An artist uncovers the history of the Philadelphia Fox, the city’s first pro women’s basketball team

The new collective bargaining agreement for the WNBA includes a $7 million salary cap, codified private chartered flights, and protections for pregnant players. The sport is in a different universe from 1979, when the highest-paid player on Philadelphia’s first professional women’s basketball team signed a one-year, $9,000 contract.

Local graphic artist Lydia Victor hosted an event as the WNBA season opened Friday at Another Corner bookstore in South Philly for her new zine about the Philadelphia Fox, which only played 10 games in its inaugural 1979 season before folding because of financial mismanagement.

Victor interviewed several former Fox players and its head coach, and studied Inquirer and Daily News articles covering the ill-fated team for her single-issue zine, “Girls Will Shoot Hoops: A Story About the Philadelphia Fox”.

Fox players were clear-eyed from the beginning that this precarious venture wasn’t likely to last, Victor said. Girls and women’s sports had just begun to meaningfully expand following the passage of Title IX in 1972, and the Women’s Basketball League founder Bill Byrne was known to be a fast-talking conman. But the players were passionate, and certain women’s basketball would eventually catch on like it has today.

“What stood out was their optimism that it was going to work out. Even if it wasn’t for their generation of players,” Victor said.

“It was just the idea that this was inevitable to happen at some point … someone had to do that groundwork, to go through those difficult periods for women’s basketball to be where it is now,” she said.

The team’s brief history was scrappy and chaotic. The first two players drafted by the team never played for them. The Fox and its first-round pick Katrina Anderson, sister of Phillies outfielder Mike Anderson, had a contract dispute and she was traded to another franchise for future draft picks. Second rounder Kay Ford opted to keep her job as a lab technician.

Before game four, the Fox lured St. Joseph’s legend and Archbishop Carroll grad Mary Sue Garrity Simon out of her insurance job in Washington, D.C., leading to a small uptick in attendance at their home in the old Civic Center in University City.

The women who committed to playing for Fox accepted the pitiful wages, low attendance, and scheduling mishaps and “thin little silky, sleazy things” for uniforms designed for sex appeal, back-up center Sue Hlavacek told Victor, because they were thrilled to be professional athletes.

They were beginning to bond after a six-game road trip, where head coach Dave Wohl drove the rented team bus along the East coast, when they learned the team would be ceasing operations — the league had only secured $20,000 of the $100,000 required franchise fee from owner Eric Kraus, and league founder Byrne was secretly approving the team’s expenses.

The players did not receive their last paychecks, and instead held a goodbye pizza party with the last couple of hundred dollars the team had, Victor wrote. The Women’s Basketball League restructured as the Fox and the Washington Metros folded at the same time, and continued on for one more season.

Victor’s launch event served as a meetup for what she calls the “community of basketball freaks” in Philadelphia — the fans who are just as online as they are diehard for the Sixers and the sport in general. Some visitors had discovered Victor on TikTok, where she shared a unique illustration after every Sixers game this season, and her disdain for Daryl Morey’s teambuilding strategy.

Another Corner owner Lee Frank displayed a signed photo of the San Antonio Spurs’ David Robinson he’s had since he was 12 years old, and it didn’t feel out of place. The store projected the Sixers’ playoff game against the New York Knicks on a wall, and the freaks were grateful to have a reason to look away.

» READ MORE: This graphic designer is creating a new art piece after all 82 Sixers games

But there’s much to look forward to for Philly’s women’s basketball fans. Victor and other attendees were also at the Philly tour stop of Unrivaled in January, a nascent three-on-three women’s professional basketball league led by WNBA stars, which set attendance records. Victor said it was a “surreal experience” to see thousands of people cheering on women’s hoops while working on her zine. She can’t wait for Philadelphia’s WNBA team to start play in 2030.

Tim Huff, 32, came representing his two basketball teams at the same time, with a Washington Mystics WNBA hat and a vintage Sixers T-shirt on. He’s always been a fan of both the women’s and men’s game, and said he’s been happy to work as a “translator” for his male friends who have just started showing interest in the WNBA. Huff said he’s confident the yet-to-be-named Philly franchise will be a success.

For a generation of Philadelphia basketball fans, all there was to hold onto was a hopeful, distant future when Markelle Fultz, Ben Simmons and/or Joel Embiid might lead a Broad Street parade, and nostalgia from the Allen Iverson era.

Now, Sixers sweep aside, the team has young, exciting stars without (knocking on all the wood) mysterious medical ailments. There’s a growing excitement around the present and future of women’s basketball, supported by the legacy of the past. And if people dismiss that, letting the twilight of the Embiid era bring them down?

“It’s their loss,” Huff said.

Copies of the zine are available at Another Corner at 612 S. 6th St. and lydiahopevictor.com.