Women's Sports Blog

Former Hockey Player Speaks Out About Homophobia

Justin Bourne wrote a courageous piece for USA Today about the continuing anti-gay culture in pro hockey.  Sadly, the NHL is always rated the most gay-friendly of the major sports leagues, which means players aren't seeing the connection between their stated attitudes and their behavior.  Though as Bourne admits, they also know the way they're supposed to act in public about these matters so they put up a good front.

New Blog To Check Out

Via Pat Griffin, I learn that a young FTM trans athlete is now blogging.  Fascinating and important stuff.

Graf Hates Tennis Too

The crystal meth revelations in Andre Agassi's book excerpt didn't bother me, although his lying about them did.  The most upsetting part was the message that's getting lost in all the drug furor.  Not only does he say several times that he hates tennis, it's clear that his wife, Steffi Graf, does also.  Both were forced to play by abusive fathers, and this shared pain was what helped bring them together.*  Both were among the greatest players of all time, and they spent their careers loathing what they were doing.  All parents who are interested in having their children play sports at a high level should read this book.  We laud the athletes who are products of 'tough' sports parents like Jorge Posada or Tiger Woods, but does the end really justify the means? 

*The fact that he calls her Stefanie, separating the person he knows from the tennis persona, is pretty telling. 

Join The 60th Disability Blog Carnival

Hosted this time around by FWD.  Entries are sought on one of our own favorite themes, intersectionality.  In this case that means the ways in which disability may intersect with social locations like race, class, and gender to create complex lived realities.  The carnival will take place on November 19th, with entries due no later than November 17th. 

Self-Improvement

Instead of the post I just had up, I've decided to do a hundred lines: 'I will not mock ignorant people, despite the fact that they were mean about people like me.'  If I'm serious about not going negative except for egregious examples of sexism, etc, I have to stay away from easy targets like the WNT blog. 

Adding A Sport Just To Recruit Men- Fine, But Title IX Compliance Is Too Expensive?

Small, selective liberal arts colleges have been whining for years about their gender imbalance.  Turns out that young women have, shockingly, bought the message that they can do anything and that includes becoming extremely successful candidates for college.  Yet after years of exclusion and missed opportunities for women, the natural correction of some schools running, say, 60-40 women to men is being treated like the threat of the century.  The problem?  Well, oddly enough that imbalance allegedly makes it harder to recruit more men.  Don't worry, you're not the only one to whom that reasoning seems circular.  The second issue disappears if the first issue isn't considered a national emergency.  There's no real threat that these schools will go all-female, after all.  Plus there are still universities that skew the other way (and there's always Deep Springs, Wabash, Hampton-Sydney, etc, to keep the old order safe).  Now that the federal government's civil rights wing is back to doing its actual job rather than investigating enemies of the Republican party, it's looking into the various ways the admissions process at certain schools discriminates against women.  The aspect that's interesting for WSB's purposes is that one of the ways some of the colleges involved have considered recruiting more men is adding more men's sports teams.  But since pesky Title IX isn't going anywhere that would mean adding more women's sports teams as well, dammit, which is just so costly.  Never mind that the cost actually comes from a morally shaky ploy to further a morally shaky end.  Adding a team in itself is fine, but think about extra recruiting for, say, whites, and see how you feel about it.  The Title IX requirement is just a way to make it slightly less sketchy by forcing schools to consider the consequences of their actions.  It is a real problem that some groups of men are not going to college in the numbers we would hope.  These are not the groups who would be applying to Williams, anyway.  And the problems are systemic, not to be solved at the admissions end.  But as usual, it's much easier to blame Title IX than to address that. 

Serena Puts Serena First. As Always.

Here's a nice little follow-up to the Tulu story.  Apparently beating her sister for the year-ending Sony Ericsson title and regaining the world number one ranking were all too exhausting for Serena to consider playing for her country in the final of the Fed Cup next weekend.  She should at least have the courtesy to come up with an injury.*  She shouldn't have joined the Fed Cup team in the first place if this is how she treats its biggest set of matches.

*Now she's claiming "exhaustion."  She already has a lighter schedule than most other top players, and didn't have too much trouble in this tournament. I call shenanigans. 

Derartu Tulu: What Sports Are About

Good lord, there have been a lot of Big Important Stories on the blog recently.  I promise some light-hearted banter next.  But I have to relay the amazing tale of yesterday's New York Marathon winner, 37-year-old Derartu Tulu.  The first black African to win Olympic gold in the 10,000 meters, she retired from racing when a comeback attempt faltered after the birth of her second child.  She certainly hasn't been running at the elite level at the marathon distance recently, with her only victory coming in 2001.  But not only did she accomplish another first, becoming the first Ethiopian to win the New York Marathon, she did so with an astonishing display of sportspersonship, at one point slowing to wait for the injured Paula Radcliffe, whom she supported with words of encouragement throughout the race.  Tulu's ethic is one of the purest example of how sports can bring out the best in the human spirit. 

Photos: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty.

 

Coaches' Inexplicable Love Affair With Mittsy

The BC Fan was watching the updates of people who were watching webcasts of the Germany match (ah, the wonders of modern technology), and reports that the company line about solid defense was rather kind to Mitts, quelle surprise.  The mystery is how not one, not two, but three generations of WNT coaches continue to play this semi-disaster area at the highest level.  She must be a great practice player.  There was also general consensus that the midfield sucked, with special attention to Lloyd, whose career has gone right down the nick over the past year.  If you are playing a huge midfield against a German team that thrives on midfield possession, make sure you have your best people on the job.  Even more worrying is Pia's postgame musing about what to do with the rejuvenated Wambach.  She's your biggest offensive threat (literally); what do you think you should do with her?   It was fun to see her come off the bench after practically owning the team, but the novelty's worn off and the World Cup is not that far away.  Now, this team is light years ahead of where it was under the previous two administrations, and no one is going to agree with every decision a coach makes.  I just wish I knew where Pia's thoughts were tactically with her current player pool.    

I admit to being totally sucked in by the 'everything is normal, look away' vibe coming off the Hucles retirement.  But shaking off the PR, why did she go through training, get selected to the team for Germany, then leave?  As has been pointed out elsewhere, she clearly didn't have another job lined up and it sounds very much like an un-premeditated decision.  Could have been a sudden attack of introspection, but why not play the match at least before hanging them up? 

Is Twitter A Woman Thing?

There's been a lot of posting recently among the Women Talk Sports crowd about the power of social networking for women's sports.  My contribution is an observation I made early on in my Twitter tenure that has continued to cross my mind from time to time.  I had always sworn never to use the service, thinking of it as the last frontier in self-absorption and oversharing, until the day I found out that a friend, a smart, balanced friend whom I respected, loved it.  She saw the 140 character limit as a challenge in creating pithy and interesting updates.  I checked her feed.  It didn't sound like 'woke up, ate a muffin, brushed teeth, caught BART.'  She mused and asked questions.  This challenged the part of Facebook I'd never liked, the idea that you have to write a status update about something you're doing rather than something you're thinking.  I signed up. 

I quickly discovered the other, more popular and more unexpected (by the developers) aspect of Twitter: the presence of people in the public eye whom one might follow.  Twitter became an important blogging resource by enabling me to follow pro athletes and sports journalists.  Also politicians, Web 2.0 theorists, and Sarah Haskins.  From at the beginning I noticed that my numbers were skewed heavily toward women.  Even now when things have become more balanced, 48 of the 72 people I follow are women (two-thirds).  Initially I wondered if it was just my own selection bias.  But Kara Swisher reported back from a tech conference that users of Twitter were running female in large percentages.  I also found a graphic representation on a sports social media site, that aggregated the tweets of pro athletes and showed their pictures in a grid.  Ten-ish for Major League Baseball, ten-ish for the NHL..then the page exploded with images for the WNBA.  There is no question that more female athletes are tweeting than male athletes. 

From a sports perspective, this is women taking advantage of a niche that can't be exploited by men because the downside is too large.  Male athletes make a lot of money, have important sponsorships and are well-known worldwide. Many of them are also immature and volatile, which makes broadcasting their every thought to the world a problem. A number of men's pro sports leagues and college teams have already restricted or banned Twitter.  Meanwhile, women's sports are embracing it because what they need is exposure, and they thrive on the personal connection between athlete and fan.  They've thus far avoided any major controversy.  Although it's only a matter of time before a percentage of the athletes lodge foot firmly in mouth, the benefits outweigh the potential cost in this particular balance. 

I think there's another reason, though, which is more connected to the way our culture views women and the way we're taught to socialize (NOT inherent differences between the sexes, I might add).  'What are you doing?' is the question asked by someone who has called to talk, to be informed about what's going on at that moment in your life.  Prolix pronouncements, where you bang on about your personal philosophy, are impossible with the character limit.  The perception is that Twitter is chatty, which is a mode of communication linked with femininity in our culture.   I don't think men see it as acceptable to document their time in chatty ways.  The balance is probably shifting now, since it has become clear that Twitter is a useful PR and business tool (which is why, despite low rates of returning regular-person users, it's probably going to continue to be successful).  However its initial appeal was to the virtue of keeping connected, long the province of women.  It makes perfect sense that female athletes, as a subset of the population of women, would embrace this technology first: many of them travel away from family and friends and are looking for new, more immediate forms of communication, and they also understand the importance of building personal relationships with fans and athletes from other sports.  The small, quotidian aspect of the service would make sense to them since those are things women are taught to value.  They are certainly aspects of Twitter that I enjoy, getting glimpses into the daily world both of friends and of people I find inspiring or informed.  Most people I meet don't really get Twitter, but that's often a function of knowing the caricature rather than the thing itself.  There will always be a crucial place for long-form thought, but Twitter has tremendous potential to make connections.