I haven’t benefitted from Title IX in a sports context, and readers here certainly know I’ve got problems with the way the sports compliance provisions are being enforced by the courts.

But this terrific video compiled by World Team Tennis is the perfect tribute to a woman who has done so much more than to advocate for Title IX. Billie Jean King’s impact on women — and men — is far greater than a law will ever be. This certainly has been the case for me.

She questioned why things were the way they were for female athletes and for women in society, and did something heroic about it.

This is the final post in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that critically examines the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues.

All posts in this series can be found here.

I’ve been promising the last two weeks to explain what the above racquet is all about as I’ve made a racket about why and how the women’s sports movement lost its way.

The racquet was inspired by one of the creators of that movement who continues to inspire me and many other women today.

I bought it just days after she beat a self-styled male chauvinist pig in one of the greatest sporting spectacles of my lifetime.

It’s a Wilson Billie Jean King Cup racquet, a fabled relic of its day, wooden with a small head and long handle, frayed strings and a crack along the insignia. It’s completely unusable now, of course; when I last took it out a few years ago to see how it felt making contact with a ball, it shimmied like our family’s old 1969 Buick Riviera when I was learning how to drive.

I keep this racquet on the wall above my writing desk, as much a symbol of what King’s example has meant to me as her feat that night in Houston — and in everything else she has done — has meant to literally hundreds of thousands of women.

I had never been so fired up in my life, or since. Finally, I didn’t feel so all alone as a “tomboy.” The word didn’t sting so much any more. Here was a woman who did so much more than beat an old man on a tennis court in the Astrodome. She gave us the heretical idea that we might actually be able to do something in sports after we had grown into women.

I’ve lost so many things in so many moves in all the years since: gloves, cleats, my red, white and blue ABA basketball, a childhood’s collection of baseball cards. But somehow I’ve managed to hang on to the racquet, without really trying. There’s something metaphorical in all that.

In many ways, this racquet also symbolizes what I think the women’s sports movement has become today: Tough but brittle, successful but chastened, worn down but not without the goods, once refreshed, to spark future generations of females all around the world to get in the game, and to stay.

During this series I’ve explained how the noble intentions to live up to Title IX have been accompanied by hard-edged gender identity politics with little sympathy for displaced male athletes, rants against football and sexual expression, and desperate pleas that girls need to be “saved” by sports. Not only do these leaders ignore the notion that women may just choose not to play, they define equality in sports as based on participation numbers and percentages, and think this can be achieved only by their eternal vigilance in the court system.

Reviving the joy of play

The activists claim they’re only trying to make sure Title IX is being enforced, but as I have written in this series, what some truly crave goes far beyond what the law requires, and has ever been about. For them, this isn’t about sports, but to overthrow a dastardly “patriarchy” that haunts their dreams.

Their attempts to impress these notions upon young women hasn’t been as persuasive as it might have been, and I think I know why.

There's crying in basketball.

For years, the Women’s Sports Foundation (that King created), National Women’s Law Center and other advocacy groups serve up a battery of data and studies to illustrate not only how beneficial sports have been to girls and women who participate, but how they must be encouraged for females who have not. Or to underscore the legal rights for females to have equal access as boys to get in the game.

Learning how to compete and cooperate, staying fit and feeling healthy, getting good grades and avoiding teen pregnancy and boosting self-esteem are good things. If young women derive these benefits from sports, fine. If not, that should be fine too. Title IX is the law of the land and should not be repealed. It must be reformed to reflect the times and stop causing harm to men’s teams.

But what’s missing the most from this advocacy is the reason why we flock to sports in the first place.

Instead of being badgered to play for social and career imperatives, or for scholarship offers or fame and fortune on ESPN, both girls and boys need to be reintroduced to the idea of the pure joy of play, perhaps a quaint and even naïve notion in today’s society. It’s the subject of one of my favorite sports books, and it has informed me as I wrote this series.

I’m learning in middle age that extrinsic motivations simply will not work. Corporations keep pushing them on their employees, hoping the offer of a little beer money bonus will prompt more productivity and keep their docile little worker bees in line.

I may be getting older, but I’m no less rebellious about this kind of conformity, and I hate to think that we need to make sports yet another activity marked by duty and obligation, rather than fun and play. And most of all, a passion inspired by people such as Billie Jean King.

But that passion has stir inside the girl, and it has to stir deeply. Nothing else is possible without it.

Imagine

When I stepped inside the lines, the rest of the world melted away.

Like opening a book, taking the field and the court was for me an act of the imagination, as well as a means of escape. The world of adults — their rules and demands — could be blown off, at least to some degree.

I could hear coaches and parents cheering, and sometimes yelling, and occasionally I let an umpire have it. I could talk back to a grown-up and get away with it, although I came close on one occasion to getting tossed for my big mouth.

At the age of 12!

I’ve often wondered whether I’d be sore today if had I had more talent and ambition than the limited options offered to me at the time, slow-pitch softball and six-on-six basketball. I participated in what I could, and did the best that I could. Playing for the Atlanta Braves, or being the female Pete Maravich, all the way down to my gray socks, were fanciful notions better left for the dream world inside the lines.

This used to be my playground.

I didn’t have a point of reference for any of this. When Donna Lopiano repeats her oft-told story of being crushed as a young girl to learn why she’d never have a chance to pitch for the New York Yankees, I can relate to that. Although I have always hated the Yankees, and always will.

She ended up being a Softball Hall of Famer, playing for the famous Raybestos Brakettes. I gather this might not have been as satisfying for reasons I came to realize about my own experience: Softball was and is a fine sport, but it just isn’t baseball. If your heart is set on playing baseball, the so-called “female” alternative is really no alternative at all.

(Even more intriguingly, Lopiano never fielded a softball team when she was women’s athletics director at Texas; it was added only after she had become the CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation and her old school was hit with a Title IX suit.)

What I can’t relate to is how Lopiano and other women’s sports advocates have allowed those stymied dreams to animate their activism beyond the simple notion of working to tear down the barriers of participation and competition for girls and women. That certainly was difficult and painful enough to do, and they should be tremendously proud of what they’ve done on behalf of hundreds of thousands of young women.

But to parlay that activism into an angry grievance against the so-called “male sports culture” smacks of an embittered sense of vengeance that’s just unbecoming. Even when it attempts to call out the unbecoming behavior of male athletes. The women’s sports movement was not supposed to have been about reflecting matriarchal attitudes.

Even after I became aware of how truly limited my sports options were because of my gender, I never believed that rectifying that meant others had to pay a price. I didn’t envy or hate boys because football and baseball were all-male pursuits, with their standalone cultures. If anything, I grew to love those sports even more, curiously attracted to the reality that they would always remain mysterious to me.

For me, it was all about getting in the game, and staying there, first as a kid on the sandlots of suburban Atlanta, and later as an adult privileged to write about sports from all over the country and the world for my hometown newspaper.

It ranged from collecting names and times of competitors at a youth track meet to watching Brazil win the World Cup in person. In between were lots of high school and college football and basketball, soccer and Olympic sports and quite a bit of women’s sports.

It was a theatre of dreams that will never die.

Billie Jean showed that it wasn’t a place just for boys.

When I stepped inside the lines, I could dream.

And be.

What’s Next: On Saturday I’ll post a collection of all the individual posts in this series with a few final thoughts, and explain why I wasn’t able to get to everything I intended. It’s been a thrill to do this, and an honor to have some really thought-provoking comments from readers.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

This is the second in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that critically examines the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues.

All posts in this series can be found here.

When I was 13 or 14, I did something I never thought I would ever do.

I quit playing sports.

This was the mid-1970s, before I’d ever heard of something called Title IX, and just as Billie Jean King was lighting a fire in me (the racquet above has her name on it) and many other young girls who were thrilled to play slow-pitch softball and six-on-six basketball because that’s all we had.

It was more than enough, until it wasn’t.

At the very moment in which women’s sports broke through the surface of American culture, I decided that I was done playing. For the rest of my high school years, I deeply regretted doing this, almost to the point of depression.

Zealots might be quick to point out that given the lack of options at the time, it was understandable that I would give up. I was being held back by sexists, apparently, and antiquated rules.

Except that I wasn’t. Frankly, I couldn’t hit a softball thrown under slow-pitch rules, and in basketball I was a short guard who couldn’t shoot, even after being freed from the defensive side of the halfcourt line. When I tried out for my high school basketball team after a couple of years away from the game, I blew a layup with a rare chance to touch the ball. I wasn’t just rusty; I was bad.

Instead, I covered that team for my high school paper, and my college’s women’s team and on from there as a professional journalist. Playing was a thrill while it lasted, but reading and writing and evolving into an inveterate history geek and aspiring journalist surpassed everything else.

My days as an athlete ended here, but never the passions that inspired them.

Can I interest you in something?

All along I’ve believed that my wavering interests are not that unusual, for females of my generation and for those who have come after me.

The familiar, comfortable narrative spun by women’s sports activists has been that females are just as interested in playing sports as men. It’s social attitudes that have prevented this seemingly organic “equality” from taking place.

I do think that held some more truth when I was younger and women’s sports at the collegiate level were still in the early stages of development. But as girls and women continued to make their participation in sports so common as to be unremarkable, the stridency of the activists became increasingly defensive. What I knew in my own experience was being hotly denied by women who claimed to be speaking for people like me.

One of the tests for Title IX sports compliance is for college and university athletic departments to “accommodate the interests and abilities” of female athletes. But the Title IX establishment actively resists having those interests surveyed in any serious manner. This hot-button issue was triggered anew during the deliberations of a Title IX commission created by the George W. Bush White House.

In 2002, I covered the first commission hearing in Atlanta, and like a later meeting in Washington, tempers nearly flared over the subject of interest. Three years later, the Bush administration issued a “policy clarification” that allowed schools to conduct an interest survey to meet that test.

Bush officials erred in making it almost too easy for schools to put a compliance stamp on their gender equity efforts. Instead of making a case for incorporating interest as a factor in the Title IX equation and fostering a discussion about what I’ve tried to examine here, the Bush policy clarification predictably backfired.

Still, the feminist orthodoxy went into a rage, when not indulging in raw hyperbole about having Title IX examined at all.

When the Obama administration took office in 2009, that clarification was reversed, and one of the three ways to measure Title IX compliance was effectively neutered. How can college athletic departments “accommodate the interests and abilities” of female students if they can’t find out what those interests might be?

The activists say only that they don’t trust the results of surveys that could get caught in an e-mail spam filter. That’s a cop-out, for they have never suggested improving the methodology of a survey, nor its retrieval options.

It might be seen as a bait-and-switch, but I suspect they fear women students may not tell them what they want to hear, that not enough of them may be as prone to playing sports and back up the untested creed about equal interest. For what it’s worth, I think male and female students should be surveyed for sports interest, but women’s groups might be even more wary of that data.

The vanilla gender ideal

In her 2008 book “The Sexual Paradox,” Canadian psychologist and columnist Susan Pinker interviewed high-achieving North American women in such fields as the law and the hard sciences and found many of them, at mid-career, lacking the desire to carry on. Some expressed an obligation to please others, or to adhere to feminist pleas to invade strongly male-dominated professions. Some of her subjects, in fact, gave up tenured professorships and executive posts to teach grade-school children and other lower-paid, lower-profile work that nonetheless offered immense gratification:

“. . . women can now have what men have, but many decide after trying it that they don’t want it. The vanilla gender idea that every given opportunity they should want it, if that’s what men choose, hinges on the assumption that male is the default against which we measure everyone’s wants and dreams.”

The wrong kind of feminist activism has been to push women toward this ideal of “sameness,” and we are seeing this in sports as well. While I loved playing sports, and prided myself in knocking down barriers and even “taking on” the boys, ultimately that wasn’t my greatest passion.

One leading women’s sports legal advocate contends that the Title IX statute and its sports regulations are part of the problem. University of Baltimore law professor Dionne Koller calls this “the interest paradox,” and provocatively claims that the current sports participation model predicated on Title IX is a “male” model that does not invite female “assimilation.” It’s a suggestion I’ll take up in a later post, as Koller’s argument essentially makes the case for the non-commercialized vision of the Association for Women in Intercollegiate Athletics (plenty more on this tomorrow) and college athletic reformers.

Women’s advocates have long accused men resistant to the changes brought about by Title IX as “dinosaurs,” and certainly there has been plenty of retrograde thinking and action to tackle. It’s not over by a longshot, but the common assumptions women’s advocates make and the straw men they invent to perpetuate their party line have become stale.

Coming Wednesday: Some of the biggest dinosaurs standing in the way of women’s progress in sports have been women.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.