When “Machine Gun” Molly Bolin arrived in San Francisco in 1980, the city and the Bay Area were ready for a new star.
“Basketball’s sexiest shooter,” blared a Chronicle headline, next to a photo of Bolin holding a fake machine gun. Cringeworthy stuff, for sure, but those were less-woke times, and Bolin rolled with it. How are you going to help women’s pro basketball get off the ground if you don’t get folks’ attention?
Bolin could do that, and she could play. She lit it up as a star in America’s first women’s pro league, the Women’s Professional Basketball League (WBL), which lasted three seasons, 1979-81. Bolin played her final season with the San Francisco Pioneers.
The case can be made that Bolin (now Kazmer) was women’s pro basketball’s ultimate pioneer. She helped blaze a trail that would lead to the formation of today’s WNBA.
That should rate Kazmer a spot in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame and the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame. Her nickname alone should get her in. Nope.
The Naismith Hall holds its 2022 induction ceremony Saturday, welcoming 16 new members. The Women’s Basketball Hall inducted its 2022 class in June — eight new members, including four in non-player categories.
Bolin? Well, every HOF has its snubs, but these Halls need to take a fresh look at Machine Gun Molly, by golly.
“It took our first generation of Title IX fighters to really trailblaze,” Kazmer said. “We were so unentitled, so unspoiled, we were so determined to make this happen that nothing was going to stop us. We had that attitude.”
She still has it. Kazmer heads up a small organization, Legends of Ball, dedicated to keeping alive the history of that league. All the women who played in the WBL players are enshrined as a group in the Women’s Basketball HOF, inducted in 2018 in the Trailblazer of the Game category, but the league is largely forgotten. Have you ever heard of the Pioneers?
How about Machine Gun Molly?
Molly Bolin of the San Francisco Pioneers , February 27, 1981
Susan Gilbert / SFCMonna Lea Van Venthuysen fell in love with basketball in her little home town in Iowa, where high school girls played a hybrid form of the game — six players per side, three on offense and three on defense, nobody crosses midcourt, because girls were thought to be frail.
Molly, an unimposing 5-9 guard, scored 83 points in one game, 70 in another. She then played one season (regular basketball) at tiny Grand View College, got married at age 18, had a son, and retired from basketball.
Then she unretired and played one more season at Grand View, averaging 24.6 points, and graduated with a two-year degree in 1978. Great timing! The WBL was starting up and the Iowa Cornets made Bolin the league’s first signee at a $6,000 salary.
It was a shoestring league. The Cornets shoehorned 12 players into two hotel rooms. But the competition was real. In the league’s second season, Bolin was co-MVP (with superstar Ann Meyers) and she was the scoring champ, 32.8 points per game, which is still a women’s pro record.
When the Cornets ran out of money and folded, Bolin, after a momentary fling with another new league that quickly died, was picked up by the San Francisco Pioneers.
The Pioneers were in disarray, but they had just hired a new coach, Dean “The Dream” Meminger, a former key role player on the Knicks last championship team.
Bolin and Meminger worked on her game for countless hours. Bolin and her teammates laughed at Meminger’s fiery obscenities and loved his hard-driving practices, reveling in their new status as genuine athletes.
Bolin, a one-dimensional gunner, was becoming a player. Remember, she was only four years removed from half-court basketball.
“Basically, I came out of the woodwork,” Kazmer said with a laugh.
At the midseason All-Star Game, which featured future Naismith HOFers Carol Blazejowski, Nancy Lieberman and Meyers, Bolin led her team to victory with 29 points, nailing seven long-distance shots in a row.
Bolin led a strange dual basketball life. She was tough. The previous season she had scored 55 points in a game — still a women’s pro record — in which she dislocated her left shoulder in the second quarter.
Her looks also made headlines. In 1981, a Sports Illustrated profiler wrote, “Suffice it to say that if beauty were a stat, Molly Bolin would be in the Hall of Fame.”
A basic question the players and the league wrestled with was: What are we selling? Cute girls in makeup and short-shorts, or real women athletes sweating and competing? The discussion, with Bolin always featured, helped move women’s basketball — and basketball in general — closer to the ideal world, where every player presents herself the way she wants.
With the Cornets, Bolin had supplemented her meager salary by selling autographed posters. In San Francisco, at a Pioneers’ photo shoot, someone handed her a toy machine gun, and the legend of the pretty girl with the deadly shot grew.
Under Meminger, the Pioneers picked up steam and finished strong, winning seven of their last eight games. Then the league folded, and Bolin was back on the street.
Meminger had told Sports Illustrated, “Molly doesn’t have the type of body, the physical attributes, to out-talent people. But she’s got the smarts to know that with a little hard work, she’ll be around as long as there’s a league to play in.”
Alas, there was the rub. There was no more league to play in. For the next decade — and here’s where Bolin earned serious HOF credentials — she was a basketball vagabond, the poster woman for the frustration and futility of women athletes of that era.
In 1984, in the leadup to the Olympics, Kazmer toured with an All-Star team playing against the U.S. women’s team. Also in ’84 she played in the short-lived WABA, and in ’86 and ’96 she worked with developers of two women’s leagues that never got off the ground.
Even with no place to play, Bolin persisted, playing constantly — pickup games, men’s rec leagues, always searching for a good run.
“The thing about playing pro basketball right out of college is that it ruins you for everything else in life,” Kazmer said. “It’s all you want to do. There was no way I was ever going to have a real job. I was working construction jobs for five dollars an hour, and painting houses, so I’d be free to play basketball. I spent some of the best years of my basketball career playing in men’s rec leagues.”
Playing rec league is not a path to the Hall of Fame, but until Molly and her crew started paving the way, there was no professional route.
“People don’t understand the lack of opportunities we had to overcome,” said Kazmer. “The opportunities just weren’t there. That’s the thing about the Hall of Fame — I don’t have that kind of resume, because it wasn’t available to me, the opportunity just wasn’t there.”
Now the opportunity is there, because of the pioneers, and the Pioneers, and Machine Gun Molly.
Scott Ostler is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: sostler@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @scottostler
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