We sat down with Britni de la Cretaz, a freelance writer whose work focuses on the intersection of sports, gender, and culture, to talk about their new book Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women's Football League.
You can now get some sweet Oh, I Like That merch! Check out our store at Teepublic and buy some things!
Also, we want your gift recs! Please send us your favorite things to give (and be given) that do not come from big box stores or chains (including Amazon). Email us your recs at OhILikeThatpod@gmail.com or DM us on Instagram or Twitter @ohilikethatpod.
We had a nice long talk with freelance writer Britni de la Cretaz, one of our favorite people on Twitter and also the co-author (with Lyndsey D'Arcangelo) of the new book Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women's Football League. Britni told us about what it was like to research the league and write the very first book about this watershed moment in sports history. We also talked about the intersection of gender, sexuality, media, and sports. It was a blast and the book is great!
This episode was produced by Rachel and Sally and edited by Lucas Nguyen. Our logo was designed by Amber Seger (@rocketorca). Our theme music is by Tiny Music. MJ Brodie transcribed this episode. Follow us on Twitter @OhILikeThatPod.
Things we talked about:
Sally: Hey, this is Sally, and I'm dropping into your feed with two quick and exciting announcements. The first one is that Oh I Like That now has merch. That's right, you can go to teepublic.com/stores/oh-i-like-that -- we will of course have a link in the show notes -- and get our glorious logo by Amber Seger on just about any item you desire. Whether it's a sticker, or a t-shirt, probably a mousepad or a mask, kind of anything. We are thrilled that merch is now available, and if there's anything you'd like to see, on apparel or magnets or whatever, please let us know. I mean, not anything in the whole wide world, but anything related to the show, please let us know. We are definitely taking recommendations. Exciting announcement number two is that Rachel and I have a request to make of you listeners. For an upcoming episode about gifts and gift giving, we want you to tell us the gifts and independent that make you say "oh, I like that." There's just one rule: because we're looking to help people avoid Amazon, Walmart, and other big box stores and chains, the recommendations should be things that you can either get directly from the companies that make them, or from independent sellers and shops. You can also recommend things you can make yourself, like a great recipe or an easy DIY project, or are general enough that someone could probably find it at a local grocery store. So for example, Maldon sea salt. You can also share more general ideas, like the reader tip we got last year to get someone a book that's signed by the author. Basically, we want all your recs for your favourite gifts that do not come from big box or chain stores. We're going to take all of your recommendations, we're going to throw in some of our own, and we're going to talk about all of them in an upcoming episode just in time for gift guide season. Here is how to get us your recommendations: you can email us or send us a voice memo to ohilikethatpod@gmail.com. Let us know any information you want us to share about you -- your name, location, pronouns, et cetera. If you don't specify, we'll just keep it anonymous. And if you send us a voice memo, let us know if you're okay with it being in the episode or if you would prefer that it not be in the episode. You're also welcome to DM us on Instagram or Twitter @ohilikethatpod with all your recommendations. Okay, that's it, I'm done. Get some merch, send us some gift guide recommendations, and here we go.
Rachel: Welcome to Oh I Like That, a podcast about things we like, and occasionally things we don't. I'm Rachel Wilkerson Miller.
Sally: And I'm Sally Tamarkin. Rachel.
Rachel: Sally.
Sally: Every time I say my own name, I feel like I'm an NPR anchor, they have that really specific rhythm. And so then as I'm saying it, I try to get myself out of that rhythm, and then what comes out is a rhythm that I just don't know about.
Rachel: [Laughs]
Sally: So stay tuned. I'm going to keep tweaking that rhythm.
Rachel: Yeah. Workshop it until you get the exact right rhythm of introducing yourself, saying your own name.
Sally: And then I'm going to release it as a ringtone.
Rachel: All right, Sally, what is your vibe?
Sally: So my vibe, I'm feeling kind of low-key, I'm having one of those days where my corporeal vessel feels like it needs a little more TLC than usual. I haven't been having amazing nights of sleep, and I feel like I'm floating through in un-reality. So I'm glad that it's almost the weekend when we're recording because I hope to do some resting. Rachel, what's your vibe?
Rachel: My vibe is Friday before a little fall trip, which I realized that we also recorded recently, when I was about to take a trip which might give the impression that I take a lot of trips. This is my second trip since fall of November of 2019. We've done two trips in a month's time because after taking the first one, it was like, "Wow, that was great. What if we did that again?" And this time the plan is similar to Acadia, it's like the low-key version of it. So we're going to a place in the Catskills and we're going to just do nothing, like maybe go see a waterfall one of the days, but other than that, we're taking puzzles, we're taking games, we're taking books, we've got podcasts loaded up to listen to, so the plan is to just really, really, really chill out and then go outside and enjoy the nice fall weather when we're not chilling.
Sally: That sounds awesome. We should maybe do an episode on what to do when you want to have a weekend of doing nothing.
Rachel: Oh yeah.
Sally: That doesn't include streaming TV and movies, but all other kinds of stuff.
Rachel: I would be very into that.
Sally: Well, that sounds really fun. Please report back.
Rachel: I definitely will. So we have a very full agenda today, so let's just keep it moving. The big theme today is sports, and we're going to have a special guest joining us in a few, but before we get to that, we're going to do a mini-segment with just the two of us because we need to sort of explain to listeners why they're getting a sports podcast from us, which is a little, perhaps off-brand, and we are both recently established -- as in like a week and a half ago, we both, separately but simultaneously decided to become NBA fans.
Sally: Yeah, totally independently of one another. It's one of those things that, I often think, Rachel, we really are related, [laughs] but then I remember we're not related.
Rachel: We're not, yeah.
Sally: Yeah, I can't remember... I guess we were just texting, and you mentioned that you guys were getting into basketball? Or was it the other way around?
Rachel: It was the other way around. I was like, "What are you guys doing tonight?" and you were like, "Oh we're going to go on a date, and then we're going to see if we can watch the 76-ers game because we've decided to get into basketball," and I was like, "That is incredibly weird that you mentioned it because we also last night decided to get into basketball and watch the Nets game, and what a strange coincidence, there must be something in the air."
Sally: There's something in the air. And the other thing that I think has really bonded us is that we have gone through the trenches together of trying to figure out how one watches local basketball games live, which sounds like it should be incredibly simple, and I remember growing up in a world where you turned on the TV and there were basketball games on, but it turns out that it's incredibly complicated, and although much ink has been spilled trying to explain this -- clearly because there's a lot of good SEO around it -- really there's nothing out there that explains it totally clearly.
Rachel: No. And the short version is, you have to be willing to pay at least $80 a month on top of whatever else you're already paying. That's just flat out, you're going to have to pay $80 a month. But even if you're willing to pay that much money, it's still not that easy, which is the real mind-blowing thing that we've discovered, that even if you're willing to pay an excess amount -- because I was like, "Fine, I'll give you the $30 a month for the NBA Live app. I'll do the league pass of the 30 different passes that are available," still no good. Yeah, it's a wild labyrinth. But maybe we should share a little bit how we came to this and why.
Sally: Yeah, man, that's such a good question, and I guess I don't really know the answer. I don't know... so we moved to Philly three years ago, and it's always sort of appealed to me to get into the hometown sports team, and I want to get into baseball because my dad loves baseball and it would be really cute to bond over that with him and I used to watch it when I was a little kid, I was really into it, I collected baseball cards, but I actually find it really boring. We have Gritty here, which makes hockey really fun. But hockey, it's weird because they just punch each other in the face and that's actually just part of the sport.
Rachel: Right.
Sally: Unlike boxing, it's not the main sport. So football is really complicated. The games seem really long to me. I don't know if they're actually longer than basketball, but they feel longer to me. Basketball, to me, is like the soccer of the game you use your hands for.
Rachel: Yeah, other countries treat soccer like I think we probably treat basketball, that it's easy to follow, there's just one intention really that everyone's doing, the rules are fairly simple, and people get really into it.
Sally: Yeah, and also it's like you're watching a bunch of people move really fast and handle this ball really skilfully, which is fun and cool, and then occasionally someone gets airborne and dunks it, which is wild.
Rachel: Yeah.
Sally: And yeah, and also, as your girlfriend pointed out, the scores get really high [laughs] which just makes it feel really exciting.
Rachel: Yeah, there's a lot happening. You can look away for two minutes and actually miss things, which is not the case with many other popular sports in America.
Sally: Totally, totally. So yeah, so I think that wanting to be connected to something in Philly and sort of crossing out all of the other possibilities, I was like, "How about the Sixers? How about if I get into that?" And now I'm super into it because I'm paying an exorbitant amount just to watch the game, so I figure I can't just be a casual fan, I have to have the foam finger on.
Rachel: Right.
Sally: What about you? What's your origin story?
Rachel: Okay, so I realized that I love a sports documentary and have been watching a lot of them throughout the pandemic, but even before, and I realized I kind of like the culture -- or not the culture of sports, but the way that sports intersects with the culture, let's say. So I used to read Deadspin regularly because there's usually an interesting sort of social issue happening through sports that I found that I like to know about. And I love sports documentaries, as we've said, I think on the show, it's workplace drama, and basketball in particular, you've got a lot of petty people or people with little petty grievances. And because there are so many games and because people get traded a lot, there's a lot happening there where it's like you see these people again and again, and then somebody gets traded to a different team. And I think also so much of basketball for that reason is about sort of the gossip and what's happening and why. There's a lot of conversations about what's their motivation, and so many of these documentaries, it just comes down to like, "We would have won that game, but somebody said something rude to the other team before the game, and that changed everything." It's just... it's so emotional.
Sally: So true. Yeah.
Rachel: And I find that that is actually... so I've been enjoying the documentaries for that reason. And then I was reading a New York Magazine article that I thought was just going to be about an unvaccinated Nets player, and the article started off by being like, "The new NBA season starts tonight and it's going to be amazing," and I was just like, "What if I just watched it?" And so I turned to my girlfriend, I was like, "What if we watch the NBA?" and she was like, "Are you okay? Are you having a stroke?" Because I have no interest in sports, I never really have. Although I will say that getting into the Olympics this summer, I think also kind of helped this percolate. But my girlfriend really likes basketball. She used to play basketball. She's a Warriors fan. But in the entire time we've dated, she has never once been like, "Let's put a basketball game on," or "I'm going to go watch a basketball game." She's happy to dip in and out, but she genuinely does like it. And so she was delighted to hear this, but I think was still not totally sure if this would stick. And so the fact that I've now on multiple occasions, been like, "These are the games tonight, should we watch them? Should we watch another one?" She's still shocked by it every time. And to be honest, I'm shocking myself here. But I think that... here's the other thing I came to last night. I think that Real Housewives is in a low period, in part because of COVID. The seasons have not been good. And I think that sports is kind of hitting the same spot because you've got, again, you've got all these complicated dynamics and different regions, and they go on little trips together and everybody's kind of fighting, but not physically, but there's an emotional battle happening here. And I think... it's my off-season Housewives, I think. So that is also something that I came to during the pandemic. So I feel like these are my two forms of reality TV and I'm loving it. I'm learning two players on every team, I need flash cards, but I've learned a lot already, and it's been great.
Sally: That's awesome. Yeah, I have also learned a lot already. It's just kind of amazing how much or little, like how deep you can go if you really want to learn. And yeah, I think that sports is definitely reality TV, particularly if you're also... like, occasionally I'll search Sixers on Twitter to see what people are saying during games, and there's so much just pettiness like you said.
Rachel: Yes!
Sally: And it's definitely like, I feel like if you like, not just Housewives, but also Game of Thrones because of the intersecting storylines, there's just really good intersecting storylines in the NBA. There's the fun of watching the games, and then like you said, there's all of the stuff that's also going on between games and stuff like that. And I have similarly surprised myself, I watched the Sixers game last night, and I was watching the post-game wrap-up where the anchors were chopping it all up and stuff, and I was sitting there rapt. And a lot of times when I'm watching TV, I'm also doing other things such as tweeting or whatever, and my partner looked over at me and she was like, "You're actually paying attention to this." I was like, "I know, it's really weird." What can I say? I'm a hardcore sports fan now.
Rachel: I know.
Sally: I'm going to start calling in to Drive Time Sports Radio and complaining about coaches and making demands of players.
Rachel: Yeah, I think I'm well on my way. Also, there's a whole separate thing about the business of it all, which is also fascinating, of how the NBA operates, and I don't know. I'm like, I want everything about the logistics of this. I want to know everything about the uniforms. I want to know everything about the court and how it gets painted. Also the advertising, how every single fucking thing that happens in these games is sponsored by something, and it's just like, "Here we go to like the KIA tip-off or jump ball," and then it's like "the State Farm audio assist," and it's like, where are you coming up with these things? It's actually remarkable. I'm waiting for somebody to get a bloody nose and it's like "The Tampax play the game." They just come up with everything and I'm like, somebody's making incredible commissions off of this. I want to get into that business, it seems fun. But I think there's just so much to look at that I feel a bit like, we were hanging out with friends a few weekends ago, and they had their cat out in a tent in the backyard, and they were saying, he is going to be so tired tonight because he's not moving, he's just looking at everything. He's looking at birds, he's looking at trees. And that is how I feel after watching these games where I'm like, "Oh my God, I'm exhausted," because there's so much to look at.
Sally: There's so much to look at, so much to pay attention to. And we've had entire conversations just about colors of uniforms and logos.
Rachel: Yeah.
Sally: I feel like, honestly, you can get into the aesthetics and the sneakers. You don't even really have to watch the games if the athletics part of it doesn't interest you. Just become a connoisseur of the way logos have changed over the last few years.
Rachel: Oh my God, yes. 100%.
Sally: Fascinating.
Rachel: Also, there are off-court outfits too. These players are dressing, they take pride in their appearance, and I think that's also something that makes it really fun to watch is to see their individual swagger and style because it is like... They're all wearing uniforms, but they recognize that hair is 90% of the game, but then all they've got is hair and that includes beards and then shoes, and they accessorize in a way that it is really interesting to see sort of how they all interpret this dress code and this assignment. It's great. I'm so into it. I'm loving it.
Sally: I am too. We should maybe get a real hardcore basketball fan to come on. We would have to meet one. But [laughs] maybe...
Rachel: Yeah, I think I know one. Caroline Moss' husband Dan, who is also, I will say that the group chat that I'm in with him and some other people, we talk about basketball a lot, and that also helped with this, when I pitched my theory of, this is just like Real Housewives, he was like, "Can you please say this to Caroline?" and Caroline wasn't buying it. [Laughs] But I do think that most hardcore basketball fans are not going to appreciate this theory of the NBA is just like Real Housewives. I think that might incite some ire.
Sally: But I will say, next time you meet someone and they tell you that they're really into watching live sports, be like, "Oh, I'm really into reality TV too," and then start talking about Housewives, see what happens. [Laughs]
Rachel: Yeah.
Sally: All right, well, I think that is a good explanation of where we're coming from, so now let's move on to our main segment today. So for our main segment, we have a special guest, Britni de la Cretaz. Britni is a freelance writer whose work focuses on the intersection of sports, gender and culture. They are the co-author of HAIL MARY: The Rise and Fall of the National Women's Football League, and their work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, espnW and more. Britni, welcome to Oh I Like That.
Britni: Hi, thank you for having me.
Rachel: Yeah, thank you for joining us. We're so thrilled to have you today.
Sally: We're thrilled you're here. We are obsessed with your book and have been texting about it all week. Britni's book is out now, and I highly recommend everyone get themselves a copy. We will include a link in the show notes of where you can get the book. Pick it up at your local indie bookstore, preferably. So okay, let's get into it.
Rachel: All right, so Britni, this book actually sort of is a Longreads article about the Toledo Troopers that you published in 2019. Can you talk a little bit about how you came to the Troopers and kind of to this topic in general, and then how it grew into a book proposal and then your book?
Britni: Yeah, so this book started kind of as a joke between me and my co-author, Lyndsey D'Arcangelo. We are both sports writers. We met in a Facebook group for sports writers of marginalised genders. And she's a football writer. I happen to not really know much about football, I don't even watch football, but at the time, I was the sports columnist for Bitch Media, and I was working on a piece about the current leagues. There's several semi-pro women's leagues that most people don't know about. But I'm a history nerd, and I like to understand the context within which things exist, and even if it doesn't make it into the piece, that's background info I'm looking for. And I was like, "There must... there is a book, there has to be a book about women in football," and it turns out no, [laughs] no books really about women and football, really sexist books about how women can learn about football so they don't lose their man on Sunday and make them watch the game with him.
Sally: That's a good tip. We'll talk about that in another episode.
Rachel: [Laughs]
Britni: You should check out the listings on Amazon, they are quite something. So I am angrily sending these links to Lyndsey, being like, "This is ridiculous!" and she's like, "You should write a book," and I was like, "Yeah, okay, whatever. But if I write it, you're writing it with me." So somehow then that project got agent-ed. We didn't even have a proposal. A friend of ours was like, "My agent would love that." This is not how that works, by the way. For anyone listening, this is not usually how you get an agent. So we had an agent for this women's football project, and we wrote a proposal that did not sell. It was about general women in football throughout history, and yeah, it was pretty dry actually. People were like, "There's no narrative here." But as I was researching for that proposal, we came across the Troopers, the Toledo Troopers in the NWFL, and I was just starting a gig as Longreads sports columnist, and that column was sports told from the perspective of the losers, and the Troopers were the winning-est team in pro football history, so I wondered what happened when they lost their first game, and I set out to recreate and tell that story. And as I tracked down players, I was like, "Wait a second, there was like a whole league here. They were playing people. Who were they playing? And why can't I find anything about them?" And I went back to Lyndsey and our agent, and I was like, "You guys, I know we're going to revise the proposal and I think this is it." And yeah, it just opened up from there.
Rachel: That's incredible. I was shocked, when I went to look at the Longreads article, that it was published in 2019. Like the amount of time between that article and now a finished book hitting shelves is really short, and this book is so clearly research heavy and interview heavy that it's so remarkable to me that you two turned it around that quickly.
Britni: Yeah, I think something that we decided early on, and we make this really clear in the book, is that this is a partial history. There were, I don't know, 14 teams, I think that's what we come to, we're probably wrong, there were probably more that we don't know about, thousands of women would have taken the field as part of this league. There is absolutely no way to track down that many people, and if we did, it would have been really unwieldy, and I think any project, there has to be a point when you call it and you say, "Okay, this is the container that the book is going to be, and our hope is that players, kids of former players, relatives are going to come out of the woodwork when this book publishes, and we're going to learn so much more." I'm so excited for the stories that we're going to get to learn after this book comes out. Because like I said, this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of this league.
Sally: It's sort of incredible how much you have to rely on just individual memories and oral history and story-telling because this was not that long ago. And you talk about that in the book, how records are kept of women's sports and so on. Yeah, I can't wait to see what comes out of this when people who were in the leagues and have never really talked about it before, or they have, but only in their own lives and homes, and it gets out there to wider... I don't know, just like sports fans.
Britni: The coolest thing is when you have someone's memory and you know it's faulty and it doesn't quite line up, and then you have the newspaper clippings and the game programs that somebody has kept in their closet for 50 years, and you start to be able to put all those things together and find the places that they match up.
Sally: So cool.
Rachel: And some of that we write about, there was an on-field, I'll call it a skirmish. It was a fight. A real fight between two of the teams. And you have these recollections from the players and then we find a newspaper article, and over the course of it we're able to pin down which game it happened in and what the score would have been because the only coverage from the game was the fight, like nobody wrote about actually the play on the field. And through process of elimination and people's memories, everyone was slightly wrong in how they told it. But through process of elimination, you end up figuring out it had to have been this game and this must have been the score, this is the only way this works out. And that's really cool. And also we had this moment that opens the book, and it is from the Longreads article where the Troopers lose for the first time to this brand new team, the Oklahoma City Dolls, and everyone is shocked, and every single player on both teams agreed that it was a flea flicker play that was the game-winning play. And there was no doubt, everybody on both teams just knew that was the play, that was the play that beat us, and you don't have to doubt it because you know it's right. And it was so cool because after you interview these players, there's a point when they're about to tell you about the play, and I know I can predict they're going to say it was a flea flicker.
Sally: Oh that's just so cool.
Britni: And then they say it, they're like, "It was a flea flicker", and I'm like, "Oh my God". I love it so much. So those are really cool moments.
Rachel: That's amazing.
Sally: That is really cool and a really fun thing about reading this is not just that you can tell that the research is really deep in that you guys did a lot of it, but also that you were triangulating multiple sources, and that makes it really cool. Just that you were able to reconstruct that from all of these different pieces. So for listeners who, like me, and I think also like Rachel, who didn't know there was even a National Women's Football League, can you give a little bit of an overview about how it came to be and then also what it evolved into?
Britni: Yeah, so the cool thing about this league, cool, sad, I don't know, is that even women's sports historians don't know that there was a pro women's football league.
Sally: Wow.
Britni: It's wild. This league started the way most women's football stories throughout history start, which is that some men thought it would be good entertainment to watch women play football. And that's something we go into in the book, but there is this thread that runs throughout the history of women's football in this country and it is American Football, right? That it's a men's game, it's a masculine sport, and when women play, it must be for a lark and they must not be very serious. The other common thread is that the women show up and they actually want to play, and then the men are like, "Oh my". The first recorded game in football history was in 1896 and the police had to come break it up. It was supposed to be entertainment before a men's social ball and the women were like, "You said, football, right? We're going to play."
Sally: That just makes me feel proud. I just... I feel good about that.
Britni: Right? And so this is what happened. This Cleveland-based promoter named Sid Friedman, he did things like put on the Miss Outer Space Pageant, he was going to send the winner to the moon.
Sally: Time out.
Rachel: We texted about that specifically. [Laughs].
Sally: I copied and pasted that entire thing to Rachel because I was like, "We have to talk about Miss Outer Space and that if you win, you got to go to outer space", which was just like a... that's just like, you're just making a thing up. You're like, "If you win this, you get the ability to fly. I'm going to give that... " It's like, you can't do that, right?
Britni: Right. Now, understand at this point, we had not yet landed on the moon. So this is not... no one had done it, but the winner of this beauty pageant that Sid Friedman put on, was going to get to do that. These were the types of things that Sid Friedman did. And so he conceived of the idea for a women's football troupe in 1967, the idea being they were going to be like a barnstorming venture, he at one point envisioned tearaway skirts, they were going to play men's teams. It was going to be entertainment. But like the women before them, these women showed up and they were like, "You said, football, right?" And they wanted to play. And I mean, think about it, football is king in so many places, like college football was starting to get really big at this time, and women just had no access to this. They had no access to most sports, this was before Title IX, but they really had no access to football, and so when they saw an opportunity, and it's the only opportunity, they were going to take it. So when Sid Friedman realized that these women wanted to play and could play, he decided to think bigger, and he decided he was going to have this league to rival the NFL. And he started setting up other teams, including the Troopers who we mentioned before, and they were going to compete against each other, and those were really the beginnings of the league. And what happened, I think, is a couple of things. One, Friedman didn't want to give up control and so he was trying to own all of these different teams, and I think it was too much for him, the overhead was too high, there was no money coming in yet. So he's having to rent out stadiums and provide uniforms and insurance and all of that for all of these teams, and it was too much. And the other thing that happened, and we see this happen with the Troopers, and shortly after that a team called the Columbus Pacesetters, is that they take themselves way more seriously than Sid Friedman will ever take them. And once they have a coach that takes them equally seriously, they're able to say kind of screw you to Sid Friedman, and to walk away from his fledgling little operation that he's got going on. And so it really is the women's belief in themselves and having supportive coaches around them who believed in them too, that allowed them to break away and decide amongst themselves that they were going to form a central league, the one that Friedman was never quite able to get off the ground, and that was in 1974 with seven teams, and that was the NWFL.
Sally: Incredible. And I kept thinking about A League Of Their Own when I was reading.
Rachel: Me too.
Sally: Which I feel like is probably the most facile comparison, and potentially a lot of people have said it and maybe it's an annoying observation.
Sally: But I just... because in the movie A League Of Their Own, in the hit Tom Hanks movie A League Of Their Own, the players are really into it and they're not fucking around, and the dudes are... it's a money grab, it's to make money when the dudes are away, but the athletes actually take it really seriously and everyone learns a lot of heart-warming lessons and so on, and I feel like that's what was happening here.
Rachel: Yeah, we were also texting about Glow, the show on Netflix and in it... that and A League Of Their Own, it fell in line with both of those things, where you just have these men who have this idea. The idea was never coming from women in those cases, and then the women just stepped up and sometimes the men sort of tolerated that and worked with it and were happy to, but a lot of times it was like, they were sort of bothered by the women and sort of put upon by it. And so I think you have sort of both types of people in this book, you have men who just genuinely care for these women and want them to succeed, and then you have men who were just like, "I'm here to make money, they're a product, nothing more."
Britni: And I think what you see is sometimes these teams started with coaches who underestimated the players, and a lot of times there are stories where you're kind of reading the newspaper coverage from the first season and there's a coach and then he doesn't return in any of the following coverage, and when you ask the women about that, they'll be like, "He talked down to us. He treated us high schoolers, he didn't think we could play. It didn't work out." And so then you'd have someone else come on who was really dedicated, and this was all volunteer, a lot of the men that were coaching these teams had played college football or played high school football, they didn't have a lot of other coaching opportunities, some of the men that coached Sid Friedman's teams were former NFL players that had hoped to coach in the NFL, but they were Black men who were denied the opportunity to have those jobs, and this was how they were able to coach football. Also, you have a lot of the men that come out and they're like, "I didn't believe in these women at first, and I kind of thought it would be fun, and then I saw what they could do and how eager they were to be coached, and I was all in." You've got the team in LA, the Dandelions, their coach, his name was Bob Edwards, he admitted to the newspapers that he didn't think much of the team when he came out, and the first year didn't think they could handle complicated playbook and really gave them only a few plays to run, and he admitted in season two, "I was wrong", and he gave them a much more thorough playbook for the second season because he realized that they could learn it and they wanted to.
Rachel: So you've mentioned the Dandelions, you have mentioned the Dolls, and I think one of the things that stuck out to both of us when we were reading this was the team names and how so often they were just so... So hyper-feminine. It was the Bluebonnets, the Dandelions, the Cowgirls, they were just were all in with like, these are lady sports teams and we don't want you to forget it. I was really expecting them to just call a team like the Tits at some point because it was so on the nose. And you do see a shift, and it wasn't all of them, they were obviously the Troopers and I think the Detroit Demons, it wasn't everyone, but it did feel like even when naming the teams, they just were never going to forget. And that's fine, there's nothing wrong with a powerful flower, but it did feel noticeable that the names were so often like the Queens and -- the Powder Kegs was a clever one, I'll give them that, but they really wanted you to remember these are ladies.
Britni: Oh yeah, there was not the Tits, but there was the Babes. So.
Rachel: Yeah, right. [Laughs]
Britni: But the Dandelions, it's funny because I was like, "Oh, the Dandelions," and one of the Dolls players was like, "the Dolls kind of sucked, but at least we weren't the Dandelions" when I interviewed her, and then we found out why they were named the Dandelions and it was because it was a pretty flower that you just can't kill, and I was like, "All right, well, I see what you were going for there."
Rachel: Exactly.
Britni: Yeah.
Rachel: Yeah. It just was interesting. I don't know where I sort of land on it, but it was definitely noticeable that the names were mostly chosen to remind everybody that it was women playing out there.
Sally: My other pretty facile observation is that it's wild to me that, because when you think about the way people think about what women are capable of intellectually, you associate the 19th century with people thinking that if women read too many books, it's going to cause them physical harm, but this was the 1970s, and so it's wild that that strain of thinking was still influencing people.
Britni: Yeah. I think some of it is just like plain sexism, right? I think there's something else though that gets into the systemic issues, which is that men get to learn football as boys. There is organized football for them to play, and they evolve and learn the game over the course of their lifetime, and by the time they're adults playing at the professional level, they have been playing and studying it for years. Girls are denied that access, they still are, largely. And so you have these women who played pick-up games with their brothers in the streets, and that was the only access to football that they had. And so a woman named Dora Stokes who played for the Oklahoma City Dolls was telling me, she was a running back and she was like, "I could watch a football game and tell you who the running back was and watch them take off and run down the field and score a rushing touchdown, and until I played, I did not understand the role that the other players on the team had in the running back's success. I did not understand the intricacies of what is involved in a play, and the ways that the running back is only successful because her O-line gets the blocks that they need to get. Those are things that I learned through playing that I could not have learned watching on TV." And so people say, "Well, this is pro football, what was it like?" And if we're being real, it was kind of like a high school level on-field product, even though these women had been athletes their whole lives and they probably picked it up much more quickly than if I went out and tried to learn football. I have never played the throwing and catching sports, so it probably would not go well. These women, they were athletic, some of them were collegiate athletes, softball players under some of the first teams that were under Title IX, these were real athletes and so they caught on quickly. So it's not just that, "Oh, maybe women can't handle this," but these women are newer to the game as well, and how long does it take to actually learn the intricacies and the ins and outs of a game when you're limited in time?
Sally: That makes so much sense that if you start to learn this shit when you're a little kid, it just becomes another way that your brain just thinks. And learning as an adult is like a whole other situation.
Rachel: So for those who aren't totally immersed in the business of sports, Britni, can you sort of define what makes a league technically professional? Is it just that the players get paid, or is there more to it than that, how do we define what makes a pro league?
Britni: Yeah, I think it's kind of loosely that the players are getting paid on some level. If you read this book about this league that was considered to be a pro league, I mean, it's not anywhere near the NFL, right?
Rachel: Right. Even to say the players are getting paid is like, well, sort of. Yeah.
Britni: It's a stretch. The intention was there. They'd give them $25 a game. Most of them never saw that money, or they did for a few games and that was it. They had medical insurance for a lot of the players. When the owners really started to lose money, sometimes at some point, some of the teams had to cut insurance and the women were playing without any protection. And they had full-time jobs, remember, and if they get hurt on the field, they can't apply for workman's comp or anything like that. So yeah, they're in theory getting paid to play and the hope was that this would be eventually on par with an NFL, but if you look at the women's leagues today that exist, they are all semi-pro, and they're not even pretending that the women are going to get any money to play football. It's very clear that that's not going to happen. And so they're semi-pro, and that's the main difference.
Rachel: It seems like to the women, the money was sort of... it obviously wasn't the point or they wouldn't have been doing it, and it's probably the case today with these women who are semi-pro. They're doing it because they want to do it and that it's organized and it's there and there's an opportunity, but it seems like making money can't be part of the equation at this stage or at the stage in the 70s. That wasn't the point, they just loved playing football and wanted to play.
Britni: It's incredible what women will do to live out their dream and get access to -- even the Lingerie Football League that some people may know of from the early aughts. We can get into whether or not that was real football, or it's another example of men having a vision and exploiting women. But a lot of those women were real athletes and they were willing to go on TV and play football in their underwear because it was a chance to play football. And there is an incredible documentary streaming on Hulu that is about the Boston Renegades, they are what I call the current day Toledo Troopers, they are the best women's football team in the country. It's called Born To Play, and it is shocking how little has changed in 50 years, that these women are at their day jobs and then they only have a few hours a week to dedicate to football. If they could -- and they talk about this, the quarterback of the Renegades will say, "Tom Brady has endless hours every week to study film. He can study film from the time he wakes up to the time he goes to bed, and I don't have that luxury. I will never be that good, not because I'm not capable of being that good, but because I don't have the resources." There was another player who retired because of injuries, and she said, "I saw this NFL player came back from the same injury I had, he came back in six months and I thought, 'Well, if he can do it, I can do it'." And she's like, "Well, I couldn't do it because his whole job is to rehab, I can't do that." And that's what these women, they're playing, they're putting their bodies on the line for absolutely no money, no recognition, no fame, none of that, because it's what they want to do. And when you think about how good they are with such little resource, and you think about the talent that we are denied the ability to watch because they are never given the resources to develop the way that they should. I think about everything we miss out on, by not letting them kind of become what they could be, and the fact that they do all of this despite all that, is really incredible to me.
Rachel: Yeah, it just speaks to a deep desire to do this thing in any form, in any way that you can, and it's a shame that there isn't a more, not even lucrative, but just more sort of supportive way of doing it. Yeah, the money would be nice, but also just the ability to properly do it, to do that 40 hours a week or more, versus on top of your full-time job and all these other things.
Sally: Yeah, when I read that they were making their own padding out of shoulder pads, for their boobs, I was like, man. That just kind of reminded me, this is a fucking contact sport, you're really knocking into each other. And yeah, they love it so much, they want to play it, but there's also the element of they love it so much they want to play, and even the fact that they don't really even have the proper protection, they're going to play anyway because that's how bad they want it.
Britni: Oh yeah, and the Demons, Detroit team wore hand-me-down uniforms from the Lions, the NFL team, and they're so huge on them. I have this picture of them all sitting in these giant jerseys. I think though, of the equipment and the not fitting and them just playing anyway, I actually think of baseball umpires today, who there are so few women umping baseball and they don't even make umpires gear for women's bodies, and so the chest plates are designed for flat chests, and there is this woman in Florida who every year drives to the two umpire schools in the country. They're both in Florida. She calls ahead to see if they have any women students that year, and if so, she drives and brings a heat gun and teaches the women how to mold their umpire equipment to fit their bodies.
Rachel: That -- I mean -- that fucking sucks. Good for her, but come on, the fact that this is a known thing and there's nothing that anyone who makes this padding can do.
Britni: I've asked about it. I was told, the demand is not there. But whether it's taking a heat gun to umpire equipment to mold it to your body or stapling knee pads onto your shoulder pads to create breast cushion, this is what they had to do.
Sally: "There's not demand for it," is the most depressing through line of a lot of these stories of, "Well, people are going to want it, people aren't going to watch it, people aren't going to do it," and it's like that's the excuse for never providing the opportunity. Okay. So Britni, you have a chapter called Media Miscues, and I thought it was really interesting, and also really liked that you and your co-author talked about the role the media played in shaping the story of the league. Can you talk about that a little bit? Because it sounds like the media did a lot to shape perceptions in many different ways, and of course, I'm also interested in how that has and hasn't changed in the current day.
Britni: There was no way to write the story and not, because me and Lindsey were looking up -- so how we did this was, we split the teams in half and we each kind of went down our rabbit holes and then came back together for the writing process, and we would be texting each other these newspaper clippings that were just like, "Holy shit. Can you believe this?" The level of sexism, the women's play is insulted, they're constantly asked if they're libbers, women's libbers, because there's no other explanation that women would possibly be playing football. They're consistently asked what their husbands or male partners think about them playing, which most of them did not have male partners, nor did they want them. And the coverage is so shaped by the people telling the stories, and those people were usually men. And often, it was very easy to piece together the beginnings of these teams because they are a curiosity, they are not in these particularly large markets, they're in the Rust Belt mostly, so there's not a lot of competition from other sports teams, and there are a lot of stories. What is relatively dependable about those stories is the play-by-play, is the score, that's what these men are trained to write. They can write a gamer. What is less dependable about these stories, as we try to write a book based on archival documents, is the information. And it is so skewed by these men's perspective, that the only questions they're asking are about women's lib, and in some cases, I heard from players who said, "Oh, they wholesale made up quotes from me. I never even talked to that reporter, but I wasn't willing to push back because we were just grateful we were getting coverage." So then you have to ask the question of what is reliable and what is true, even in something that we consider to be a primary source document. We don't know, we'll never know. And so I think those are such interesting questions to ask and to grapple with, and I don't actually hear that talked about a lot. But the other thing that got really hard and anyone who reads the book will see that the end years of the NWFL is very little of what we talk about in the book. And actually, that's one thing I hope I get to learn more about after this is published. I hope folks that were on those teams will get in touch. There was no more coverage, people stopped covering them because they weren't interesting anymore and they weren't new. And so there's very little that's available, records or anything like that, and it just completely drops off. And it's like, "Well, if it's not in the newspapers, did it actually happen? Maybe nobody remembers it, it's not even there to be found." And I think that's another trend that really became clear when you look at just the wealth of coverage that happened in the beginning, and the absolute dearth towards the end.
Rachel: One of the things that sticks out to me is the reporter who did actually do a really nice job, you guys write that this person took it seriously and wrote a really nice piece, and then the newspaper ran a horribly sexist cartoon in the middle of it. That it's like, okay, we finally get the coverage we deserve, and then it's just like this absolutely disgusting caricature of a woman playing football, plunked in the middle of it to just kind of undercut the good will that this person had engendered.
Britni: Yeah. And so much of the coverage focused on the looks of the athletes and reinforcing their femininity or comparing and contrasting players that the press deemed conventionally attractive, versus those that they did not. There was a player on the Dallas team, named Bobby Grant, and she was a very large woman, she played the line, and their quarterback was this tall, slender woman named Barbara O'Brien. And the press would run images of them side by side and make comments about Grant needing Weight Watchers. They would post headless photos of her body from sitting behind on the bench and really, really horrible. And what's fascinating about that is, even those players, they were like, "Yeah, the coverage was really bad, but at least we're being covered." And you have these women who were the fastest women on the team, and I was writing this for a story that we published in Sports Illustrated, which is bonus content, we discovered the bulk of it after the book was finished, and I'm looking through newspaper articles for a quote from one of the women who is mentioned in the story, and she is one of the best players on the team. And I go looking and the only quotes available in the newspaper articles I can find are how she likes to play football to keep her trim, and how it's good for her figure. And then, that raises questions for me, of, "Did she say that?" And if she did, she must have been asked a question that was leading about that and that was it. And I was like, "I don't want to talk -- this is not what I care about from her."
Rachel: Man. So on a more positive note, when you were talking about this in the book, you also talked about how the players often talked about how this was actually quite good for their body image, that it was a place where they were celebrated for being big or they got to prioritize what they could do. And one player said, after being on the team, she didn't feel like she needed to lie about her weight on her driver's license anymore, and I thought that was really remarkable, even in the phase of this incredibly sexist coverage, the players were finding something really valuable in how they saw themselves, through playing football.
Britni: I did not think that when I started writing this book, I was going to have a whole section on football as a fat positive space. [Laughs] But I was so excited about this development and to hear this. And you think about it, there are women still today, but definitely back then, their looks are policed, both in terms of what size their body should be and how feminine they should be. So also a lot of these players were butch or more masculine in presentation, and none of that mattered when they were on the field. And you have a quarterback on the Troopers who's five feet tall, and they have a blocking back on that team, who's 4 foot 11, and then you have other players who are six foot tall, they weigh 250 pounds on the line, and everyone looked different and their body performed a different skill and filled a different need on the field. And so their body was celebrated for what it could do, and if you were a larger player, this was a space where you were really, really valued for your size and for what you brought. And I heard one of the women on the Pacesetters, her name is Linda Stamps, and she told me that one of her favorite things about it was watching some of the bigger woman who would come out who always tried to make themselves smaller by the way they walked, their shoulders were hunched, their head was down, they were constantly trying to do that so that they wouldn't stand out so much, and after a few weeks of practice, they were standing taller, and you could see that they felt pride in their body and what it could do on the football field and how it helped their team. And that was a remarkable part of the story, and also no one's femininity is going to be policed when they're executing a tackle, nobody cares. You're all in the same uniform. Unlike the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League that A League of Their Own is based on, the women did not play in dresses, they wore football uniforms, and so it was also a place free from gender policing and that was another thing that was really valuable to a lot of the women.
Sally: It's fucking awesome.
Rachel: So on that note, I was really excited that there was an entire chapter that talked about gay shit, and that there was a lot of great history. I learned a ton about Dallas lesbian bars, including that one was called Jugs, and also that there was a 'Bring your own steak' night at these bars, where you brought your own steak and the bar supplied the potatoes and salad, and this is just... I really wish we could make that happen in current queer spaces. Why not more 'bring your own steak' night? This is genius.
Sally: It's the only theme night of a bar that I've ever heard and been like, "Oh, I definitely want to do that."
Rachel: Yeah, that sounds incredible. That sounds so nice. But also through this, you talked a lot about community in these communal spaces and how bars were kind of the only space, it was the 1970s. And a lot of really heartbreaking stories, a lot of really heartwarming stories on a lot of stories that was just like, "Yeah, that sounds gay," where you've got these players dating and breaking up, and dating, I think it was a trainer or coach, somebody's ex-girlfriend. Just so many great details in there, that I loved that chapter so much because I felt like I could picture these people and their lives as whole people. And it was also really interesting to read about how for a lot of the straight players, this was their first time getting to know gay people, and that was a really big deal for them. I just, I love that chapter. I think that a lot of people really appreciate that you included it and went into such detail.
Britni: So Lindsey and I are both gay, and I wrote that chapter, and every player I talked to was like, "I'm so gay. Let me tell you about it." And every player that Lindsay talked to was either straight or didn't want their identity in the book, and Lindsey was like, "How do you keep getting all of the good gay gossip from 1970 or whatever?" And I was like, "I don't know, but I love it."
Rachel: That's amazing.
Britni: Yes. And I think you can tell the story without mentioning these player's sexual orientation. It was also never an option, that was never something that we were going to do. Obviously, not every player was gay. I think the estimates from players range somewhere between 50% and 70% of their team was gay. And that just felt really important, because as a queer person, I think we know that we have always been here, but we're so invisibilized, and the clues are there if you know to look for them. I did this with the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. I wrote a piece surfacing the queerness of those players, and I used their obituaries to put that together. The clue is there. The word 'long-time companion'. We're there, and the fact that the bars were so central to these players' lives, the bars took out ad space in the game programs, and a lot of the fans are from the community. There's this really lovely story that is not in the book. Again, we discovered this after, and it feels like... I feel like this is the thing to... So the Dallas bars bought ad space in the program and the players were really open about this, and in Columbus, in the Pacesetters, a lot of them were gay, and one of their bars, Summit Station, had offered to buy ad space. And the players were really worried that they would no longer be considered family-friendly if they had a lesbian bar advertising in their program and they turned it down. The Pacesetters are also the longest team to play in the league. They played until 1988 when we think it folded, and there's a 15th anniversary program from the Columbus Pacesetters' 1988 year, and in the back is a full page ad that says, "Summit Station supports the Pacesetters," and the woman who told me they'd turned the ad down played in 1974 and '75. She had not seen the 15-year program. When I opened it, and I saw the ad, I just started to cry and I was like, "Oh my God, they did it." And it was just a really beautiful moment of, yeah. I just... I got really emotional over that. And I think it's important too, to talk about that these women were playing in the middle of the country. We're a few years removed from Stonewall, most of the women didn't know what Stonewall was. They'd never heard of it. So when we talk about queer liberation, it's always like, "Well, post-Stonewall." They're like, "What the hell is Stonewall, and what does it have to do with me in Oklahoma City? I don't know what that is." And I felt so happy to be able to give a voice and visibility to the people who are queer in other parts of the country, that sometimes we forget -- not we, but mainstream kind of culture and analysis forgets about.
Rachel: Man, I just got chills when you told that Pacesetters story.
Sally: Me too.
Rachel: That's really special.
Britni: It's not in the hard cover that just came out. We're hoping it will be in the paper back, but it ran as an excerpt exclusive with Sports Illustrated, and you can read it there.
Sally: Okay, amazing. We will make sure to link to that in the show notes too.
Rachel: Oh, I'm feeling emotional. That's lovely. I'm so glad that you two were the ones to write this book. Because it is obvious that, of course you have to tell this story, but it's not a given that it was going to be told, and I'm so glad it's in there.
Britni: This feels like the greatest honor of my career. I feel so lucky. I don't know, this is a vulnerable whatever thing, but when I think about this, I'm like, "Oh, I want my book to do well, because I wrote a book," and I never think about that with this. I think, "I want this book to do well because what these women did was so important and I want everyone to know about it," and I'm so grateful. How often do you stumble across something like this, that hasn't really been told yet? It feels surreal, and I feel so lucky that I've gotten to do it. And I've been getting texts all day, from people associated with the Pacesetters, who have read the piece in Sports Illustrated, and I've been crying. It's just... yeah.
Sally: Yeah, I started to get a little teary when you were telling the 15th anniversary program story.
Rachel: Yeah, we both had the thought of, "This reminds us of A League of Their Own." We think we both thought of Glow, and I kept reading this and thinking like, "This better get fucking optioned," because we all now know the story of women playing baseball. I loved that movie when I was a kid, I loved it. These stories matter, and when you write the book that can then be the source material for a movie that is a classic beloved movie that everyone's seen, and you say, "Hey, also by the way, many of these players were gay," or you talk about race and how that mattered and you talk about their working class roots and you fight for that to be in there. That's what leads it to getting in front of a wide audience. This is not a small thing that you've done. This is incredibly remarkable, and I hope that it gets as big as it deserves to be and takes its rightful place in the culture, so that people know these stories, because they're really good and they're really special.
Britni: Thank you. I will just say, if we get optioned, I'm going to fight for butch representation on screen. Give me fully rounded butch characters who are desirable and have love interests. Please.
Rachel: Yes, I'm like, I hope your contract is built for that, but if it's not, I know that you will... Again, I'm just like, this book is in great hands with you and Lindsey writing it and fighting for it and representing these players. I just feel so happy for you and so glad it exists.
Sally: It's, I think, wild to discover a topic that hasn't been written about because it sort of feels like you can look up something and there's a lot of Wikipedia stuff and also tons of books, and there wasn't a book and now there is, which is fucking cool.
Rachel: You wrote it, that's so cool, and you did all these interviews and it's wild that something that happened so recently could just be sort of so undetected and how there wasn't any of this. And so now we have these primary sources, these interviews, I think it's just so remarkable, I'm so happy that it exists, and I think you both did a great job with it.
Sally: I agree. Britni, everyone should buy your book, it's really good. They should follow you on Twitter.
Rachel: Britni is a great Twitter follow, I just want to say. I should have said this at the beginning when we introed them, but sometimes I just go to Britni's Twitter and I'm like, "What's happening? Just tell me what I need to know about today." And I always learn something new. I always open a bunch of articles. Sally and I talked at the beginning of this episode about how we're into sports now, and part of it was through the Olympics in summer, which I was editing the pieces that you wrote for us, which then just opened up a whole new world for me. And so, I highly recommend Britni's Twitter for all of your sports needs and breaking news about issues that matter to you, and just memes, good shit. Follow Britni on Twitter, among other places.
Sally: Yeah, that's @BritniDLC, and we'll link to it in the show notes. And I just want to echo Rachel's sentiments that there are some people's timelines you go to and you just read them from top to bottom. Other people, you wait for them to show up in your timeline, but some people, you go to their timeline, and that's what I do with yours, Britni. I'm so glad you could be on the show. Everyone, definitely buy Hail Mary. Once again, we will link to it in the show notes.
Sally: I think that brings us to the end. Rachel, it's time to talk about a nice thing to end on. Do you want to kick us off?
Rachel: I will. After that incredibly nice thing to end on from the book, let's go into other nice things. I like when we're just talking about nice things. Okay, so my nice thing to end on is that I am about to start taking remote piano lessons and I'm really excited about it. I've been thing about this since the spring and looked into it extensively, but it was right around the time that I got vaccinated and was like, "I don't know that I want to practice piano all summer when I could be at the beach or doing other fun things," and the school that I was looking at taking the classes through was really pricey. I think they offer a lot, but it made a tough decision. But then I saw an ad in a newsletter that I follow the other day for someone who teaches remote piano lessons. I had a consultation with her yesterday, she was great. And we're going to start with Christmas carols, so that makes it even more fun. And I'm just like, my dad played the piano, he composed music, which is just mind-blowing to me. My mom was in high school band, so both my parents are musical. I can't even read music, but maybe I'll discover that I'm a savant. More likely I'll just be able to play Jingle Bells, and that's it. But I'm really pumped about it.
Sally: I'm so excited for this, and I really hope that there is a Zoom recital in our future.
Rachel: Can I learn to plunk out our podcast theme song?
Sally: That would be amazing. Maybe if we ever have a Patreon, the highest tier reward will be you doing a live recital. I just made that decision. That's if, the tier is like $25,000.
Rachel: The tier is me paying people to listen to that, not the other way around. Anyway, all right, let's kick it to our guest, Britni. What's your nice thing to end on?
Britni: My nice thing to end on is that, well, in addition to my book coming out shortly, two days after Hail Mary's release will be my 10-year anniversary of sobriety.
Rachel: Oh my god!
Britni: And I've just been thinking a lot about all of that and kind of where I am 10 years later and what I've... I don't know. My life is so different now, and I have all of these friends and family and my writing group are coming in to celebrate Pub Day with me.
Sally: Oh, that rules.
Britni: And 10 years ago, I was newly sober and I had a bachelorette party that nobody showed up to. And so, my life is so different. And yes, so I think that is the nice thing that I'm trying to stay focused on, in the midst of all of this.
Rachel: Well, that's amazing. Congratulations on 10 years, and the timing of this is really something. I don't know. Who knew.
Britni: [Inaudible] sense of humour, I think.
Rachel: That's a really good one to end on.
Sally: That's really good. Congratulations.
Rachel: All right, Sally, take us home. Take us to the end zone, as they would say in football, I guess. What's your nice thing to end on?
Sally: I want to spike the ball. By the way, growing up, I thought it was the n zone, like the letter 'N'. Fun fact about me. Okay, my nice thing to end on is that I just did a massive cleaning and decluttering project that I've been meaning to do for three years. And a lot of people, I think, did this over the pandemic. They were like, "Well, I can't leave home. Spending a lot of time in this space, I should get rid of a bunch of stuff," and I could not be bothered to do that. I was busy doing other things like playing video games and sleeping. But, I did a massive cleaning and decluttering project, I gave away a bunch of things. And it feels really good, I feel spiritually lighter, and it's something I've been putting off for a smooth three years, and it feels really good.
Rachel: That's inspiring, I need to do this.
Sally: It's my nice thing to end on. Okay, thank you everyone, for listening to this episode of Oh I Like That. Please rate us and review us wherever you listen to podcasts.
Rachel: You can follow us on Twitter, @ohilikethatpod, or email us at ohilikethatpod@gmail.com. You can also follow Sally and me. I'm @the_rewm, and Sally is @sallyt.
Sally: Oh I Like That is produced by Rachel and Sally and edited by Lucas. Amber Seger, who is @rocketorca on social media, designed our logo.