Throwback Thursday: The Kentucky Colonels Appoint All-Female Board of Directors

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In July of 1973, a man who made his fortune in fried chicken purchased an American Basketball Association franchise in part because his ten-year-old son asked him to do it. The Kentucky Colonels were struggling and on the verge of moving to Cincinnati, when one day at breakfast John Y. Brown Jr.'s son looked up at him with tears in his eyes and asked, "The Colonels aren't moving, are they?"

So Brown, who had purchased the original recipe and use of the name Kentucky Fried Chicken from Col. Harland Sanders back in 1964 and rendered it a nationwide export, bought the Colonels on July 7, 1973. And then he did something that can be viewed as both wildly progressive and utterly calculating: claiming he was too busy to do it himself, Brown announced that his wife, Ellie, and a ten-woman board of directors would run the team. According to news accounts, he had run the idea by his wife via a long-distance telephone call.

"It sounds terrific," said Ellie Brown, who at age 33 became the first woman to chair the board of a major sports franchise.

Was John Y. Brown's motivation, at least in part, an attempt to draw in more fans to the floundering franchise? Was this whole idea driven more by marketing and public relations than by true feminism? It almost certainly was. But Ellie and her colleagues, while perhaps distanced from actual personnel decisions (the kind that her husband enjoyed meddling in), played a real role in selling the Colonels to the Louisville community. They went around to banks and industrial firms to sell season tickets; they put up booths in shopping centers and issued decals to schoolchildren that read, "I Love the Colonels." They gave public speeches—"I'd never made a public speech before," Ellie said—and they held parties with players and their wives as the featured guests.

"Our purpose is to make the Colonels a community project," Ellie told the media. "We have a good orchestra in Louisville, and a good theater. The Colonels are our only big professional sports team. The state is renowned for its basketball. We must have a successful team."

The media's reaction to the all-female board, as you might imagine, was also fraught with sexism. A couple weeks after purchasing the team, Ellie took a "get-acquainted" visit to meet with reporters in New York, along with several of her fellow board members, a number of whom were friends from clubs or from the Junior League. The Associated Press—which referred to Ellie as "an effervescent, striking beauty"—led its story about her with this sentence: "Pretty Ellie Brown insists she won't make her Kentucky Colonel basketball players wear lace on their shorts, but they may have to sip tea with the customers."

Asked if the team was just a toy bestowed to her by her rich husband, Ellie reportedly replied, according to Terry Pluto's seminal ABA oral history, Loose Balls, "You're absolutely right in saying that I know nothing about basketball, but my husband knows nothing about making chicken and he's done all right."

The announcement also disturbed several Colonels employees, including general manager Mike Storen, who immediately went to John and asked him, What's this all about? "As usual, John Y. was thinking about his political career, and saving the Colonels for Louisville—which he did—was very good public relations," Storen told Pluto. "He got to wear the white hat in the state. His position was that women were a great untapped resource in sports marketing, and he talked a lot about 'woman power.'"

"Women are the most unused source of time, talent and energy in this country," John told People magazine, "and if you don't have a woman who can be ambitious with you, you're only creating a conflict instead of a compatible marriage."

Storen, already concerned about John's interference with the team's roster moves, asked him if he was serious about his wife and her friends running the team. When John responded in the affirmative, Storen quit his job. Soon after, coach John Mullaney, also concerned about the active role John Brown wanted to take in making personnel decisions, left to coach a franchise in Utah.

Ellie and her board, meanwhile, sold 3,000 tickets that first season, and average gate receipts rose 75 percent over the previous year. An April tornado, she said, was the only thing that kept the Colonels from breaking even financially. On the court, the Colonels hired Babe McCarthy as coach for a season, then fired him after losing in the second round of the playoffs; they also added a single man, legendary former Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp, to the team's board of directors.

Before the 1974-75 season, the Colonels wound up hiring Hubie Brown, then an assistant coach in Milwaukee. Sometimes, Ellie and her fellow board members would come to watch practice, and the story goes that one day they opened up practice to the public—but only to women. And Hubie, who tended toward the profane, halted practice when he felt his audience wasn't paying attention.

"I wasn't excited about you being here," he said, according to Dan Issel, who played for the Colonels that season. "If you can't be quiet and pay attention, you can get the fuck out of here."

The Colonels finished 58-26 and wound up winning the ABA title. After the final game, they threw Ellie in the shower, Colonels player Gene Littles told Pluto, because "owners get thrown in the shower."

Even then, the Colonels were not making enough money. So John Y. Brown put Dan Issel on the market, sold him to the Baltimore Claws, and lost favor with the local fans. After the 1975-76 season, in the midst of the ABA-NBA merger, he took a $3 million financial settlement and folded the team. "Ellie and I decided that basketball isn't the kind of business we want to be involved in," he said, and then he went out and purchased the NBA's Buffalo Braves, and eventually traded the Braves to become owner of the Boston Celtics. (He would also serve as governor of Kentucky from 1979 to 1983.) In 1976, John Y. and Ellie divorced, but their legacy as co-owners lives on: they were inducted together into the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame in 1998.

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