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.

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 eighth 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.

At about the time young girls in America were beginning to flock to playing fields and other athletic venues in unprecedented numbers, women’s sports leaders in the 1990s began cranking up some new rhetoric about the reasons they should be participating and competing.

This went beyond obtaining an athletic scholarship and a college education in the process, as Title IX was permitting them to do.

As the female experience in sports was poised to make astonishing breakthroughs later in that decade — the Atlanta Olympics, the creation of the WNBA and the Women’s World Cup — a new line in the sports feminist narrative was sounding a bit more stern, even grim: Participating in sports was imperative, for the sake of good health and a prosperous career, among other factors. Former University of Iowa women’s athletics director Christine Grant summed up this sentiment rather famously:

“Girls must play sports. It’s essential for successful people.”

Her sister-in-arms, Donna Lopiano, at the time presiding over the Women’s Sports Foundation, added more details of how girls and women would benefit from sports:

“Greater confidence levels, self-esteem, and a better self image. They are also less likely to be involved in an unintended pregnancy, less likely to take drugs and engage in other high-risk behavior, and more likely to stay in school. The health benefits are tremendous and include a lower risk of breast cancer and osteoporosis.”

It’s hard to dispute that a positive experience in sports can yield these and other benefits, beyond the pleasure of playing. I understood that even as a young girl in pre-Title IX America. Told how unusual it was for a girl to want to play ball as much as I did, I shrugged off such statements, defiant of even polite suggestion of conformity. I was (and remain) stubbornly independent off the field as well, but never in my life did I think the urge to get girls to get in the game would become even more conformist than what I fought against.

Playing for all the wrong reasons

The symbol of this almost desperate attempt to encourage girls to get involved in sports was a 1995 Nike commercial, If You Let Me Play Sports. An influential sports shoe company with a brilliant reputation for powerful marketing and imagery packed more into this 30-second spot than all the pronouncements of sports feminists could manage in 30 years:

This ad certainly felt like a triumphal moment for women’s sports leaders, a cultural watershed in reaching the American public about the values and virtues of sports for girls. Clucked a Nike copywriter:

“It wasn’t advertising. It was the truth.”

But was it?

I was initially chilled at seeing this ad when was first unveiled, and my feeling soon switched to horror.

First of all, the title of the ad.

Who was stopping girls from playing? Anywhere in America? In the mid-1990s? This has been part of the sports feminist mantra — that girls and women, even then, were somehow still being prevented from playing, even two full decades into the Title IX era. If not actually on the field, then in a larger cultural context. Except that this was patently untrue.

Secondly, there has been little response to having young girls spout the same talking points of activists, as if they have any idea what they’re really saying. The worst example was the somber girl, sitting on a swing and saying in a monotone that if only she could be allowed to play sports:

“I will be more likely to be leave a man who beats me.”

To have the words of adults come out of the mouths of children is reprehensible, this line above all. There’s an implication here that females must be implored to get into sports, to “become strong,” if for nothing else than to deal with abusive men. Mariah Burton Nelson must have been beaming.

Rarely has the veracity of these statements in this ad, and in the entire “girls must play sports” meme been questioned. What are the sources for these claims? We are never told. This all sounds so right, so they must be true.

It’s OK not to play — really, it is

Yet a flood of books, research and other claims were forthcoming in the wake of the Nike ad, and as social scientists, academics and the larger feminist community issued warning signs about how girls were being “shortchanged” in American society.

A 1998 book, “Raising Our Athletic Daughters: How Sports Can Build Self-Esteem and Save Girls’ Lives,” plays off these claims, which were expertly demolished by dissident feminist Christina Hoff Sommers.

Now girls needed to be “saved” through sports. But what if they stop playing? This is a terrifying prospect for the well-meaning co-authors, Jean Zimmerman and Gil Reavill, so they devoted a chapter to it. “When Sports Fails Girls” leads where the title suggests. There are lengthy discussions of eating disorders and body image, and of sexual abuse by and relationships with coaches.

Zimmerman and Reavill mention only in passing that girls may become interested in other activities, and even “in boys.” Apparently, “some people” believe this, but they don’t bother to explore that possibility. It is a glaring omission.

Today, as a third generation of young girls and women participate in sports, there is more research being conducted into the topic, and that is being widely hailed in the mainstream media. So is the Nike ad, still uncritically. Chirped The Wall Street Journal:

“A 10 percentage-point rise in girls’ participation in high school sports leads to a 1 percentage point increase in female college attendance and a 1 to 2 percentage point increase in female labor-force participation.

“Maybe athletics should be added to reading, writing and arithmetic.”

Yet women are more than 50 percent of college students today, and are becoming more in demand in a labor force that increasingly favors knowledge- and information-based collaborative skills. Whether or not they played sports does not appear to be a factor. They’re changing the cultures of education and work, indeed, they may be actually shaping it, by the sheer dominance of their numbers. This is hardly being shortchanged.

While these developments are good news, there are other basic questions unanswered. Why, when women are diving deeply into all kinds of academic, athletic and extracurricular activities, is such a disproportionate amount of attention being focused on those who play sports? Stevenson’s research doesn’t address those girls and women who don’t play sports and who aren’t interested in it at all, but are having succesful, happy and healthy lives. What about them? What about those of us who did play, once upon a time, and did drop out, and are just fine?

Yes, Title IX and the women’s sports movement opened the doors of sports to girls and women who might not otherwise have been able to play. But to continue to insist that this must be a top priority, a higher-value choice among many that females now have available because of health, fitness, academic and professional reasons, is to disrespect the fact that not all women will make the same choices. There’s a certain comformity in this notion that I find detestable, given the rebellious roots of my sports experience.

And finally — and I will write about this in more depth in my final post on Friday — all these feel-good stories and studies are missing any examination why those of us who love sports were drawn to it in the first place:

If not for the joy of sports, then for what? What’s the point?

Coming Thursday: As the Title IX establishment celebrates the 39th anniversary of the passage of the law, some envision how the “revolution” might continue. Their ideas subvert the original intent and spirit of that statute and do little to broaden the mainstream appeal of women’s sports. Warning: I may get a little angry about all this.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

This is the third 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.

The standard narrative script followed by women’s sports activists is that men are to blame for the slow progress of female athletics.

But it doesn’t take much digging to discover that women — female physical educators until the 1970s and politically-minded feminists since then — also have hindered what’s referred to now as the women’s sports “revolution.”

Starting in the 1890s, when Senda Berenson Abbott formulated a restricting first set of basketball rules for women, leading figures in women’s athletics wanted anything but a revolution. As much as any men, they expended decades’ worth of energy to prevent that from ever taking place.

The singular philosophical line running through organized women’s scholastic sports has been anti-commercial, and until the 1960s, largely anti-competitive. For the better part of 70 years, these women resisted efforts to expand competitive athletic opportunities, working especially hard to prevent varsity sports from trumping intramurals and “play days” on high school and college campuses.

That’s because for many of these women’s leaders, maintaining control of women’s sports — and keeping them out of the hands of men favoring a commercial, highly competitive model of sports the women reviled — has mattered above all else, even at the expense of increased opportunities for female athletes.

Maiden Aunts don’t always know best

“When equal opportunity knocks,” posted on the NCAA website in January, chronicles the dramatic, contentious 1981 vote at the NCAA convention to sponsor women’s college athletics, which since 1972 had been governed by the female-led Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. The story amply quotes two high-profile AIAW stalwarts who still believe that women’s sports was dealt a severe setback when the organization collapsed.

Said former Texas women’s athletics director and Women’s Sports Foundation CEO Donna Lopiano, the AIAW president during its last sports season of 1981-82:

“I think the NCAA takeover slowed down the development of women’s sports probably by a good five to 10 years.”

For most of its existence, however, the AIAW was short of money, and ambivalent about pursuing commercial options. The AIAW also was the defendant in one of the first Title IX sports lawsuits because it initially banned athletic scholarships, while the NCAA permitted them for male athletes.

Just let this sink in for a moment: Women discriminating against women, as the age of Title IX dawned. How many years did that set back women’s sports?

This policy, eventually dropped in an out of court deal, was a byproduct of the AIAW’s egalitarian philosophy but untenable in the wake of the new law.

From that point on, AIAW leaders were focused more on holding on to power and their self-proclaimed virtuous approach than catering to the competitive desires of female athletes. Within the organization there was disagreement about later revisions of the scholarship policy that prevented women athletes from receiving aid for anything more than tuition and fees, and other rules that banned schools from paying coaches for recruiting trip expenses.

According to data gathered by sports historian Ying Wushanley, the AIAW spent more than 20 percent of its overall revenues ($847,000) on legal expenses during its 10-year history, while allocating only eight percent ($315,000) on championship competitions for women athletes.

During its final three years (1979-82), as it battled for survival, the AIAW burned through $569,000 for lawyers, mainly to fight the NCAA.

But even well before the NCAA vote, top women’s coaches — including Tennessee Lady Vols legend Pat Summitt — were publicly saying that the NCAA was the way to go, as she reflected 20 years later:

“For me it was tough emotionally, but professionally it was clear cut. We felt emotionally tied to the AIAW, but there comes a time when you have to look at the big picture, opportunities for your sport and women’s athletics across the board.”

That the AIAW required schools to pay their own way to national tournaments also made it easier for athletics departments to cast their lot with the NCAA, which then as now foots the bill for those expenses.

Virtue or politics?

Also by this time, even some AIAW leaders had become disenchanted with the organization’s activities, including what women’s basketball writer Mel Greenberg described as a vendetta against schools and individuals supporting the NCAA move. Judith Holland, like Lopiano a former AIAW president, felt that women athletes were being shortchanged amid all this, and testified on behalf of the NCAA during the AIAW’s unsuccessful antitrust trial.

For that, Holland, then an associate athletics director at UCLA, was labeled a “co-conspirator,” as if she were the Whittaker Chambers of women’s sports. In a recent video interview posted on the Pac 10 website, Holland, now retired, affirmed her belief that the NCAA-AIAW merger was good for women athletes (picks up at the 2:50 mark):

“I don’t think you should have different rules for women than you had for the men. And the women couldn’t have an impact on the rules for the men unless they were in the same association.”

But in the same NCAA website piece linked above, former Iowa women’s AD Christine Grant, who preceded Lopiano as AIAW president, underscored the political animus of sports feminists like her:

“The whole decade of the ’80s was pretty much a whole downer. We just seemed to be losing one thing after another.”

She doesn’t define who she meant by “we,” but in truth it didn’t include female athletes. The AIAW was gone, and from 1984 to 1988 Title IX sports compliance was on the back burner thanks to the Grove City vs. Bell Supreme Court ruling, which exempted parts of educational institutions not receiving direct federal aid. (Congress pre-empted the decision by passing the Civil Rights Restoration Act, then overrode a veto by President Ronald Reagan.)

Concluded Wushanley in his 2004 book, “Playing Nice and Losing,” which culminated with the AIAW-NCAA dispute:

“Toward the end, the AIAW became more of a political agency for women leaders than a national organization devoted to the advancement of women athletes.”

But women’s sports were starting to flourish at the college level, especially basketball, in which iconic figures like Cheryl Miller and Teresa Edwards were competing. At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Summitt guided the powerful U.S. team to the gold medal. Two years later, the women’s hoops team at Texas, where Lopiano still presided, won its first and still only national championship in undefeated 35-0 fashion.

While basic Title IX compliance still lagged in far too many places, the superior resources and organization of the NCAA were beginning to pay off for women.

Coming Thursday: Longstanding complaints about football hogging financial resources took a darker, nastier turn in the early 1990s, when more radical voices in sports feminism demonized the sport on cultural grounds.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

• In USA Today, Christine Brennan tees off on Nike for “standing by” Ben Roethlisberger and Tiger Woods, despite their recent issues with women, and gives Donna Lopiano first dibs at being the ultimate moral arbiter of all this:

“There’s no question that the right thing for a company to do is to drop athletes who treat other people so badly. What does it say when a company doesn’t do that? It says that they like the reputation of being sexist because it fits in their edgy, macho, not-so-nice-male brand. Companies that care about these ethical issues do pull back.”

While these athletes don’t appear to be terribly enlightened about women, neither has been charged with a crime. The real scandal here isn’t Nike, but law enforcement authorities in Georgia and their abysmal investigation of the rape allegations against Roethlisberger. He’s been suspended by the NFL for six games in a rather strong rebuke of his behavior.

Then there are the ethical implications of Gloria Allred, who’s representing two of Woods’ alleged mistresses (as well as his kindergarten teacher) in what might charitably be described as a big-time shakedown attempt.