Fraters Libertas

Courageous, Appalling ..... and Right!

Regarding my controversial comments yesterday on women’s sports and confused gender roles, Barbara from Golden Valley emails in with an endorsement of my views. Since she’s a former college athlete and a woman (and it sounds like a kind of a babe), I think this may be the definitive account about what’s wrong with women’s sports:

I've been reading your comments on women's basketball, and I couldn't agree with you more. I'm a woman, and my husband swears I'm a feminine woman (you'll have to take his word for it). But I played softball in college, full scholarship, at UCLA in the '80's. Won two NCAA championships, came in third twice. I loved my teammates (not like THAT!! Yuck!!) but even the gals who weren't gay were, well, mannish. And intentionally so. Not to the degree that you see now, where the girls have tattoos on their biceps for heaven's sake, but still pretty butch. It's not right.

For me, I just wanted to play a sport I was good at, get a good education for free (thank you tax payers of California) and get a date with the good looking surfer guy from the water polo team. Small achievable goals. But, once undergrad was over, it was time to get out, rather than continue as some of my teammates did to 1996 and the first woman's softball competition in the Olympics. Do I wish I had their gold medals? Of course. Was I willing to continue living with girls that never owned a skirt or mascara and knew nothing of politics unless it was left-feminist-manhating? Nope.

Women's sports should be about women, playing against women, having their dads and boyfriends cheering in the stands, and then getting off the field and wiping the dirt off of their lip gloss stained mouths (editor’s note - yagada yagada yagada yagada) and going off and doing the other things that girls do. Not strutting around like men, burping and scratching and generally acting like men act only when they're on the field or around other men. And what's wrong with that?

Yesterday I also addressed the politicized media hype over the Lady Gophers basketball run. King from SCSU Scholars provides further insightful commentary on this issue. No, King isn’t a woman, or an athlete or a fabulous babe. He’s an economics professor, and for this purpose, that may be good enough:

But let's be clear as to why it is on the air and why it is getting coverage. The NCAA pumps up women's basketball because it's the closest thing to a female revenue-sport, and Title IX is forcing schools to create these programs. SCSU has a women's hockey team not because we're competitive -- so far, we're not -- but so that there are thirty or so more female athletes that can balance against the men. Not all schools can do that. The University of South Dakota, which doesn't have women's hockey, now has to cut its baseball program to allow it to fund women's sports to meet Title IX. And as Sid Hartman pointed out a few days ago, Minnesota has had its ADs fighting to force broadcasters to show women's sports on air as part of a package for men's sports. This is not uncommon.

The NCAA has made Title IX a cause celebre. It instructs its presidents, ADs and coaches to promote women's sports. It should come as little surprise then that it gets coverage beyond the merits of the sport, and even less surprise that some people exposed to it end up embracing it. As to fans here loving the Lady Gophers, it's Hartmanism -- the support of all things Minnesota, the desire for relevance in a world that passes by in silver tubes in the air, particularly for those of us outside the Twin Cities.