A Winnebago County-based organization was a pioneer in paying women to play professional sports.
No, this History Lesson during Women’s History Month isn’t about the Rockford Peaches.
This is about Dempsey Hovland’s World Famous Texas Cowgirls basketball team.
The Cowgirls were the brainchild of Hovland, a Beloit, Wisconsin native, and famed professional sports promoter Tex Rickard in 1949. Although Rickard helped get them started, Hovland kept them going for nearly 30 years, and, much like how the Harlem Globetrotters never actually were based in Harlem, New York, the Texas Cowgirls were run out of either South Beloit or Rockton during their entire existence.
Also like the Globetrotters, the Texas Cowgirls never had a “home” court. They played more than 5,000 games all over the United States as well as far-flung locales such as Spain and North Africa.
Some of those years, the Cowgirls were the opening act for the Globetrotters. In 1957 and 1958, the Cowgirls opened for the Globies in Rockford when their “big” attraction was Wilt Chamberlain — who is deserving of his own history column.
Quick question. Has an athlete greater than Wilt ever actually played in Rockford? The only one comparable, I can think of, would be when Tiger Woods played an exhibition at Ingersoll in 2001 when he was at the height of his game.
Most of the time, though, the Cowgirls were the main attraction and they played a wide variety of competition. They played teams made up of major league baseball players and pro football players, occasionally playing before NBA games to help boost the crowd for the then-struggling league. The Cowgirls also played lots and lots of local all-star teams and school faculties.
A look at the Rockford newspaper archives showed that the Cowgirls took on teachers from Boylan, Hononegah, Harlem, Lutheran, Orangeville, Pecatonica and South Beloit high schools over the years as well as several media all-star teams that would be “enhanced” by former star players, including former University of Illinois great Bill Erickson.
The Cowgirls played almost exclusively played against men, but in 1952 the Cowgirls made local history when they played the Hollywood Glamour Girls at the White Eagles gym in what was billed as the first all-women’s basketball game in local history. Interestingly, the opening game on that night was a battle between a local men’s league all-star team and a basketball squad made up of Rockford Peaches: Jackie Kelly, Nicky Fox, Rose Gacioch, Dottie Key, Alice Pollitt and Helen “Sis” Waddell.
The Cowgirls weren’t the only act under Hovland’s control. He promoted a wide range of things, including Negro American League games, magicians and country western singers. He also founded barnstorming baseball teams such as the Caribbean Kings and Havana Cuban Giants and, in the 1960s and 1970s, he ran the Miss American Teenager beauty pageant. A Texas Cowgirls game could feature a halftime show of Negro League great Satchel Paige giving a pitching exhibition or Hank Williams singing.
The Cowgirls played more than 150 games a year, a grueling schedule, and Hovland would churn through players. Although based locally, only one Winnebago County player was ever featured in stories announcing a Cowgirls game. In the mid 1960s, Loretta Thompson of New Milford was a 6-foot rebounding star for the squad.
Because of the schedule, Hovland had one rule that likely would get him in trouble today. All of his players had to be single. If they decided to get married, they were off the team. The irony in that is that Hovland’s wife, Florence, started playing for the Cowgirls when she was 17 and they married in 1954.
Although the team attracted notice nationally — famed writer Heywood Broun traveled with the team for a time, documenting the life of women playing against men, and the Cowgirls were featured on the CBS Evening News in 1974 -— it was not treated as a big deal locally. The Rockford Morning Star didn’t run a full feature on the operation until 1972 and Rockford Morning Star writer Roger Jaynes misspelled Hovland’s last name as Holland throughout.
In 1975, the Morning Star did a bigger piece just on Hovland and his various attractions over the years just as the run was about to end. In 1976, the team played its 5,000th game at Beloit Memorial High School, a nod to Hovland’s home town. But in late 1976 and early 1977, Hovland ran a series of advertisements asking for players to try out.
It must not have worked. The team stopped playing in 1977, but there was no story in the Rockford papers making the announcement. The Cowgirls just ceased to exist. Hovland died in 1979.
Of course, the Texas Cowgirls are not entirely forgotten. The team is mentioned on Hovland’s Wikipedia page.
In 1996, the Beloit Daily News talked to several former Cowgirls players who settled in the area for its annual Legends of Sports publication. There are plenty of Texas Cowgirls photos and advertisements online and occasional stories about former players. The fame, though, pales in comparison to the acclaim that’s been heaped on the Peaches and the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which operated from 1943 to 1954.
That’s a shame because the Texas Cowgirls were more progressive and carried the message that, “hey, women can play,” to far more people.
While the AAGPBL never integrated, Hovland had African-Americans on his team almost from the beginning and eventually spun off the Harlem Queens as its own traveling team. While the AAGPBL was strictly a midwestern operation, the Texas Cowgirls played all over the world. In the 1960s, the team was given an honorary ambassador award from Robert McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, because of all the goodwill the team created playing at military bases.
The Peaches and the AAGPBL, though, had Penny Marshall. The actress turned director became interested in the story of women playing professional baseball and spearheaded the making of “A League of Their Own,” the 1992 movie featuring Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, Madonna and Lori Petty, who grew up in Rockford as the only girl playing on a boys Little League team.
The Texas Cowgirls deserve the same treatment. In the streaming era, with companies such as Amazon and Netflix throwing hundreds of millions into independent movie projects, hopefully one of those aspiring filmmakers will look to tell their story as well.
Alex Gary is the former business editor of the Rockford Register Star. He launched the NIC-10 Sports History Book — NIC-10historybook.com — in 2016. You can reach him at alexgary87@gmail.com.
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