Extracurriculars

The Christmas Day death of Bud Greenspan, the official documentarian of the Olympics since 1984, is generating the typical fond remembrance pieces from the likes of Alan Abrahamson and Richard Sandomir, among others.

What I found most striking about some of Greenspan’s “official” work is how he didn’t make distinctions between male and female athletes in his storytelling. To be sure, the gender of the athletes depicted is obvious. But in his filmmaker’s eye and mind, a great story doesn’t differentiate.

Recall the 1984 Los Angeles Games, when the International Olympic Committee began moving out of the stone age and began offering competition in a number of sports for women, including the first women’s marathon. There also was the controversial 3,000-meter run involving Mary Decker and Zola Budd.

This also was a period of great contention in women’s sports in the United States, two years after the NCAA began sponsoring national championships for women (a move that the now-defunct AIAW fought vigorously, to no avail), and during a time in which Title IX officially wasn’t being enforced. In the Grove City v. Bell decision, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that only educational programs receiving direct federal aid were subject to the non-gender discrimination statute.

For four years, women’s sports activists were predicting doomsday, when in truth, women’s sports — especially at the college level and under NCAA auspices — made great strides. To cite one example, 1984 U.S. Olympic women’s basketball team, coached by Pat Summitt and including a very young future Olympic legend in Teresa Edwards, roared to the gold medal.

To be sure, the absence of most Iron Curtain nations, especially the Soviet Union, was quite notable. But the cries that women’s sports were sliding back because of the Grove City ruling — and which died down only after Congress passed the overriding Civil Rights Restoration Act in 1988 — were also muted by the simple, eloquent examples of female athletes that Greenspan brought to the screen.

Say what you will about the IOC in recent times — and there’s plenty of hot air coming from the usual places — Greenspan didn’t overlook the stories of women competing in obscure events, some for the first time.

And say what you will that women athletes today remain invisible. But take a glimpse, if you care, at Greenspan’s profile of women cyclists in 1984 that few have heard of before or since. He gave visibility to athletes of both genders in sports that get just one chance every four years to capture a fleeting moment of glory. Luckily for all of us Greenspan’s eye was very sharply attuned.

Since there’s been a lot of drive-by commentary about the UConn women’s basketball streak from sportswriters who admit they don’t follow, nor do they much care, about the sport, a few simple lessons in interpreting Geno Auriemma are necessarily in order.

But first, thank God for Bob Ryan. The legendary Boston Globe columnist and basketball maven with a deep appreciation for every level of the sport, regardless of gender, truly gets what the Huskies and their star player embody:

“Similarly, I saw a great basketball player two nights ago. Her name is Maya Moore, and she won’t be playing in the NBA. But I’d go watch her play her dunkless game any ol’ time, because she is a pure basketball player. She can shoot, pass, rebound, defend, and, finally, lead. It was an under-the-microscope performance before what will be the best audience for women’s basketball until the NCAA championship game several months hence, and she personally made sure UConn would get that record. The final scoring total was a career-high 41, but that didn’t matter. Twenty-one, 31, 41 . . . she put on a show. She’s not Kemba Walker physically, but she’s as good a basketball player, and I bet the standout UConn point guard would love to play with her.”

Yes, Ryan gets it, because he’s a basketball purist at heart, while far too many members of the sportswriting Tribe were too busy genuflecting about Auriemma, doing their 24/7 all-platform wiseguy best to respond to a wiseguy coach, or disparage his team’s accomplishments, all too literally.

They just don’t get it.

They don’t get what Auriemma was really doing after he dashed off this doozy in response to all the attention at Madison Square Garden as the Huskies won their 88th consecutive game over Ohio State on Sunday:

“There wouldn’t be this many people in the room if we were chasing a women’s record. The reason everybody’s having a heart attack the last four, five days is because a bunch of women are threatening to break a men’s record … All the miserable bastards who follow men’s basketball that don’t want us to break the record are all here because they’re pissed.

“If we were breaking a women’s record everybody would go, ‘Aren’t those girls nice?’ Give them two paragraphs in USA Today, give them one line on the bottom of ESPN and let’s send them back where they belong — the kitchen.’ “

Auriemma wasn’t yelling, or even raising his voice, when he said those words. His voice was low, his demeanor calm. But to the untrained ear those remarks can seem harshly sharp and piercing, if not offensive. It didn’t take long for the overreaction to the reaction to spring forth like a geyser.

To the sports blogs who find room for women only in bimbo poses, this was just another example of Geno being an insufferable douche.

Yahoo’s Les Carpenter doesn’t get it. Geno wasn’t really angry.

Surprisingly, SI.com’s Ann Killion, whom I respect and has spent some time around the women’s game, doesn’t get it either.

Business Insider, a Silicon Valley blog, even piled on the UConn streak, but Dashiell Bennett clearly doesn’t get it.

And the knuckleheads who come up with such original observations as “women’s basketball sucks” and why don’t you play a men’s team? have truly revealed their level of intelligence. So do those who complain of having the sport shoved down their throats in an age of 500 channels.

(Some defenders of the womens’s game — and not just those named Christine Brennan – have come across as overly thin-skinned, and this doesn’t help the perception of the sport either.)

Was Auriemma taking a serious swipe at detractors of the women’s game? You betcha, and it’s important to understand that he was making a very direct point about all of this.

But for those who know the deeper message behind nearly everything Auriemma says for public consumption, it’s this:

This is Geno, just being Geno. It sounds off the cuff and unscripted and rash, and his extemporaneous talents are as remarkable as how he prepares his team to play.

But this is also coldly calculating stuff, designed to absorb all the pressure that might otherwise be heaped on his players, who had little trouble mowing down Florida State for No. 89, with John Wooden’s grandson in the house.

Some opiners think this is Geno hogging the spotlight, egomaniacally, injecting himself in the middle of a debate he has ratcheted up. As Killion writes, there is some truth to all of that. He does like attention and being a lightning rod in a sport that rarely gets this kind of early season exposure. He’s a breath of hot air and fresh air at the same time.

But Auriemma’s tactics should be recognizable to some of these opiners, since the coaches he resembles the most are soccer’s self-dubbed “Special One,” Jose Mourinho, and the Ol’ Ball Coach himseelf, Steve Spurrier.

After his England club Chelsea lost to Barcelona in the first leg of their 2005 European Champions League series, Mourinho accused Frank Rijkaard, then the Barcelona manager, of entering a referees’ locker room beforehand.

Chelsea roared back to win the second leg 4-2 and the series 5-4, and Rijkaard lost his grip on the reins of Barcelona. (Mourinho, now at Real Madrid, did get some comeuppance recently when Barcelona throttled Les Meringues 5-0.)

It was Spurrier that Auriemma channeled at a Knoxville hotel sports bar the night before UConn’s game at Tennessee in 2002, when a photo of the Ol’ Ball Coach flashed on a television screen as he was to the Washington Redskins. To anyone within earshot Auriemma cried out:

“I want to be the Steve Spurrier of women’s basketball!”

The locals didn’t like hearing it — after all, it was Spurrier who said, during his Florida days, that “you can’t spell Citrus without ‘UT.’ ” Then again, Auriemma had spent the previous days referring to Tennessee as the “Evil Empire,” and expressing how much he loathed the color orange and “Rocky Top.”

Final score? UConn, 86-72. The run-up to that game proved to be a tipping point in the now-dormant UConn-Tennessee rivalry.

After losing a prized recruit, Brittany Hunter, to Duke, Auriemma’s words became bulletin board material in Durham for a Feb. 2003 matchup and what would become the first women’s sellout at Cameron Indoor Stadium:

“You know, there are just as many Duke graduates waiting on tables as there are from any other school in the country. They may just be working at a better restaurant.”

Relaxed, Auriemma even joked around with Duke students camped out at Krzyzewskiville, waiting for North Carolina tickets.

Final score: UConn 77-65, and it wasn’t even that close. The following season, Hunter transferred to UConn, but injuries shortened her career.

Even after UCLA’s mark had been eclipsed, the media grousing continued. ESPN.com’s Johnette Howard, who also has been around the women’s game for a number of years, snorted that perhaps Geno ought to go coach men already, reflecting a fairly healthy sentiment that still exists in the women’s coaching community. Then Howard descended to this:

“Auriemma is hardly the first coach or high achiever who can be ultracompetitive or self-referential, contradictory or complicated. But he has never been spanked as much as he should have for how he has treated Tennessee’s Summitt.”

Well, let’s open up those old wounds, shall we? Howard’s spanking — it’s hard to tell whether she enjoyed it, though — should put to rest the worries some in the Connecticut media have had the last couple years that America had taken the fun out of Geno.

Not any longer. While he’s back to his old self, and God continues to smile on the Huskies, far too many star media opiners are taking him far too seriously to get why he does what he does.

Even before the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team won for the 87th consecutive time last week, some of the most vocal women’s sports advocates there are — affectionately known here as the Sisters of Perpetual Indignance — have felt especially anxious about the reaction to what they believe to be nothing less than (wo)man landing on the moon.

Except there really hasn’t been that much scorn heaped upon UConn’s winning streak, and the chance that Geno Auriemma’s Huskies have on Sunday to match the UCLA men’s record of 88 wins in a row against Ohio State in Madison Square Garden. What has appeared of that variety has been scant, and rather poorly argued. The apples-and-oranges references are as lame as suggestions of putting the respective men’s and women’s teams in question on the floor and letting them settle the matter there.

These are the exceptions to what has been a rather respectful rule when assessing UConn’s apparent place in history (unless the Buckeyes make some of their own). Most notably, there was Connecticut resident Frank Deford on NPR, in his latest tribute to the Huskies. And ESPN.com’s MeChelle Voepel penned this kindly comparison of the coaching styles of John Wooden and Geno Auriemma, who despite their vast personality differences are remarkably similar in what they have demanded from their teams on the court.

Then there’s Yahoo! Sports columnist Dan Wetzel, who has more than a passing familiarity with women’s hoops, offering a very generous and fair-minded perspective.

But The Sisterhood didn’t wait for any of that, convinced that UConn was not going to be treated “fairly” or “equally” in the press. A few pre-emptory strikes were served up by Laura Pappano, with her usual heavy-handed hyperbole, and Nicole LaVoi, who thought it necessary to make predictions about the coverage, with No. 4 being particularly insipid.

(If you reside outside of the sisterly bubble, these are two of the most notable women’s sports “experts” we’re told we have, women who have written books, participated in panel discussions, conducted research and the like. The quality and accuracy of what they have written, discussed and researched is rarely given any critical examination inside the bubble, of course, which is one of the problems with the general discourse about women’s sports.)

When Connecticut-based ESPN announced it would not displace poker with the UConn vs. Ohio State game that will remain on ESPNU, the conspiracy theorists had their proof that the women were not getting proper respect. (Some UConn fans complained that they don’t get ESPNU on their cable systems, but there are alternatives: Go to a sports bar, or better yet, take a short trip to Manhattan and see history in person. More than 6,000 empty seats still remain.)

But it took the Stenographer of the Sisterhood, the typically late-to-the-game Christine Brennan of USA Today, to stir the pot really good, and turn a celebratory occasion for women’s sports into an unsavory whinefest:

“For decades now, those of us in the sports media have argued about which comes first: interest or coverage. There’s no doubt that college men’s basketball has more interest than the women’s game. TV ratings, attendance figures and revenue bear that out. But there’s also no doubt that the media’s lack of coverage of the UConn story, and many other stories in women’s sports, ensures that interest will remain static.”

If Brennan actually covered women’s sports as much as Voepel, for example, I’d buy some of this. But for someone who parachutes into the realm of women’s sports only when a story becomes big enough, or when she’s trying to make a reflexive point about Title IX or gender issues in sports, or when she’s introduced as a women’s sports “expert” on NPR, it’s truly rich for Brennan to scold the media Tribe for its supposed negligence.

At last spring’s Women’s Final Four in San Antonio, Brennan stuck around long enough to query Auriemma about UConn’s dominance, and why this was the case with Title IX and all. But she didn’t stay for any of the games, having jetted off to Augusta before the women’s semifinals to join the Tribe stalking Tiger Woods. Maybe it’s because she had just written that she thought what UConn was doing wasn’t necessarily good for women’s basketball.

So which Brennan are we to believe now with UConn on the cusp of 88, and possibly more? The March Brennan? Or the December Brennan?

And better yet, will she be at the Garden on Sunday, as one of the few women in sports media with a true national platform? According to her “Keeping Score” archives, the only women she’s written about since March are three drivers at the Indy 500, Maddy Crippen, Debi Thomas, Ines Sainz, Serena Williams and her bothersome foot, Kim Clijsters and Yeardley Love, the University of Virginia lacrosse player who was murdered last spring, allegedly by a member of the men’s team. Oh, and the non-athletic women at the center of the Tiger Woods and Ben Roethlisberger controversies.

By my count, women have been the focal point of only 10 of Brennan’s last 61 columns, and some of that is human interest treatment. Golf is the subject of 24 columns, and Brennan used not one of them to write about women’s golf. Nor has she written in that span about the WNBA or the endangered Women’s Professional Soccer league.

Brennan’s gender scorecard is just as threadbare as those she lectures. And she gets away with it, while the few women’s sports journalists still remaining at mainstream media outlets labor in obscurity.

Look, there’s plenty to lament about today’s sports media atmosphere, and to feel just a bit sheepish about what’s considered important.

It’s a 24/7 noise machine that overdramatizes almost every story, large or small, rehashes of dozens of replays of dunks, touchdowns, homers, golazos, complemented by the rush of reporters to “confirm” petty, inconsequential “news,” all for the sake of getting a “scoop.”

It’s the same sports media environment that women’s sports advocates claim marginalizes them and the feats of female athletes. As a counter, such “experts” like to conduct bogus studies that reflect what they already believe, instead of casting a more empirical net (and that’s a subject for another time, and that I wrote about here and here).

But what the sisters have done this week is to undermine everything they said they wanted to be emphasized about the UConn women’s streak. In making the coverage of the story the story, they guaranteed that the marvelous basketball played by UConn and Auriemma’s coaching brilliance would share some billing with a subject unbecoming of that excellence.

In other words, ladies, you’ve pulled off what you feared the male-dominated sports press would do. Only you did it much, much better.

Sports business ace Kristi Dosh talks to espnW vice president Laura Gentile on the Forbes SportsMoney blog in response to some of the rather heated reaction to last week’s site launch, and says we’re missing the point entirely.

It was never meant to cater specifically to women who are already hardcore sports fans, or to those who want to see more women’s sports (I’m in both categories) but to those women who are in the vast, untapped majority:

“Although my conversation with Ms. Gentile certainly helped put things in perspective, it was the surprise phone call I received from an anonymous espnW supporter that really had an effect on my view of the situation. This person pointed out that they’d heard from women who watched their child’s little league game from the car because they were afraid they would clap at the wrong time or who wanted to coach their kid’s team but had no idea how to run a practice. As a woman who grew up after Title IX, and who has spent my entire life playing and coaching sports, I was honestly oblivious to such issues. These women—the ones who aren’t part of ESPN’s existing 26% female audience—deserve to be engaged. They want to be fans, but are a little shy about it. They don’t want to look stupid. They are lost in the world of sports and no one is catering to their needs.”

I touched on some of this after a much ballyhooed espnW retreat in October, but Dosh really drives home the point well, while suggesting that espnW could have more clearly explained its aspirations.

That’s why I also was a bit confused by what I saw on espnW launch day and every day since: A lot more men’s sports than I expected, and I was expecting some. Perhaps it was a fangirlish piece about Bill Simmons that ultimately turned me off. The subject of his visceral loathing of the WNBA somehow never comes up.

But then again, I’ve never been in the target audience for anything in my life, so I’ll admit to having yet another blind spot.

Media writer Eric Deggans falls for the pink ghetto meme, then falls into the tired, dreary cultural rabbit hole of gender and sports to express his disappointment with espnW:

“How does a female sports fan respond to all the sexism embedded in some professional sports’ presentations? Does it matter that even the most accomplished female athletes seem encouraged to sell themselves as sex objects to get ahead?

“What about some female athletes who have been accused of emerging as stars mostly for their beauty and sex appeal of male fans? If a name like Kournikova or Patrick floats up in these conversations, are the criticisms fair?”

Again, that’s not really the issue here.

Dosh’s larger point is that espnW’s marketing must be vastly improved:

“There needs to be a unified message coming out about what espnW wants to accomplish and how they plan to do it. I know they’ve done the research behind this, and I’m now convinced they’re serving both an untapped area and underserved consumers. The issue is the message.”

From a corporation that aggressively and relentlessly promotes itself and makes perfectly clear what it is pushing, this is truly surprising.

For those wishing for more news-oriented women’s sports coverage on this platform, it’s not going to happen, not to the degree we might wish. At first I thought it was a missed opportunity by espnW, but that’s not the case.

It still leaves open the door for others to claim that space. It may be a much smaller niche that a gargantuan enterprise like ESPN may not be able to make profitable enough, but the opportunities are there, on a different scale.

Here’s the first part of Dosh’s two-part take on espnW.

I began hearing not long ago that espnW was coming online in December, and on the first Monday of the month the site indeed did go live.

I haven’t looked thoroughly at all of the launch material, but a few thoughts did cross my mind as I perused:

• There’s more men’s sports here than I imagined, and the site was promoted as appealing to women sports fans as well as those interested in women’s sports. Still, at the end of the first day, the Jets-Patriots game is getting top billing? I realize it’s a big game and there’s great interest in that matchup, but that’s a story that can be found anywhere else. It crowds out what I thought was supposed to be the emphasis here.

Which got me thinking about a couple of other possibilities that bear watching as the site develops:

• Can espnW sell a site devoted entirely to women’s sports? Or is it partially using this vehicle to push its men’s pro and college sports content onto a primarily female audience? Do we really need BCS, LeBron James and baseball winter meetings stories here? Women who are diehard sports fans know where to get this.

• The smartest, most relevant piece I’ve seen comes from former WNBA president Val Ackerman, who pens an intelligent, passionate treatise on the future of women’s sports that dearly needs to be amplified. A few snippets:

“In our post-Title IX world, the old stereotypes and barriers which historically distanced women and girls from sports are largely gone, but differences persist in the way American males and females participate in, consume and think about sports, which in turn affects health and fitness trends, media imagery and coverage, and strategies for companies trying to turn sports into profitable business ventures. The future of women’s sports will be shaped by the way these differences are addressed and by the effectiveness with which women’s sports proponents can meld the gains of the past 40 years with the needs, sensibilities and realities of today’s world.”

And:

“But although the battles for acceptance which marked the 1970s and ’80s have been largely won, they’ve been replaced by another challenge: how to convert the feel-good vibe of ‘with you in spirit’ into cold, hard revenue, so that women’s sports leagues can endure as viable businesses. The protections of Title IX, which helped make the pro outlets possible, do not reach beyond federally-funded educational institutions, so the future of the leagues will be wholly left to the realities of the marketplace. In the post-Title IX age, progress at the elite level will ride on the adeptness with which women’s sports leaders can marry what’s appealingly feminine with what’s impressively athletic, what’s edgy and controversial with what’s mainstream and wholesome — and in our culture of celebrity, whether women’s sports ‘products’ can be turned into compelling entertainment, the kind that busy fans (women and girls among them) will make time for and pay real money to see.”

Bravo! No whining about sexism or victimology or spouting the usual reflexive talking points on these subjects. Ackerman understands this isn’t an ideological battle, indeed that’s it not really a battle at all any longer. There are complicated, deeply human considerations that are still evolving about females and athletics — and evolving is the key word here — that defy the absolutist pronouncements of the sports-and-gender crowd.

Please don’t overlook Ackerman’s last point, and it’s one that I’ve been making for some time as well. Please listen to someone who’s been a pioneer in the business of women’s sports about what’s really important at the present time, and in the near future. The challenges are no longer cultural as much as they are cementing durable business models and winning fans for women’s sports.

This goes far beyond Title IX, so perhaps it’s understandable why the women’s leaders who take up most of the oxygen — here and here and here — don’t say anything remotely resembling this. Their inability, or unwillingness, to yammer about much else besides Title IX and trifling cultural obsessions reflects a women’s sports movement that needs new blood, and new ideas, to come to the forefront.

The sooner women’s sports stops being peddled primarily as a cause — and the people behind espnW understand this very well — the sooner they can become more viable in the mainstream of the sports world.