Her twenty-four-year old sister, Lynda, wanted to try out for the team as well. Nancy Berardino, a seventeen-year-old from Far Rockaway, had also seen the advertisement. Her main reason for going, she said, was to “put away a slap-in-the-face kind of attitude that some people have about athletic ability and women-not being able to use it fully because it didn’t seem feminine.” Dearie was intrigued and decided to see what it was all about.
HAIL MARY FOOTBALL GAME PROFESSIONAL
In spring of that year, before Dearie became the most recognizable Fillie on the roster thanks to the Life magazine photos, she was working in New York as a go-see model in commercial print media when her husband showed her a wanted ad in a national paper looking for women to join a new professional football team. The full-page photo contrasted beauty and brawn, and it attracted national attention.
HAIL MARY FOOTBALL GAME FULL
Dearie is clad in a grass-and-dirt-stained white jersey with the number 84 on the front, her long blond hair falling out of her large gold helmet and down onto her shoulders, and her high cheekbones and full lips distinguishable underneath the thick gray face mask. Twenty-nine-year-old Dearie from Red Bank, New Jersey, was one of the players featured in the photos, and one photo in particular stood out from the rest. They were not under his umbrella of teams, and were owned by someone else.) Life’s writeup of the Fillies was only the second such feature about women’s football in the magazine’s history. (The Fillies, however, appeared without the support or blessing of Sid Friedman. In June 1972, Life published a photo spread with a short article about a new women’s football team-the New York Fillies. Now, we say ‘it went viral.’ A lot of things happened as a result of that picture.” She thought it was worth trying to send it to Life magazine. I was thinking about my route for a play. “I did not pose for that,” Gail Dearie, now eighty, said of the iconic photo. Available from Bold Type Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. This article has been excerpted from Chapter 5 (“The Troopers’ Reign Begins”) of Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League by Britni de la Cretaz and Lyndsey D’Arcangelo. And they played for all the young girls out there who, like me, were told no, this sport isn’t for you.
I knew how they felt and could imagine how rewarding it was for them to take the football field on game day, to put on their uniforms and to play in front of a crowd. In writing Hail Mary and listening to players describe how it felt to finally get to play a sport that everyone told them they couldn’t and shouldn’t be playing, I reconnected with my 8-year-old self. I didn’t say a word during the car ride home, even when my brother tried to console me. The all-too-familiar feeling of being told I couldn’t do something because I was a girl had settled into my gut, and my eyes were wet. They went something like, I wouldn’t be able to play with the team any more, because it was getting too rough. As my coach knelt gently in front of me and put his hands on my shoulders, I saw it in his eyes even before he said the words.
I was the only girl on the team and we had all been playing together for a while. I was forced to sit in the stands and watch from afar, and my football-loving heart ached with envy with every snap of the ball.Ī few years later, the head coach of my indoor soccer team pulled me aside after a game. Still, no matter how much I protested or how much my brother advocated on my behalf, they never changed their minds. But now my parents were worried about me getting hurt? It didn’t add up.
I held my own with the boys, and was better than most.Īs for football, I had already been playing tackle with my brothers and their friends on the street, in backyards and on rock-filled school playground lots. Both of us were naturally athletic and had great coordination and dexterity. Up until that moment, my brother and I had been playing soccer together on a co-ed team since we were five. I was not allowed to play, out of fear I might get hurt because I was a girl. I was 8 years old when my twin brother had signed up to play youth football.
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