This movie should be rated 'GI' for genuine inspiration

Julie Byrne, a religion professor at Hofstra, knew she was on to a good story when she wrote a book about the early 1970s basketball team at Immaculata College, a tiny Catholic women's school outside Philadelphia.

The squad had no gym and not enough money to attend the first women's national championship tournament. Players held fundraisers, including a toothbrush sale, flew standby to Chicago and had to leave three of 11 team members home.

They didn't know there was a tournament when the 1971-72 season started and were seeded 15th out of 16 when they arrived.

And they won.

It is sort of a women's version of "Hoosiers," captured neatly by Byrne in her 2003 work, "O God of Players: The Story of the Immaculata Mighty Macs." The book, published by Columbia University Press, was a scholar's tale of how some people live their faith and Catholic culture in daily lives - a view of religion from the ground up.

"I looked at the team as something that was sponsored by the church and cultivated by the church, but was not really religious," Byrne said.

The book was very well received in the academic community, which was gratifying enough for the author, who then was teaching at Duke and now holds the Monsignor Thomas J. Hartman Chair for Catholic Studies at Hofstra.

Then, about three years ago, came an upset almost as big as Immaculata winning the championship. Producer/director Tim Chambers called and asked about turning the book into a movie. "Right out of the blue," she said.

Sure enough, before she knew it, Byrne was a consultant on "Our Lady of Victory," starring Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn and Carla Gugino (of HBO's "Entourage") - an unlikely movie about an unlikely team.

You've heard of a play within a play? This is a one-in-a-million story on top of a one-in-a-million story. "It's very funny, because as the author of an academic book, you don't expect this ever to happen," Byrne said.

Hers was no ordinary academic book. It contained the kind of story that makes us like sports and makes us like stories. Gugino, who plays coach Cathy Rush in the movie, has said in interviews that it dwells not only in dreams but in "the equality of dreams."

It recalls a time when women athletes didn't have much equality. Basketball players still wore skirts. There was no Title IX. The tournament wasn't sanctioned by the NCAA but by the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW).

Byrne was fascinated by the interaction of the flashy young Protestant coach - then the 23-year-old wife of Ed Rush, an NBA referee - with players who had been comfortable with the nuns who ran the college. Immaculata players were fixed on keeping their values in a changing world but wound up at the crest of the changes.

Without even realizing it, the Mighty Macs became pioneers in women's sports and the women's movement. "They were way ahead of their time," the author said of the team that kept winning - two more national titles in 1973 and '74, second-place finishes in 1975 and '76.

The roster included a Women's Basketball Hall of Famer, Theresa Shank Grentz, who went on to coach Rutgers and Illinois, as well as Rene Muth Portland (coach at Penn State) and Marianne Crawford Stanley (won three titles as Old Dominion coach, then coached the Washington Mystics of the WNBA).

Times and traditions have changed so much that Byrne expected the former players to say they had left the Catholic Church to explore other things. On the contrary, most of them have stayed in it and raised families in it.

"I really think," said the author, still a religion student as well as a professor, "that is because the church gave them what they loved most in life."

That would be a combination of joy, achievement and camaraderie that was so pronounced that one player changed majors three times so she could fit practice into her schedule.

All of those feelings came flooding back to the former Mighty Macs, who had cameos in the movie and who were there to watch the recreation of the 1972 title game. Rush was in tears at the filming.

"Our Lady of Victory" seems a kindred spirit of "Miracle," the U.S. Olympic hockey movie that Chambers helped produce. The Immaculata story meant a lot to the Philadelphia native, who turned down offers from major studios, including Disney, because they wanted to make it more like "Sister Act." Chambers and buddy Anthony Gargano (former Mets beat writer for the New York Post) wrote a screenplay faithful to the spirit of Byrne's book.

Because it is a low-budget, independent film, Byrne said, it is not likely to make anyone rich - unless it catches fire like another Philadelphia overachiever, "Rocky."

It all is fine with the professor, who will be at a big premiere in late winter or early spring. Considering the way things have gone, someday someone probably will make a movie on the making of this movie.