around the country. They discovered a competitive, vibrant, and popular sporting entertainment that rose in the Rust Belt, spread to the football meccas of Texas and California, before collapsing due to financial issues in