Metro Pulse/Cover/The Football Issue

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Sports Scribes Step Up
or, how to write a hands-free college scouting report

The Chillbilly Phenomenon
Malignant and potentially dangerous musician/comics (skip the 'potentially')

Women of the NWFA

Maternal Madness
Tots influence new moms' picks for UT's season

Just Do It; Nobody'll Notice

Knoxville's NWFA Summit franchise turns Tornado

Even less heralded than Knoxville's intermittent forays into men's semi-professional football (Thundercats, Riverhawks, et al.) are the Knoxville Summit, the city's representative in the 3-year-old National Women's Football Association.

One of four Tennessee teams in the league (others include the Chattanooga Locomotion, the Nashville Dream, and the Bristol-area TN Venom), the Summit franchise has suffered from questionable management, bad football (playing home games at Halls High School, the team was 2-6 in 2003), and lack of press.

That could change in 2004. James Pennington, a retired Harriman resident, recently purchased the team and renamed it the Knoxville Tornadoes, in hopes of bringing new life to the moribund franchise.

Pennington's interest in the team was spurred by his wife Sue, who played defensive tackle for Knoxville last year, and for Chattanooga the year previous. According to Sue, her husband has been an enthusiastic supporter ever since she first donned pads and helmet. "He followed me everywhere I went, and attended every practice," says Pennington, one of the oldest members on the squad at 50.

When the team came up for sale this summer, after stormy relations between the league office and the previous owners, James leapt at the chance to buy out the franchise. (The NWFA sells franchise rights for up to $35,000, depending on locale.)

Having raised three sons, all of whom played organized football, Sue tried out for the NWFA on a whim after seeing an advertisement in the Harriman newspaper. "I thought it was just going to be a bunch of girls going to get together and do this and do that," she says. "I didn't think it would be serious."

The reality of a rigorous and well-organized league was a jolt at first, Pennington says, but it piqued both her interest and her determination. "I sat and studied about it, and then I got enthusiastic. I liked the chance to get out there and play rough."

She says her most cherished memory to date is that of her first solo tackle.

A truck-stop waitress and part-time nail technician, Pennington looks forward to her third year of competition in 2004, this despite a catalogue of knocks and bruises that includes a concussion and a permanently disfigured pinky finger. "What have I learned?" she asks. "I've learned that you should always finish what you start. And that you're never too old to play football."

'We have met the football family, and she is us'

by Mike Gibson

The Lifetime Network would seem an unlikely catalyst for launching a professional football career. But when Chattanoogan Sandra "Strong" Watson saw an ad soliciting players for a fledgling women's football league on the estrogenic cable network three years ago, she knew it was something she had to...tackle.

"Football has a reputation for being challenging, mentally and physically; there's an air about the game," she says, explaining her quick infatuation with the idea of playing a sport long inaccessible to female athletes. "The game makes you want to be part of it. If you play for any length of time, you're part of an unofficial brotherhood."

Or sisterhood, in any case. Three seasons, four torn ligaments, and countless contusions later, Watson is a battle-happy veteran of the National Women's Football Association, billed as the largest full-contact football league in the world with 37 teams in 24 states. Tonight she's sitting in the press box of Vanderbilt University Stadium in Nashville, giving a reporter an insider's perspective on the league championship contest between the Pensacola Power and the Detroit Demolition, and on the hazards of playing a game that offers equal opportunity apportionments of flesh-rending brutality.

"We've had a couple of shoulder surgeries and several knees [on the Chattanooga squad]," says Watson, showing off the tell-tale crimson stitchlines on her own knee, where it was surgically repaired after a vicious three-way ligament shredding in April. "We had three or four ACL [anterior cruciate ligament] tears on the team this year alone."

Watson hobbled through her last three games prior to the knee injury with a cracked bone in her right foot and three more in her right hand. She also played through the pain of a bad shoulder and torn ligaments in her wrist, the latter without so much as a wrap for the afflicted joint, since it would interfere with her mechanics as an offensive lineman and especially with her duties as a long snapper on special teams.

"The day after a game, I feel like I don't have a brain, and I'm made of Jello," Watson says. "The second day after is even worse; you feel like you've been hit by a truck."

For those reasons, she says, the staunchest critic of her gridiron endeavors has been her mother, predictably anxious that her daughter remain physically intact. "She hates it. You get hurt playing this game, but you play anyway."

The NWFA was founded in August 2000 by Catherine Masters, now the league owner and a former sports marketing representative for the Virginia Slims tennis tournament. According to NWFA vice president of marketing Debby Lening, Masters initially partnered with another group of investors seeking to found a women's league, but pursued her own course when their interests diverged.

"She thought she could do it better by herself, and I guess she was right," says Lening, a tall, strongly-built woman in her late 30s. The evening of the league championship, she has the flushed look of someone who has been running the Vanderbilt stadium stairs, such is the frenzy of her game night responsibilities.

Lening was one of 300 women who showed up for the inaugural try-outs for the Nashville Dream, a group consisting mostly of former college and high school softball, volleyball, and basketball players still yearning for the savor of competition. Lening explains that for athletic, sports-minded ladies, football has always been a sort of forbidden fruit, withheld from them through the devices of gender expectation.

"Guys don't understand what it's like for a woman, because they've got to play all their life," says Lening, who pushed an old Ford Taurus around her front yard to prepare herself for the punishing rigors of the game. "As women, we maybe got to play in the back yard when we were little, but few of us ever got to put the pads on."

Lening remembers that those early try-outs were chaotic affairs, as most of the women were foreign to both physical technique and gridiron vernacular. "One time a coach asked the tight ends to go to one side of the field and the wide receivers to the other," she says. "The girls all just looked at each other, so he said, 'OK, big girls go over here and little girls over there."

The 6-foot, 200-pound Lening made the team as a defensive tackle, but suffered a serious ankle fracture before her first game. She was eventually remanded to the custody of the league office, where she has since watched the league grow from eight teams that first year to its current 37-team, six-division structure.

"It's been a little like the Wild West sometimes," she chuckles, noting that organizational problems, communication snafus and other growing pains still occasionally trouble the league. "We're figuring out how it works. But people familiar with National Football League history have told us that it's all part of having a new sport and a new league, that we're on the right track. One thing we're proud of is that we've stayed in the black since almost day one."

The Detroit Demolition has already won one NWFA title, in the league's second season, and it's not hard to see why. Even from the remoteness of the Vandy press box, the Demolition bunch are quite evidently taller, rangier, and much faster than the stockier Pensacola players. Watson cracks that some of the Power players are so heavily built that her Chattanooga teammates nicknamed them "the Men."

"There are some corn-fed mamas on that team."

By the end of the first quarter, the Demolition is ahead 14-0, on the strength of its fleet runners and a selective, but effective passing attack. Watching the game is no less entertaining than watching a pretty good high school football contest. The women are well-coached, and fairly skillful; a somewhat smaller football enables the passing game to flourish even in smaller hands.

Winners of tonight's game receive naught but trophies. Watson relates that the NWFA is only nominally a professional league. Each team is left to its own devices as to how and whether it compensates players. In Chattanooga, team members receive an even split of the proceeds from their games at an area high school, where they average anywhere from a few hundred to 1,000 spectators per contest.

"I made all of six bucks last year," she says. "My knee surgery cost me $15,000, and that was before physical therapy. Money isn't what this is about."

The players are diverse in every respect; the Chattanooga roster includes a judge, several homemakers, a physical therapist, a truancy officer, a real estate agent, and a number of students. Watson, who works in retail but has a degree in landscaping, is a few years below the league average at age 27. Girls can join practice squads at age 17, and several regular players are over 50. One Pensacola grandmother is reputed to have dressed out at the age of 70.

Says Lening, "Most of these girls have to work. They're out there pounding on each other two nights a week, they travel to games on weekends, and then it's back to work on Monday."

Reactions to the league vary; most teams average more than 1,000 spectators per contest, and tonight's final draws nearly 6,000. But local media, especially newspapers, are often loathe to report NWFA results with even so much as a next-day box score. A representative for one team recalls a rare instance when two local sportswriters made an appearance at a game, but spent much of their time disparaging it, to the chagrin of others in the press box. "It was stuff to the effect of 'Boy, this crap sucks!'" she says, preferring to withhold the name of the city and team in question.

In the second quarter of the game at hand, Pensacola rallies to pull even with Detroit by halftime, due in large part to breakdowns in the Demolition's pass defense. In the press box, Demolition partisans have been prodded out of their early complacency and are pounding desks and loosing invective with each miscue. A well-executed football series is an inherently absorbing spectacle; for the open-minded, it's not hard to divest oneself of all notions of watching a "women's football game" and simply get caught up in its naturally visceral undulations.

The second half of the game is exciting by any measure. With 10 minutes left, trailing 21 to 14, the Pensacola quarterback launches a 30-yard rainbow to the opposite side of the field on what looks to be a broken play. The receiver waits a seeming eternity for the ball to fall out of the sky, then turns and dashes another 40 yards or so to complete a 70-yard touchdown. Pensacola successfully kicks the extra point conversion; it's worth noting that both teams will end the night perfect in point-after tries.

With the score tied and tension hanging in the air like a noose, Detroit methodically drives the better part of the field for the winning score, a short touchdown burst in the closing minutes. Watson draws a measure of satisfaction in seeing Pensacola fall, remembering with a grimace the bruises wrought in her first encounter with the Power team. "They turned my arms the same color as their [blue] jerseys," she rues.

Watson notes that a lot of NWFA fans are relatives, friends, and friends-of-friends of players, and a quick sampling of the departing spectators bears this out. The first group of fans accosted by a reporter outside the stadium turn out to be friends of Debby Lening, including old chum Kim Lignon from Lebanon, Tenn., and Bonnie Curtis, from Camden, whose son is Debby's boyfriend. Their party includes more than 20 people, some of whom traveled hundreds of miles for the game.

But just as indicative of what NWFA football is all about are Bill Tate and Carolyn Thomas, a couple of middle-aged Pensacola fans from Lillian, Ala. Both of them followed college and professional football in the past, but say that "Pensacola is our only team now."

Tate tells how circumstances were favorable to their attending their first NWFA game two years ago, held at a local high school football stadium only 15 minutes from home. Once they started going, says Tate, "Things got interesting."

He acknowledges that the women's game is perhaps not imbued with the same high drama, or possessed of the same potent athleticism as men's college or professional football. But there's more of a sense of community, camaraderie, even ownership among the friends, fans, and family members who come out to watch the hard-hitting women of the NWFA.

"It's like sitting in the stands surrounded by family," says Thomas. "Tonight, we were sitting behind the same people here we sit behind in Pensacola."

"This is more personal, more like a community," says Tate. "When I followed football teams before, I never referred to them in the first person, as 'our' or 'we' or 'us.' But the Pensacola Power...this is our team."