Women's Sports Blog

Advice For SI On Its Top Athletes of The Decade

• Rank May-Treanor and Walsh higher, since their dominance within their sport was unmatched. 
• Consider Prinz and Wambach co-top-players with Marta.  Germany has won two World Cups and the U.S. has won two Olympic golds over the past ten years, and these scorers have been the lynchpins of their teams' efforts.  They're not as flashy as the Brazilian, but they're often more effective. 
• I love Cathy Freeman and her run at Sydney was moving and world-historical, but what is she doing on this list?  If Sheryl Swoopes is pushed all the way down to 15th, seemingly because her accomplishments occurred mostly from 2000-2005, why include someone who had only two major race wins in 2000 and 2001?  Think about replacing Freeman with an African distance runner or an American sprinter.   There needs to be a sprinter here.  Which leads to the question...
• If voting writers didn't have to consider PEDs, why didn't Marion Jones make the list?  I don't think she deserved to, but take a stand and say either PEDs disqualify, or writers aren't allowed to have them influence the decision. 
• Tennis is over-represented in the top ten.  Does Henin really belong at number four? 
• The selection of Torres over another swimmer, like Coughlin, is going to look short-sighted in a few years.
• Otherwise, fine job.

Tweet of the Week: Sanya Richards

Via.

Man at gym-"were you in the army?" me-"no!" man- "never seen a girl do so many pull-ups!" SMH this is the 21st century...we do everything!!!

Funny that he obviously knows women can be in the military, but can't manage to guess they can also be famous professional athletes.  Or just in shape. 

Holiday Hero: Charde Houston

Houston, who was homeless for awhile in her youth, steps up to the plate for a young San Antonian who has lost her mother to violence. 

Horses Are Athletes

Re: the tempest in a teapot involving the selection of Zenyatta to the athlete of the year list (the mare was second, and filly Rachel Alexandra was seventh), the double standard seems to be the most important hang-up to address.  If horses are considered worthy competition only in the case of female athletes, or if it it's clear that a human women did better and yet was being passed up for the slot that went to the horse, then this would be cause for outrage.  However horses have made the list for male athletes in the past, and these horses truly electrified the sports world in the way few other competitors, male or female, did this year.  Zenyatta competed, worked hard, and deserves the credit. 

Oddly enough, Serena Williams' selection was almost as controversial as that of the horses.  The end of her year was certainly ignominious, but look at all the 'athlete of the decade' nods Tiger Woods is receiving, and he hasn't even really dealt with his idiocy yet.  She paid the piper and had a fantastic season that should be acknowledged. 

102 Wins

Is Penn State volleyball the greatest Div I women's sports team ever?  

For further discussion, an American winter league team signed a 17-year-old Japanese woman to pitch for them.  Is this a gimmick or the start of something big?

I am at a work function for the next few days so posting may be sporadic.  

Mizzou, Woods, And The Real World

Voepel on the Missouri allegations: 

We’re seeing this, of course, in the coverage of Tiger Woods’ troubles, and the allegations that his wife may have attacked him. When a man is physically violent toward a woman, we’re outraged and horrified. But when it’s a woman allegedly doing it to a man, too often it’s treated like it’s somehow “comical.” Which we all know is wrong … but look no further than the recent “Saturday Night Live” skit about Woods to see how pervasive that mindset is. Honestly, I have to remind myself about this all the time.

I only wish that she were right that we, as a culture, were always "outraged and horrified," about men's violence against women. But the truth is that for many, the first thought is 'what did she do to deserve it' or 'why didn't she leave' or some other victim-blaming.  The MRAs are also going to jump on these two stories to fabricate some nonsense about how female-on-male violence is the great issue of our time, leaving aside its relative rarity, as well as the deep roots of domestic violence against women as a tool for dominance.  Hitting people is wrong.  Women should not hit men, or anyone.  But the fact that the guest on that particular SNL was Rihanna shows how little we care about women as survivors, let alone as perpetrators, of violence. 

Role Models

A lot of male hockey fans dismiss Manon Rheume's play in the NHL as a marketing gimmick, and perhaps it was.  Then again the power of one person's visibility is not something most young boys have to think about.  It mattered, a lot, to young girls. 

The Numbers Look Kind Of Weird, Rhodes Committees

A first research sally finds that the the United States' version of the Rhodes Scholarship started showing pictures of the winners on its website in 2005.  Since that time, based on my highly scientific method of looking at the photos and the names, the Rhodes has awarded 161 prizes, 40 of them to people of color.  If you're Black or Hispanic, you're statistically less likely to receive a prize than an East or South Asian student.  Granted, Blacks and Hispanics at the present time make up a smaller percentage of the elite college population than Asians, but there are enough high achievers among them that they shouldn't be hard to find. If you add in self-selection bias, perhaps these students take themselves out of the running because they don't historically get the award, or their schools may not encourage them. You can hear the Heritage Foundation types whine that 40 out of 161 is already an over-representation for all minorities.  What is more troubling from my perspective is the constancy of the numbers year-to-year, including my even less scientific perusal of the period 2000-2004 when there were no pictures. The percentage of minority winners seems to hold steady at about 25%.  There's no problem with building a floor to prevent the committees failing to identify qualified candidates of color, but this looks like a ceiling, doesn't it?  It's probably unintentional, but so is most racial decision-making in this country, since it's worked right into the structure of institutions.  For instance, the District Rhodes Committees are made up primarily of past winners. If past winners are mostly white, that's enough to create a system where people with similar backgrounds and connections succeed, even with no malice aforethought. 

What about athletics?  As I've mentioned before, Cecil Rhodes was a muscular Christianity type and there is an explicit proviso in the rules that students have some athletic background.  Yet unless the student bios only started to include college athletic achievement in 2008, that year was some kind of boom for female athletes winning the Rhodes.  Whether this is a statistical aberration or a late-breaking demographic change, I don't know.  More data is necessary.  But all signs point to the fact that Maya Moore needs to be a totally exceptional candidate (even more so than the white students already are) if she wants to get to England. 

Women of Color And The Rhodes: A Query

Helen over at WHB clearly didn't read my extensive post from last year profiling all the 2008 Rhodes Scholars who were both women and athletes, otherwise she wouldn't have asked whether a basketball player had ever been awarded the honor ;)  But the news that Maya Moore is thinking about going after one of the prizes led me to recall that post.  Of the five athletes who won a Rhodes last year, only one was a woman of color.  I have a major presentation to give in a few hours, but afterward I would like to do some research into the question of race and the Rhodes.  Contribute if you feel so inclined. 

"And I Treat A Duchess Like A Flower Girl"

It's not a question of good manners, or bad manners, or any particular sort of manners. It's having the same manner for every human soul. 

While Henry Higgins is being hypocritical here, since he certainly treats Colonel Pickering better than anyone else, this is one of the few instances in My Fair Lady when he makes a thought-provoking point.  In this case it applies quite well to the debate swirling around the double standard in gender and sports.  Obviously there are strong cultural remnants of the idea that women should be 'ladylike' and thus their bad behavior on the field or court is treated differently than that of men, which is often excused by using buzzwords like 'competitive' or 'aggressive.'  These terms are positive when applied to men but negative when applied to women.  In return, the answer chosen by many feminist commentators is to point out the hypocrisy of this position, full stop.  That's one way of being fair.  Unfortunately, the catch-22 of pointing out 'well, men do this thing all the time' is that the stereotypical male standard...sucks.  Another major tenet of feminism is that the patriarchy hurts men, too.  Look at how poorly the behavior that's lauded on the field serves them in becoming fully realized human beings.  Look at Hines Ward suggesting that Ben Roethlisberger is less than manly for not playing through a concussion.  Look at Roethlisberger himself and the countless other athletes who have been charged with rape in recent years.   Obviously the women who are the victims in these situations have it much, much worse, but I strongly doubt most men wake up in the morning and say 'I'd like to be a rapist.'  The sad thing is, thanks to the culture of masculinity, most of them won't even realize they are, even if they go to court. 

But we don't have to be talking about major crimes to address the toxic sporting culture in a fair way.  Elizabeth Lambert, meet Alex Ovechkin, who's just been suspended for a dangerous knee-to-knee check which injured both him and the other player, and has announced that the suspension "might make him more angry."  Here we have two athletes who acted like jerks.  The reaction to what they did will be totally different, because we of the aforementioned serious problem with the double standard.  But after acknowledging and decrying that, we still have two athletes who acted like jerks. And for my purposes what's important is that their own reactions have been different, because, quite frankly, one of them has been taught to think about what she's done (while at the same time noticing sexism in the response), and the other has been taught that anything goes in the pursuit of athletic success.  My bugbear is that I would rather Ovechkin be held to the stereotypical woman standard than vice versa.  Athletes should play fair, even if it means being less 'competitive,' because in the end they're playing a game.  There are many women who are as temperamentally aggressive, impulsive, and selfish as most male athletes are trained to be.  These qualities are often used interchangeably with those which women actually use to break out of their sexist roles, such as independence and strength.  But they're not the same, and they don't even make for winning sports psychology.  It stands to reason that there are also many men for whom these qualities do not come particularly naturally.  And if male athletes were taught like their female counterparts to have a little more regard for others,* we'd have a better world for them and everyone else.  

*Yes, the patriarchal standard means women are taught to be self-effacing and self-sacrificing and put other people first in every situation.  That's not what I'm advocating.  All of us could stand to face the world with a little more compassion.