Extracurriculars

The UConn-Tennessee rivalry that Pat Summitt snuffed out four years ago may not ever be fully replaced, but UConn’s Big East battles with a superior Notre Dame team are taking on a healthy edge.

Especially after the Irish guards sizzled in the second half in Hartford Monday night to down the Huskies for the third consecutive time and earn the Big East regular season title outright.

“A source” told Connecticut media earlier Monday that after Notre Dame beat UConn in last season’s Final Four semifinals, an Irish player stuck her head in the Huskies locker room and said:

“It must suck to be you.”

Given how UConn wilted down the stretch last night, and with the prospect of the rivalry being renewed at the Big East and NCAA tourneys, there may be more misery for a Huskies team that, like Tennessee, is suffering some unaccustomed losses.

And may be seeing more of its new nemesis before the season is done.

Writes Jeff Jacobs in The Hartford Courant:

“We could have as many as eight meetings in 15 months and 11 within 27 months.

“And we have one delicious story.”

Those women’s sports reformers who tout their gender’s perceived inherent virtue won’t like this, of course. It runs counter to their aims of shaming the dominant male sports culture into better behavior, instead of having it influence how women are interacting.

I will admit this is not great sportsmanship, if this incident did take place. But the nature of the competitive beast is that this sort of thing cannot be fully “reformed.”

This rivalry is becoming more heated, which is good for the game, and good for the entertainment product of women’s college basketball that needs all the compelling storylines it can get.

My favorite heroines — sports or otherwise — aren’t women who succumb to the cookie-cutter ideal of  being “role models” but who relish instead stepping outside acceptable boundaries to discover the world as it is, and reshape it, even a small bit, to their ambitions and will.

Sally Jenkins on Danica Patrick:

“I’ve always liked Patrick a lot, because she owns herself. Her image and sexuality belong to no one. They are nobody’s property but hers, to do with as she pleases, and she reserves the right to play bait-and-switch with them. She’s an expert self-promoter, with as much control in that area as she has over a car. For all of the discussion about her risque Go-Daddy commercials, they are all suggestion and little exposure, with a lot of zipper sounds but not a lot of skin. Off camera, she’s firmly married and very private. Good for her.

“As an athlete, she has no political or social agenda, she’s never bought into what Camille Paglia calls ‘Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyachers.’ She knows better than to whine about patriarchy in racing, because the sport made her a millionaire. Every good car she’s gotten came from a guy. Again, good for her.

“But it’s a lonely position she’s staked out. She’s disrespected from two sides at once.“

And so it has always been, and always will be.

The Amateur International Boxing Association is now saying skirts are optional for competitors in the first women’s Olympic boxing tournament in London.

Another first-world crisis has been averted.

This optional position is probably the best, given the mixed opinions from the boxers. Some were incensed about what might have become compulsory; others were not.

In free Western societies this shouldn’t regarded as be the greatest indignity, although there has been plenty of serious squawking from the usual suspects about this affront to equality.

For female athletes in Afghanistan, just getting in the ring is a miracle. Especially those few participating in combat sports who are defying the remnants of harsh Taliban proscriptions against their very participation in society.

Sadaf Rahimi, 17, is training for the London Games near a stadium in Kabul where women were once stoned for adultery:

“I hope the Taliban don’t come back and take over. But if they do, I urge them to let women engage in sports and go to school.”

There’s no mention what she was wearing. As if that mattered. But it’s not hard to guess.

A garden variety Title IX panel discussion at Wellesley College this week received the garden variety write-up from the Boston Globe.

Meanwhile, five high school districts in Wisconsin are being investigated by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights for alleged athletic disparities for females.

Expect much more of the same during this 40th anniversary year of the passage of the law.

What you should not expect are many nuanced discussions and observations that incorporate the complexities and difficulties of complying with an ambiguously written law from any other point of view than a once-aggrieved gender that supposedly thinks entirely alike on the subject.

Yet we all know that Title IX sports compliance has had an effect on others that is not always a positive one, especially young male athletes in certain sports. This is because the law, as it pertains to the 3-part sports test, is being interpreted by the courts in a manner far removed from its original intent.

Female athletes, their coaches and teams didn’t always enjoy what they have now, thanks largely to Title IX. But as I argued in my women’s sports series last year, we’re in a post-revolutionary phase of Title IX because the status of women in American society is in a post-feminist stage. This is heresy to some.

But revolutionary rhetoric and actions do draw our attention. Yesterday, Quinnipiac University in Connecticut fired its women’s volleyball coach who alleged Title IX violations several years ago when the school tried dropping the program in favor of cheerleading. A federal judge declared cheerleading not to be a sport for Title IX calculations, and volleyball survived.

But it did not thrive, as coach Robin Lamott Sparks compiled a five-year record of 20-133. The school contends it was not the Title IX litigation that led to her dismissal, which reportedly included her being escorted from campus. There’s the counterargument that how could a program succeed when the university tried to kill it?

Yet on-the-job performance is not often a factor in Title IX retaliation lawsuits, as evidenced by the rather nasty saga of women coaches and administrators at Fresno State from nearly a decade ago.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Quinnipiac is the next battleground for retaliation ligitation, which along with high school lawsuits figure to be where the main sports-related Title IX battles will be fought for years to come.

Regarding Title IX in general, the hothouse topic is sexual harassment, and the epicenter for the last year has been at Yale University.

The most recent twist includes sexual assault allegations against Yale quarterback Patrick Witt that affected his Rhodes scholarship application. Media reporting on that saga has drawn the attention of K.C. Johnson, a noted professor/crusader/blogger from the Duke lacrosse scandal.

The Women’s Sports Foundation is stepping into these murky waters, favoring a controversial “Dear Colleague” letter from the OCR on campus sexual harassment. This goes far beyond sports, and not all feminists agree with proposed intervention that has some serious free speech implications.

The WSF has co-written a pledge of support of the OCR declaration with a newly formed group known as the Association of Title IX Administrators, who are charged with compliance of the law beyond sports. Does WSF really want to get tangled up with this issue, which is only indirectly connected to sports and which could become very divisive? Is this primarily about showing solidarity with establishment feminist groups?

More on this this potentially disturbing action by the WSF in future posts.

If you’ve been tuning in women’s college basketball the last few days, do not adjust your set.

The pink uniforms you see for many teams — and it is a rather loud shade of pink in some cases — are in honor of the late N.C. State coach Kay Yow and the battle against breast cancer she fought so bravely and gracefully.

The “Play 4Kay” campaign has turned into a nice late-season attendance booster. But at its core, it’s a unifying cause that — unlike the recent controversy involving the Susan G. Komen Foundation and Planned Parenthood — has no divisive political overtones.

While pink has long been associated with breast cancer awareness, it was only a few years years ago that the very same color was at the center of some trumped-up notoreity in one of the most embarrassing examples of sports feminism gone awry.

In 2005, two female law professors at the University of Iowa complained about the pink visitors locker room at Kinnick Stadium, claiming the color was misogynistic and homophobic in the context of a macho football environment. “I want the locker room gone,” demanded one of them, saying the paint job — which included the carpets and the urinals — might even violate Title IX.

The other professor blogged about it along similar lines, endured some nasty threats and eventually left flyover country to write up her impressions after returning to the safe shores of the East Coast. She also pens an establishment Title IX blog, where there’s no mention of her dubious cultural obsession.

I wonder what she and her cohort think now when they see pink slathered all over the signature women’s college sport — even for a worthy cause. Or even when NFL players do the same thing.

It’s long been a cultural fascination. Most of the recent headlines have been complaints over the supposedly demeaning and sexist attire female competitors will be wearing inside the rings at the London Games.

Women’s boxing takes a huge competitive leap starting today when the U.S. Olympic trials get underway in Spokane.

Finally, it’s about the boxing. Or will it be?

In the coming months, viewers in America and around the world will be prompted to take the sport seriously as a sport, and not just as a novelty. Sanctioned by the IOC in 2009, women’s boxing will be on our screens like it has not before.

But as befits the American media formula for coverage of some Olympic sports, there’s got to be a human interest angle to serve as an introduction. The more tragic, the better. Barry Bearak’s profile of American medal contender Quanitta Underwood in The New York Times over the weekend was less about the boxing and more about her horrific childhood at the hands of her father:

“. . . she wants to be a symbol of hope to anyone who has ever been sexually abused, though to do so requires something harder for her than a thousand hours of hitting the heavy bag. She has to talk about what happened.”

I don’t want to diminish Underwood’s ordeal. It is a harrowing tale that Bearak reveals, and her father was imprisoned for his crimes. There’s no dodging any of that. But she didn’t seem particularly thrilled for this kind of attention, which included a muted interview with her now-freed molester.

These stories are hard to resist, and we live in a society marinated in media and public voyeurism. Given the Penn State tragedy, it’s understandable why these types of stories will multiply, especially in women’s sports and other smaller niche sports. It’s an easy formula to perpetuate.

But there was precious little in Bearak’s very long piece about how Underwood developed as a boxer. How have she and other women come to putting on gloves? What stirs so deeply inside of them to do this? What does stepping in the ring really mean to them ?

“Women Box,” an ongoing series on WNYC radio that has been picked up by NPR, has answered some of those questions, with a thorough, compelling mixture of the personal and competitive stories of young women who will make us confront some deep-seated notions about the most extreme levels of physical combat females can endure.

It makes all the silly complaints about wearing skirts seem as trivial as they really are.

During the height of my most ardent feminist days, I gave up watching the Super Bowl. Voluntarily.

This was Super Bowl XIX in 1985, the 49ers vs. the Dolphins. Joe Montana vs. Dan Marino. Hyped as a classic showdown between the two brightest young quarterbacks in the NFL.

And I was going to miss it. All of it.

My family was shocked. “I don’t believe it,” said my stepfather, who learned rather quickly after marrying my mother that I lived for Super Bowl Sunday, and essentially had since the age of 10. “You’re not going to see the game at all?”

No, I told him, not at all.

I had been invited by members of my NOW consciousness-raising group (hey, I was in this thing all the way) for a anti-Super Bowl party that featured a vegetarian meal, followed by conversation and anything else totally unrelated to football. There might have been some “women’s music” playing in the background, but my memory fails me on that one. Thank God there were adult beverages.

But there was no television. There was no way to check the score. There would be no talk of football at all. It was all about feminism and our heightened consciousness about our status as women, etc., etc.

At the age of 24, I accepted this dinner invitation because I wanted to feel adult and civilized, more sophisticated and refined than the chili-and-chicken wings marketing boorishness of the Super Bowl. The stupid beer-and-babes commercials were as rampant then as they are now, and I thought that by tuning out, I’d finally be outgrowing all that.

The guests were all wonderful people, and I enjoyed their company. For a while. But after an hour or so of this, and still feeling famished because there was no meat to eat, I started getting fidgety and anxious. Who’s winning? What’s the score? It’s gotta be a great game I’m missing. Montana. Marino. Gah!

I was screaming, starving on the inside, and not just for food. But in this group setting I pretended to be untroubled.

It was all about keeping up feminist appearances. And it was damn near killing me.

That Super Bowl wasn’t much of a game, unless you were a 49ers fan. Montana carved up the Dolphins for three touchdown passes in a 38-16 win. My disappointment at missing the game, no matter the verdict, was surpassed only by the misery of Miami fans.

What I didn’t sense until years later is that on this occasion, which I thought would be a major step toward outgrowing my tomboy adoration for “male” pursuits, I may well have started on the road toward outgrowing a very narrow brand of feminism that I ultimately did leave behind.

A world without football, without the Super Bowl, was no world I wanted to live in. But so much of what I had been peddled by my feminist “sisters” was that there are tradeoffs here, if you genuinely wanted to be one of them and be true to your gender. There were distinct choices to be made.

Maybe I wasn’t hanging out with the right people or hearing the right things, but I didn’t want to believe that “irreconcilable differences” applied here. I couldn’t divorce myself from such primal desires in order to be regarded as progressive woman of my time.

Establishment feminism has never been comfortable with the enjoyment of such primitive activities as football, with its routine violence that goes against everything they’ve been fighting for.

In his classic book “The Joy of Sports,” Michael Novak grasps the essence of what women’s groups and other leftist social movements of the 1960s and 1970s were protesting. The origins were in a revulsion toward the American military, empire and the Vietnam War, but football has remained a convenient domestic proxy:

“Football is a celebration of a not innocent and not rational and not liberal human condition. . . . Football gives lie to those who believe that the human being is fundamentally rational, liberal, peaceful, sweetly cooperative. In football, the dream of many a first-grade teacher for her darling little boys is shattered.”

And yet we love it so. Now more than ever. Despite, as I wrote on this blog not long ago, the contemporary handwringing of sports feminists who have declared football the enemy, not just of women’s sports, but of women.

Even after the Super Bowl domestic violence hoax of the 1990s. (And apparently there’s such a thing as the Super Bowl Prostitution hoax, which is news to me.)

As the Super Bowl has become to many less about football and more about the spectacle, the commercials, risqué halftime shows and patriotic F-14 flyovers, it pulls in far more viewers than football diehards like myself.

Including mainstream women. Nearly half of all Super Bowl viewers are women, and as Kristi Dosh writes on espnW, recent polling and census data reveals that a similar percentage of women call themselves regular football fans.

With a history of brilliant branding, marketing and advertising behind it, the NFL is catering to these women, and especially their sense of fashion.

Present-day feminism remains on the warpath with an organization calling itself “Miss Representation,” vowing to root out portrayals of women in Super Bowl commercials that are “demeaningly sexualized or entirely absent from the screen.”

Well, at least they’re not denouncing football altogether. As another earnest eradicator commented on an AAUW blog:

“This Sunday, I will be parked in front of the television to watch the game. And while the players on the field are fighting for a touchdown, I’ll be working toward the goal of telling advertisers and businesses that sexism won’t sell.”

You go girl.

Now do you see why said goodbye to all this?

I don’t care much for sexist advertising, but I don’t think it’s the hindrance to women’s advancement in society that The Sisterhood wants us to believe it is.

Besides, there’s the matter of my traditional Super Bowl chili feed. I used to make something called Male Chauvinist Chili in my slow cooker, to fully exorcise the demon of that missed Super Bowl more than 25 years ago. But heavy doses of ground beef, bacon and sausage at the same time aren’t exactly what I need to eat these days.

I’ve toned down the recipe to favor lean ground beef, while kicking it up a few notches in Tex-Mex fashion, to enjoy our spicy pagan holiday without pulverizing my heart.

And hope that Madonna doesn’t have a wardrobe malfunction at halftime.

Over the weekend I drove by the public park where I used to play softball as a girl, in the years just before Title IX.

I noticed a group of a half dozen girls, in their competitive full attire, from gloves down to socks, stirrups and cleats, huddled on an infield as an adult female coach offered instruction.

On an unseasonably warm, sunny and beautiful Sunday afternoon in January, two months before this league’s season began, these young ladies and a dedicated woman were putting in the work when most everyone else was enjoying a day off.

At first I thought this was remarkable, as I momentarily waded into the nostalgia of my youth. This used to be my playground, etc. In my day, when all we had was a primitive, slow-pitch version of the game, such a sight would be especially rare, getting ready for a season so far in advance.

But then I shrugged and smiled at how unremarkable this was.

Today girls and women across America are being asked to share their stories about what sports mean in their lives. It’s called National Girls and Women in Sports Day, and it began in 1987. At that time, when women’s college sports were getting used to being under NCAA auspices and Title IX battles were heating up, it might have made sense to have such a day. There were still obstacles to playing and having something resembling equitable opportunities.

This gesture was undertaken for all the right reasons — to honor the late Flo Hyman, one of America’s best volleyball players ever. Many colleges, universities, high schools and sports organizations, including the WNBA, will have special observances today and throughout the week.

Stories are being retold of females who preceded my generation and who faced barriers we cannot imagine today.

But I hate to admit that NGWSD has outlived its usefulness. I first made this argument a decade ago when I wrote a commentary in my former newspaper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. My views startled some male editors, who may have been anxious about the response from women’s sports advocates who often complain that the media ignores them.

One of my worries is that this day has been folded into larger political and legal issues over Title IX, which gets enough uncritical fanfare every June when the anniversary date of its passage rolls around. As this blog is registered on the Women Talk Sports network, I’ve been asked to send the link to this post to e-mail addresses at the National Women’s Law Center, which will be including them on its issues blog.

I’d be shocked if this post ends up there, since groups like the NWLC don’t like their ideas challenged. But beyond that, and amid the breathless rush to get emotional about the “meaning” of sports in our lives, I fear that women’s sports advocates remain stuck in the past, cocooned in the same sentimentality that enveloped me on my old stomping grounds the other day. I admit I had to shake myself out of it. They probably never will.

I’m afraid that that this advocacy, eternally fueled by the many battles over Title IX, discrimination and access that have been waged over the past four decades, cannot see into the future at all.

This is something to be worried about. I blogged yesterday about the hiatus of women’s professional soccer and how ensuring the viability of women’s professional sports is the next frontier in women’s sports. But you hear very little from the leading figures of the women’s sports movement about any of this. It’s as though the business of women’s sports is an alien topic.

Late last year, when WPS was fighting to be re-sanctioned by the U.S. Soccer Federation, the best some could come up with was a petition drive. Others wanted to “convince” Ellen De Generes and Rachel Maddow of the virtue of owning a WPS franchise. To “save” the league.

Seriously.

The longer women’s sports is treated as a cause, as a charity, by very women who claim to care the most about them, the longer they will be consigned to the second-class status they have now in the larger sports world. This cannot be chalked up to sexism or invisibility in a male-dominated domain.

Unfortunately, NGWSD has become an agent in a never-ending nostalgia parade that trafficks in emotion and ignores the necessity of moving forward. Sports is seamlessly incorporated into the everyday lives of the women involved in them. We celebrate it daily by doing what we love the most.

We don’t need National Girls and Women’s Sports Day because the focal point of this celebration, about participating in sports, is no longer a pressing issue in this country, as my softball heirs in my former youth sports league can attest. It’s not about “getting in the game” any longer, or being melodramatic.

What we need instead are smart, intelligent, and non-whiny efforts to ensure the viability of women’s pro sports, among other pressing issues of the present and future. But you probably won’t hear much in the way of tangible ideas about that today.