Extracurriculars

Just as the Japanese team began celebrating its victory in the Women’s World Cup on Sunday, soothing Tweets sprang forth to summarize the impact of the gallant U.S. runners-up. One declared that “little girls everywhere win today,” while another proudly proclaimed the Americans “role models for all.”

Except that these two individuals — it should be noted that they are prominent women sports journalists — were Tweeting like it was 1999.

Then there was a leading women’s sports activist opportunistically Tweeting about how “Title IX Rules!” although the success of American women’s soccer, as I wrote here on Saturday, is attributable to other factors as well.

Fortunately, these responses were not very commonplace. For they completely missed the point about why this World Cup turned on Americans.

Ever since that glorious summer 12 years ago, women activists and sportswriters have fed us a steady party line about the designated beneficiaries of the ” ‘99ers” and their legacy. The apple-cheeked “ponytailed hooligans” of America finally had grown-up women to look up to. Feminist advocates had a Woodstock-like event to validate their work, embodied in the “cloth symbol of Title IX’s success” deemed to be Brandi Chastain’s black sports bra.

But the persistence of this sunny, preadolescent point of view also has made it difficult in the years since to mature in how we look at women’s sports. Especially team sports that are a relatively new thing when it comes to spectator appeal.

The prevailing message of 1999 made it clear that women’s sports, and women’s soccer, was all about young girls being inspired by their adult “role models” who once upon a time were “Title IX babies” themselves. Indeed, this is how the Women’s United Soccer Association was marketed, and while this wasn’t the only reason the league folded after just three seasons, it was a major miscalculation.

Its successor, Women’s Professional Soccer, launched in 2009 trying to reach out to an adult, and even male, audience, and there indeed were men hoping for this to happen, for no other reason than to cheer on edgy U.S. goalkeeper Hope Solo:

“For some reason, people want to think that we’re girls next door, who all get along and go shopping at the mall together. Treat us like professional athletes.”

For the last week or so in Germany, they and plenty other men and women did exactly that, thrilled to comeback wins over Brazil and France that fed into a familiar American sports narrative. The U.S. team also resonated with real, adult, human storylines, from the internal banishment of one of its stars at the last World Cup to digging out a last-ditch playoff win to qualify for this one.

Yet the relentless preaching by sports feminists that women athletes are paragons of virtue, unsullied by filthy lucre and bereft of competing personalities, always finds a bullhorn. Bill Plaschke of The Los Angeles Times hands it over to Donna Lopiano, who clucks uncritically about why females athletes rule, and men just have cooties, apparently:

“Money breeds corruption, money breeds laziness and arrogance, all those things you don’t like to see in your star athletes. You are less likely to see that in the women’s games, where there is a lot more sense of appreciation than privilege.”

Has it ever occurred to Lopiano that Solo, Abby Wambach and other WPS stars labor in a fledgling league with no better options, and not because of her ideal of glorified amateurism? Does she really think that women would maintain their humility if they were making some truly big bucks?

This smugness also insults men’s teams with superstars and high payrolls that still embody everything she idealizes about women. Since we’re dealing with soccer here, Dr. Lopiano, meet FC Barcelona.

Just entertain me

The notion that women athletes can catch on with the larger public because of their supposed female rectitude and status as “role models” has proven to be a faulty one. In the moments after the World Cup final, the basketball blogger Bethlehem Shoals summed up the weariness of feminist lecturing:

“Guys, both teams came away with a moral victory here. And that’s what women’s sports are all about, right? Teaching values?”

But most of the post-mortems were refreshingly dogma-free. The soccer blogger Brian Phillips, writing for Slate, polishes off the cross from Megan Rapinoe:

“But the real good news for American women’s soccer is cultural. Thanks to the catharsis of the Brazil game and their careening progress through the tournament, the team managed to capture the nation’s attention without ever having to be a symbol for anything. Unlike the 1999 team, this year’s American women weren’t serving as role models for a nation’s daughters or nurturing a country through a presidential crisis. They weren’t offering a corrective counterexample to the greedy/childish/immoral superstars playing men’s sports. They were just more or less kicking ass, as dramatically and unpredictably as possible. Yes, the Obamas watched the game and the TV commentators loved the team’s determination and chemistry, but the Americans were charismatic in part because they were at least a little edgy. If I had a daughter who acted like Hope Solo, I’d be terrified, which is exactly why I love Hope Solo.”

As I wrote last week, this team captivated simply because it entertained. No more so than in the final, as gut-wrenching as the outcome was on our shores:

“It had everything. It lifted you and crushed you and wore you out. Over 90 tense minutes of regular time and 30 tenser minutes of extra time it went. Anxiety, exhilaration, jubilation, despair. Every emotion bloomed and bottomed. The nerves of an entire sports season felt compressed into a few hours on one July day.

“The game was over, then it wasn’t. The game was over again, then it wasn’t again. Momentum would arrive and get ripped away like a rug. Finally it came down to penalty kicks—always a cruel solution—and Japan prevailed.”

Now the arguments — all in the name of equality — are whether the Americans “choked,” and whether those who say no aren’t giving them kid-glove treatment because they’re women.

I’ll let my friend Clarence Gaines make the case that there is honor in losing and point out one final thing:

Welcome to the arena, ladies. For better or worse, expect more of the same. Plenty more.

It’s understandable that Title IX advocates are jumping on the U.S. women’s soccer team’s bandwagon as hard as they did 12 years ago. Then as now, American players roused their nation to care, at least for three weeks, about two things which were unlikely to gain mass attention, especially together: soccer and women’s sports.

Here we are again, on the eve of the U.S. match against Japan in the Women’s World Cup final, and the Title IX refrains are growing ever stronger:

– The National Women’s Law Center, naturally

– The Village Voice

– The Huffington Post

– The Santa Fe New Mexican

– Newsday

You get the drift.

It isn’t that these assessments are incorrect.

It’s that they are incomplete.

While Title IX has spurred the growth of women’s soccer and other sports in the United States, it is far from being the only major factor at work here.

Youth soccer leagues were sprouting up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, inspired by the creation of the North American Soccer League. All across American suburbia, girls were starting to play the game at the same time as boys, making it one of the few sports in this country that can make that claim.

It’s a rarely acknowledged fact that American women’s soccer icon Mia Hamm made the U.S. national team at the age of 16, just as her high school days were beginning and well before she played college soccer at the University of North Carolina. The same goes for Kristine Lilly, her UNC and U.S. teammate for many years and who only recently retired.

They were grounded in youth leagues before the scholastic level subject to Title IX had developed. Their national team coach later was their coach with the Tar Heels. Anson Dorrance, the legendary architect of women’s soccer on so many levels in America, had seen both Hamm and Lily at elite youth tournaments, which in several sports for females still remain more fertile developmental and recruiting grounds than the high school scene.

After their college careers were over, and with no pro league in the U.S. at the time, Hamm, Lilly, Julie Foudy, Brandi Chastain and other key figures of the celebrated 1999 World Cup-winning team benefitted from extended residency camps that few women’s national teams enjoyed. This created the atmosphere for their famous team-first ethos, and gave them time to develop first-rate fitness levels and their competitive edge.

These are the traits, handed down, that Abby Wambach, Hope Solo and Megan Rapinoe are demonstrating with thrilling effect for us now.

In one of the few recent media pieces on U.S. women’s soccer that doesn’t mention Title IX, Chris Sprow of ESPN The Magazine explains how these dynamics reflect an American competitive spirit that Wambach cited after her dazzling goal against Brazil and that’s long been the province of male athletes. It shouldn’t be a surprise that this also is why the U.S. run in Germany, as well as that of the ” ‘99ers” before them, has caught on with the American public.

The “head start” American women got years ago helped make the difference in gripping quarterfinal and semifinal wins, respectively, over Brazilian and French teams with splendid talent (except at goalkeeper) but that lack conditioning, resilience and proper backing from their national soccer federations. (The Los Angeles Times also delves into this.)

And I think I understand what Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl is trying to get across here:

“If the ‘99 Women’s World Cup was the ultimate vindication of Title IX in the U.S., this year’s tournament is exporting Title IX on a global level.”

The crowds have been great in Germany, and still good even after the home team was stunned in the quarterfinals. It’s just that when we get so giddy about women’s soccer and women’s sports (and these occasions are rare) we’ve been conditioned to think that there’s only one thing responsible.

But to take apart that sentence literally, Title IX needed no “vindication” in 1999; its current sports compliance provisions were rendered ironclad a few years earlier in the Cohen v. Brown case that reached the Supreme Court. And since there is no Title IX outside of the U.S., the development of women’s sports around the world proceeds in ways and with cultural realities that Americans simply cannot fathom. But even our women’s sports “exceptionalism,” to borrow from Sprow, has its limits at home.

After Sunday, the U.S. players will return to play in the three-year-old Women’s Professional Soccer league, which is struggling along with six teams and has issues that, in the words of soccer journalist Beau Dure, “no goal in Moenchengladbach can solve.”

Its predecessor, the Women’s United Soccer Association, folded right before the 2003 Women’s World Cup, a deflating blow to the next phase of the growth of the sport. As women’s soccer blogger Jenna Pel noted this week, since 1999, the U.S. team’s only major titles have been at the 2004 and 2008 Olympics, with no fully professional league bridging those years.

What is vital is for WPS to get more than a short-term, post-World Cup boost. This is about approaching women’s soccer, and women’s sports, as a business, which doesn’t fit the mission of women’s groups that have made Title IX the focal point of their advocacy.

Yet after all the euphoria about the latest Title IX success on the soccer fields has died down, the challenge of ensuring that these American stars can continue playing on those fields professionally and keep the U.S. team ahead of the game will have nothing to do with the law at all.

A question often raised about women’s athletics — and it’s usually posed as a rhetorical one — resurfaced recently following a suggestion from a WNBA coach that her players might just be too “nice” when the reality of competitive sports gets a little nasty:

“Could women’s sports use some bad girls?”

The attempt at an answer revolved around the usual ingredients: Among women athletes in general, there are much lower instances of self-absorbed, narcissistic comportment during games and controversial personae away from them. Rare is the story of a female athlete in trouble with the law.

The writer above, Chicago Daily Herald columnist Patricia Babcock McGraw, a former basketball player at Northwestern, is clearly on the side of better behavior, but she is also careful to repeat the all-important mantra that female athletes ought to serve as “role models” (plenty more on that in a bit).

Yet there’s still this nagging question that she seems to understand works against her preference:

“Would women’s sports get more of a following if the athletes were edgier, more outspoken, more brash?”

In praise of the human carnival

The answer may have been provided on Sunday during the U.S. women’s soccer team’s epic victory over Brazil in the quarterfinal of the Women’s World Cup.

What was on display — in addition to Abby Wambach’s ferocious extra-time equalizer — was the stuff that makes sports so compelling for fans: High drama, intrigue, controversy, dubious sports(wo)manship and ultimately, a comeback for the ages.

This involved all females, including the Australian referee, in a sport about which Americans are generally indifferent.

It was pure spectacle, with a healthy dose of American sports patriotism/exceptionalism thrown in, as is the case during the Olympics.

Above all, it was entertainment. Incredibly memorable entertainment.

That’s a word that rarely crops up in discussions about women’s sports, especially at the professional level. Even in the 15-year-old WNBA, the default mode for talking about how to broaden its audience revolves around the “role model” ideal. New WNBA president Laurel Richie mentions this repeatedly as she makes her way to all 12 league cities this summer.

While watching Minnesota Lynx rookie Maya Moore torch the Connecticut Sun for 26 points over the weekend, Richie rattled through the same litany of praise during a telecast on NBA TV. Yes, Moore is humble and is the perfect emobidment of what Richie and others in women’s sports desire above all: A great player who’s also a “good girl.”

But as I watched Moore, all I could blurt out was: “This woman’s going to tear this league apart. Absolutely destroy it.”

Her entertainment value is undeniable because of the way she plays the game. Moore’s blend of supreme skill and burning desire have already rendered her one of the best players in the history of women’s college basketball. She’ll likely have the same impact as a pro and as an Olympian. She is a basketball purist’s dream.

Yet somehow that’s not enough.

For the “role model” burden is a product of a women’s sports movement that preaches the urgency of teaching young girls well, in hopes that they will soon follow along. And further the claim that they can provide a morally superior alternative to the male sports culture feminists loathe.

While it is a good thing to exhibit good behavior and teamwork, respect for opponents and the games they play, the extent to which this demand is made also has the effect of making women athletes one-dimensional characters. It denies the reality that they are human beings, filled with the same contradictions, grievances, anger and unbecoming traits as men. Women may act out them out differently, and I’ll set aside for now the issue of whether that’s due to real gender distinctions or social conditioning, or some of both.

Role models or robots?

What is noticeable is how the desire to be “good girls” is a strong notion among many female athletes. They’ve learned well the lessons of their foremothers about being wholesome role models, instead of scantily-clad models in racy magazine pictorials emphasizing looks over athletic talent.

The rare cases of bad deeds off the court get a good denunciation within The Sisterhood as well. When WNBA star Diana Taurasi was charged with DUI two years ago, ESPN.com columnist MeChelle Voepel was especially harsh, suggesting Taurasi should be banned from the league’s all-star game. This is more than just another case of a sportswriter preaching morality at an athlete. Taurasi’s offense apparently was against not only the Phoenix community, but her team, league and sport as well:

“She is the first truly high-profile WNBA player to get in any serious legal trouble.

“Considering what a popular, visible and vocal presence she is for her franchise, the league and the sport of women’s basketball, this is as much a worst-case scenario as the WNBA hopes it ever has to deal with.”

Taurasi’s brash style is comparable to that of U.S. goalkeeper Hope Solo, whose outburst after being benched in the 2007 Women’s World Cup semifinals catapulted her into a different kind of female athletic notoreity.

As Sports Illustrated writer Grant Wahl examined prior to the 2008 Olympics, Solo was frozen out by her teammates, not allowed to be in uniform or on the bench for the third place game and even the team’s flight home from China. He addresses the sisterly bonding established by the celebrated 1999 U.S. Women’s World Cup team that the fiercely independent Solo breached:

“No episode in U.S. women’s soccer history has convulsed the team more than the Solo saga, which has strained friendships and sparked fundamental questions about the nature of women’s sports. Did Solo’s outburst violate a team-first ethos that was a cornerstone of the U.S. women’s appeal and success, or was that mentality naive in the first place? Did her punishment fit the crime? And would it even have been imposed on a men’s team? ‘In England guys get in fights and arguments all the time, and usually within an hour or by the next day everything’s fine,’ says former U.S. men’s keeper Kasey Keller, who has played 17 seasons in Europe. ‘But to be completely ostracized? I’ve never heard of anything like that.’ “

And yet the meme of innate female virtue persists. In last Sunday’s game, Brazilian defender Erika feigned an injury that ironically might have yielded the Americans enough stoppage time to score. In The New York Times this morning, Jeré Longman referred to recent research claiming that women do things like this very rarely, as compared to male soccer players. Former U.S. captain Julie Foudy, now ESPN’s lead Women’s World Cup commentator:

“Men have a tendency to draw the foul much better than women. They know and understand pressure, when to go down even though they’re not hit hard. Some are brilliant at it. Women play far too honest sometimes. They take the hit, ride the tackle and stay on their feet. I do think that will change.”

Just let them be

Ironically, one of the teammates most adamant about banishing Solo in 2007 was Wambach. After beating Brazil, they appeared together on the ESPN Women’s World Cup set from Germany, talking about the mutual respect they had developed.

They’ve shared the same amount of sporting hell and now glory together, the staples of all great compelling sports entertainment. Braced around Wambach’s heroics were Solo’s moments: She saved a second-half penalty kick, only to have Brazil given a retake because of an encroachment call that has not been fully explained; in the penalty kick phase she made the clinching save.

This is the sort of thing that draws people to sports. Too see athletes struggle, and lift themselves back up, and the way the American team did, and not just against Brazil, but over the last four years, has been mesmerizing.

While I was covering the 1999 Women’s World Cup — still the best gig I’ve ever had — the euphoria of an unexpected moment was intoxicating. So was the too-good-to-be-true saga of the girls next door, hoisted as perfect “role models” for all the little girls of America and beyond.

This was employed to create the first fully professional women’s soccer league in the world. Longman again, following the demise of Women’s United Soccer Association, with blunt post-mortems from sports marketers:

“In other words, if the league had played down ’sugar and spice’ wholesomeness campaigns meant to attract 8- to 12-year-olds, and sold the concept of the players as strong women, the W.U.S.A. could have kept the youth audience and also made itself relevant to a much wider group of adolescent girls and young women.”

When WUSA’s successor, Women’s Professional Soccer, had barely gotten underway in 2009, there were calls to draw paying spectators with an appeal to social activism. Having covered the WUSA, I responded very emphatically that this wasn’t going to cut it either. Women’s sports has got to stop being about a cause, and at the pro level needs to be treated as a business. The business of sports entertainment.

What’s going to sell women’s sports in the long haul will not be an incessant appeal to virtue but rather to sparkling, dramatic entertainment that attracts adults and youngsters alike. As a female marketing friend who’s a fan of women’s sports often tells me, people don’t watch or buy tickets to sporting events to see role models. They want to be entertained.

It’s not a matter of needing more “bad girls” but rather allowing women athletes to be the fully human, adult creatures they are.

(This is a topic I wanted to examine in my recent series “Women’s Sports Without Illusions,” especially after a perceptive reader brought it up. I pledged to address it in a new phase of my inquiry that continues on this blog and elsewhere. So here’s a little bonus coverage.)

* * * * * * * *

SLAM Online contributor Clay Kallam points to some uncomfortable biological truths about women athletes when ruminating off the likely season-ending injuries to Candace Parker (knee) and Lauren Jackson (hip), two of the WNBA’s most visible stars:

“The rate of ACL tears, arguably the most devastating knee injury and arguably the one with the greatest chance to have long-term impacts on knee health, is four times greater for women than men. Anyone involved in the sport for any length of time has seen far too many players go down in pain, from WNBA all-stars to freshman girls trying the game for the first time.

“And at some point, we all have to come to terms with this painful sacrifice that so many women and girls make for the sport. Yes, women are tough and strong, but it’s also true that a variety of factors make them much more vulnerable to crushing, debilitating injuries.”

Kallam, who has coached girls high school basketball in California for many years, is raising a taboo that women’s sports would rather not acknowledge, and that author Michael Sokolove found quite revealing while researching “Warrior Girls,” his 2008 book about female youth sports injuries. (Here’s the article in The New York Times Magazine that led to the book.)

Difference = Unequal?

For example, Sokolove was surprised to discover that the Women’s Sports Foundation did no physiological research into the topic. The WSF has since teamed up with the University of Michigan to create the Sports, Health and Research Policy Center that will open this fall. Its mission is to “generate interdisciplinary research on issues related to women’s sports, health, gender issues and kinesiology.” And here’s the real kicker:

“As a result of the collaboration, the new center will generate a variety of information and tools central to the foundation and university’s educational role of supporting evidence-based public debate that informs public policy and encourages elimination of the obstacles girls and women face in sports participation.”

That last part is a reference to legal, sociological and cultural barriers that figure to prompt calls for more gender equity measures; there’s no specific mention of female sports injuries being part of SHARP’s research efforts that I could find. This think tank will be housed within Michigan’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender, so there you go.

(Update: In this recent interview with espnW, WSF chief executive officer Kathryn Olson said the SHARP Center will indeed address injuries, including ACLs and concussions. This is encouraging; and it bears watching as the center holds a conference next spring.)

But the real heat Sokolove received for his book came from sports feminist academics at the University of Minnesota who went on an all-out offensive to refute his claims.

The Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport entitled its response “Anatomy Isn’t Destiny,” marshalling perspectives from the public health, sports medicine, orthopedic surgery, sports psychology and sociology faculties at the university. Read as one, this is an attempt to diminish real physical differences that get in the way of larger political gender equity aims:

“Sokolove skillfully links the sport ethic—striving for distinction, accepting risks, playing through pain and not accepting barriers in the pursuit of goals—with a Mars-Venus dichotomy whereby females are routinely portrayed as different from (and inherently inferior to) males. He seems determined to create a moral panic for already overly concerned sport parents who are understandably trying to do what is best for their daughters.”

The Tucker Center was decent enough to give Sokolove space to reply to its criticisms, which he keenly understands:

“The overall concern of your scholars seems to be that my book – as well as any overt discussion about injuries among women athletes – is going to drive women off the playing field. I’d say it is injuries that takes athletes off the field – not information and discussion. And not one of the hundreds of emails I’ve received from female athletes, or parents of athletes, have said the book had induced anyone to leave their sport.”

But wait, there’s more:

“There’s a problem out there, and I believe that advocates of women’s sports – those at the Tucker Center and elsewhere who have done important work in advocating for Title IX and its rigorous enforcement – have a responsibility to take it on as a cause.”

Bemoaning the body electric

The Tucker Center does indeed look into these matters, but it hardly amounts to a cause. Tucker Center associate director Nicole LaVoi, one of Sokolove’s biggest critics, spends far more time writing for the center and on her blog about the “sexualization” of female athletes in media, almost to the point of obsession. Last week, Time magazine quoted her in a story about the Women’s Tennis Association’s latest provocative portrayal of its most attractive players, and comments like this have become her stock-in-trade:

“Yes, these women are beautiful, but we see lots of cleavage and legs, and it’s set to music that is reminiscent of soft-core porn. That might be interesting and titillating, but it isn’t going to make me turn on Wimbledon.”

So will only Whistler’s Mother do?

I shouldn’t revive the old saw about beauty being in the eye of the beholder, nor should I elaborate that this isn’t about what LaVoi would watch. But I just did by way of arguing that there’s nothing tasteless in any of this. She apparently wants her muscle without even a hint of glamour (a staple of women’s tennis since the marvelous Suzanne Lenglen dared to bob her hair, among other 1920s taboos). This is typical of the legion of sports feminists who disdain any association between female athleticism and aesthetics. As I wrote in my women’s sports series, they prefer an androgynous ideal that trumps sex in favor of gender. We all know which is more fun, and which is decidedly not.

In the same Time piece, Penn State sports journalism professor Marie Hardin complains that such imagery revolves around homophobia:

“There’s this idea of the lesbian bogeywoman, the predatory lesbian in sports. Unfortunately there’s a real fear mongering that doesn’t help women’s sports at all.”

But her rhetoric actually marginalizes women’s sports, especially by implying that women athletes shouldn’t get all Hester Prynne about themselves:

“There’s a real tension there. What female athletes choose to do to empower themselves personally does often times chip away at the collective power of female athletes and of women’s sports.”

Is this what she teaches her journalism students? That women athletes should not make their own choices if those choices offend The Sisterhood?

“The collective power of female athletes” is the abiding cause of sports feminists, and anything that interferes with that objective as they define it is emphatically denounced or shunted aside. Individual preferences or experiences do not fit in this dogmatic, airtight narrative, as I also wrote.

If LaVoi, Hardin, et al, were less concerned about how women athletes look in pictorials than with what happens when they get hurt, they might better justify their credentials as “experts” on topics about which contrary points of view are rarely allowed to enter the public discourse.

You don’t have to be an academic to understand that what they’re postulating isn’t scholarship, but pure advocacy.