Outside Oberlin

The Girls of Summer Only a Start for Women in Sports
By Jessica Rosenberg

Venus Williams and Pete Sampras both won Wimbledon last year. Sampras received more prize money, a lot more, than Williams. Tiger Woods leads the men’s PGA tour money list, Annika Sorenstam the LPGA’s. Woods’ earnings so far this year? $2,255,857. Sorenstam’s? $636,448. Soccer is the world’s most popular sport, but there wasn’t a women’s World Cup until 1991, or a women’s Olympic soccer event until 1996. There are, as far as I know and I hope I’m wrong, no female coaches of Division I men’s college teams of any sport anywhere in the country, but there are hundreds of male coaches of female teams. When a woman tried to become an umpire for Major League Baseball, she was harassed until she was run out of the game, because ‘women don’t belong in baseball,’ even behind the plate. For the past 20 years, the men’s and women’s Final Fours, the finals of the NCAA basketball tournament, have been held in separate cities. 

To the casual observer, a man winning an event and a woman winning an event have done the exact same thing. Woods and Sorenstam play the same 72 holes. Williams and Sampras play a different number of sets, but that’s proportional and has nothing to do with how hard they work. The casual observer is ignorant of what drives sports in our society: the bottom line. Williams receives less prize money because fewer people watch her than Sampras, so advertisers don’t pay as much for commercial time during her matches, and NBC pays less to televise them. The Final Fours are held in different cities because women can’t sell out the same stadiums men do. There are two problems with this typical set of excuses: the media ignores its own role in creating smaller viewer numbers, and, a slightly bigger issue: those smaller viewer numbers don’t actually exist.

For the past few years, women have been outdrawing men at Grand Slam tennis events, and this is after Anna Kournikova is knocked out of the tournament. The third highest tennis audience in ESPN history watched Jennifer Capriati win the Australian Open. 90,000 people filled the Rose Bowl to see the U.S. play in 1999’s women’s World Cup final against China, and literally millions more, the biggest audience for a women’s sporting event ever, watched on TV. The celebration made the cover of every major magazine (some of which didn’t feature Brandi Chastain with her shirt off) and was the talk of the country for weeks afterward. Chastain and teammate Mia Hamm even got the chance to be sexually harassed by David Letterman on Late Night. The first successful women’s professional basketball league, the WNBA, was launched in 1997, and has expanded to four more cities while drawing sellout crowds, complete with jerseys and theme songs, in bastions of jockdom like New York and Houston.

The argument that all women’s events draw fewer fans than any men’s event is false. But that doesn’t mean that women’s events don’t on average sell fewer tickets. Female players are still considered less athletic, less competent, than their male counterparts. I’ve heard time and again ‘Women’s basketball is boring!’ ‘Why?’ ‘They can’t dunk.’ First off, some of them can dunk, but after watching the McDonald’s All-America game, I think we can all agree that the emphasis on the jam in the men’s game lessens the ability of the players to do anything else, like shoot or play defense. Why would they want to? I will agree that softball is more boring than baseball. My solution is to let women play baseball, as they did in the forties (although without those skirts, please). It’s a non-contact sport, for Pete’s sake, and if you’ve ever seen a 60 mph underhand pitch to a batter who’s much closer than a baseball batter, you know there’s a Pedro Martinez or two waiting in the women’s ranks. 
The media cannot continue to denigrate women’s events because they bring in less revenue, and then contribute to their overshadowing by not televising them. Call it the ESPN vicious circle. They’ll televise the women’s Final Four, but move their studios temporarily to Minneapolis, where the men are playing. If the networks want to see more returns from women’s sports, they can start giving them more exposure, and getting the attention of fans who wouldn’t normally go out to the stadium to see women play.
In terms of other jobs around sports, women are making inroads in reporting and broadcasting but employment in areas like umpiring and coaching is slow to arrive. The perception is that those who hold these jobs are have to be tough. They must maintain discipline and most people assume, probably correctly, that it’s harder to do that for a men’s team than for a women’s team. 
Men won’t respect female referees and coaches, apparently. But when a female referee T’s you up, the other team still gets two shots and the ball. When a female coach tells you you’re benched, you stay glued to the pine or you’re off the team. As long as officials support the authority of those female refs and coaches, they won’t have a problem handling men’s teams. Only by hiring women to do these jobs, and standing behind them 100 percent, do leagues and the NCAA send the message that women are capable of doing them. I can now turn on the TV and see a woman officiating NBA games. She’s usually one of three refs and the other two are male, but it’s a start. Pat Summit, the coach of the legendary Lady Vols basketball team, was offered the head coaching job for the men’s team. She turned it down. Smart move, Pat. Who would leave a successful program to coach a mediocre one?
For athletes, the amazing events of the summer of ’99 made the network execs sit up and take notice. Things are starting to get better, although even a show like Sports Night can belittle the achievements of the gold medal-winning U.S. women’s hockey team, while women’s hockey continues to be the fastest growing sport. 
In fact, women are starting to join traditionally male sports, like football and wrestling, in record numbers. I’m not just talking place kickers: I read an article the other day about a woman who played on the offensive line for her high school football team. In Colorado the homecoming queen at one high school accepted her crown in her uniform and then had to jog back down to the locker room to prepare for the second half. Julie Krone was the first woman elected to the horse racing hall of fame after a stellar career in which she won numerous races and rode in the Triple Crown. 
Professional leagues in soccer and softball have been started, and there has been a semi-pro women’s baseball team for years. Two of the four Grand Slams have equalized prize money, and they’ve mostly stopped sticking the women’s final between the two men’s semi-finals to keep people watching. After all the games in St. Louis as well as Minneapolis sold out, the NCAA announced that in future the Final Fours will be held in the same city.

In the aftermath of Title IX, to paraphrase the State Farm ad, little girls are allowed to have big dreams too. Women of all ages are able to feel the intense elation and crushing disappointment of watching people just like them compete on the nation’s biggest stages. Even though Purdue’s loss in the national championship game has made me feel like I’ve been kicked in the chest, I wouldn’t give back a second of the past few weeks. It has been a glorious ride. I am so very proud. All I want is for all women and men to have the opportunity to feel this way about a team, and not care about the team’s gender.

Opening Day — It’s Almost as Good as Being in Florida
By Zach Pretzer

I will be the first to admit that while playing baseball for the Yeomen in Florida over Spring Break, the last thing I had on my mind was being at Oberlin and building a snowman in late March. The whole “oooh, it’s snowing” thing kind of lost its effect for me sometime in early December, and it was quite depressing to have to come back to Ohio.
Granted, if you added the ages of everyone on our team, that would be the average age of the people we were around in Ft. Myers, kind of the gates to heaven if you will. But sunny and warm weather did an excellent job of overshadowing any downfalls that might have occurred during our break. Nonetheless, it had to end at some point, and we found ourselves back here in Oberlin on the last day of March. 

Very, very depressing. Wasn’t Delta supposed to go on strike or something? Why couldn’t we just get accidentally get left in Florida? Would anyone know we were gone? Whatever the answers to those questions may be, our team found ourselves playing in snow and sleet two days after being in sunny Florida. Home, sweet O-town.
Ohio weather is enough to bum out any baseball player, but thank God for the Major League Baseball season. Enough complaining, even if our games are canceled or if we play in blizzards until May, at least we can come home at night and watch the best in the game duke it out day in and day out. Major League Baseball, sweet bliss.

Hopefully George W. Bush throwing out the first pitch of the season is not an omen of things to come, but the opening days of the season have been quite eventful. The highest-paid man in all of sport, Texas shortstop Alex Rodriguez, even managed to trip on his shoelaces and fall down twice in the season’s first game. You’d think that $250 million would necessitate a bit of coordination, but at least he’s giving the crowd their money’s worth of entertainment. Go rich boy, go rich boy.

However, there have been a number of exciting performances in the season’s first week. Blue Jays slugger Carlos Delgado hit three home runs on Wednesday against Tampa Bay, and Boston Red Sox pitcher Hideo Nomo threw the second no-hitter of his career against the Orioles on Wednesday. Who said that Nomo couldn’t throw the no-no anymore? As for the rest of the Red Sox, however, injuries are certainly harming the team early on. Shortstop Nomar Garciaparra, who led the American League in batting average last season, will be out for up to four months because of wrist surgery, and Rodriguez’s big money partner in crime, Manny Ramirez, is bothered daily by a hamstring injury he’s had since he was with Cleveland. Poor Baby. Still, if Nomo continues to dominate as he has started to early on, the Red Sox pitching staff could be unstoppable with the addition of Pedro Martinez. More than unstoppable, just flat-out disgusting.

The two-time defending champions, the New York Yankees, have begun the season without four of their top players, Orlando Hernandez, Derek Jeter, Henry Rodriguez and Shane Spencer. Jeter and Hernandez, however, are playing extended spring training in Florida (sigh, the sunshine state), and should return soon. If the Cleveland Indians can get their pitching rotation together and sluggers Juan Gonzalez and Russell Branyan continue to swat home runs, they could be tough contenders for the defending champions, along with the Red Sox and White Sox.

In the National League, the Philadelphia Phillies, yes, you heard right, the Phillies, have jumped out to an impressive 3-0 start. For a lot of other teams, injuries are proving to be detrimental to their opening games. Dodger pitching ace Kevin Brown has tendonitis in his achilles tendon and could miss four or five starts, and the Atlanta Braves are beginning the season without the services of veteran John Smoltz, who has tendonitis in his elbow. The Cincinnatti Reds’ Ken Griffey, Jr. is having hamstring troubles, and is limited to just pinch hitting for the time being.

Also, Pirates hurler Kris Benson is currently on the disabled list, as is Arizona Diamondback pitcher Todd Stottlemyre, who just recovered from a shoulder injury. Despite the fact that a majority of teams in the league have quite a few injuries, don’t expect the Phillies to surprise everybody and run away with a division title. If you follow baseball, you know the story. Atlanta is always a contender for the title, and in the American League, Oakland, Cleveland, Boston, Chicago and Toronto all should have legitimate shots at taking down the Yankees. 

My life reached on all-time low when I saw a VW bug drive by in Florida with a huge New York Yankees sticker on the back window, a Yankees liscense plate cover, and yeah, Florida plates. To top it all off, the car was even painted to match the Yankees’ colors. I understand that a lot of baseball fans in this country are front-runners, but hey, let’s pick a different team. You would think by now even the people in New York are tired of their team winning. It’s gotta’ get old after a while. C’mon, share the love, guys.

I guess my best solution would be for everybody to root for Montreal and Minnesota. What a big market World Series that would be. Maybe if that happened they wouldn’t be able to pay guys $250 million any more. In the meantime, let’s just enjoy the season, who knows what kind of wacky things can occur during a 162-game schedule. Maybe John Rocker can actually keep his cool. We can only hope and pray. Hope and pray.