What, No Leagues of Their Own?

It’s a hot July day and Michele Smith is riding a bus to Binghamton, N.Y.

Some fans might remember Smith as the confident, hard-throwing pitcher from New Jersey who helped lead the United States to the first women’s softball Olympic gold medal in 1996.

A decade later, Smith, 39, is making her living playing pro softball. But not in America. In Japan.

She pitches for a team sponsored by Toyota. Most of the players work for the automaker in the morning and practice in the afternoon. As something of a star, Smith doesn’t have to do the factory work, but the Jersey girl does wish she could make a living playing ball in her own country. “I had hoped that would happen,” Smith said. “Things were pretty bright for a while. It was looking good, wasn’t it?”

But now Smith is riding a bus to a Toyota plant in rural New York with her Japanese teammates. They will speak to the workers to promote the company and themselves. Smith calls herself “a softball vagabond” and says wistfully, “You’d think at my age I’d have a home in my home.” But she doesn’t.

Those 1996 Atlanta Olympics were a joyful time for U.S. women’s team sports. The softball, soccer, basketball and gymnastics teams all won gold medals in stylish ways. Kerri Strug stuck a vault landing on a sprained ankle and the Georgia Dome crowd roared as the U.S. won a team gold for the first time. In Columbus, Ga., a city that was home to a major Army base, a group of jocks led by a mouthy doctor, Dot Richardson, and a determined pitcher from Long Beach, Lisa Fernandez, forced NBC to put them on television by winning games with come-from-behind panache and dramatic home runs and winning fans by sticking around after every outing to sign autographs and celebrate.

In Athens, home of the University of Georgia, a group of young, photogenic soccer players pulled on their ponytails, tucked in their shirts and did what male soccer players hadn’t been able to do -- make U.S. fans care about the game the world loves. They had a humble star, Mia Hamm, and supporting players in Julie Foudy, Brandi Chastain and Brianna Scurry who were happy to be in the spotlight and take the pressure. Scurry promised to run naked in the street if her team won gold. It did. She did.

And there was the women’s version of the basketball Dream Team. Teresa Edwards, who would eventually win five Olympic gold medals, said the 1996 team was the best. It included Lisa Leslie, Carla McGhee and Dawn Staley.

By the end of the Games, the U.S. had a 60-game winning streak and had exchanged places for good with the old Soviet Union as the dominant basketball power. And they did it modestly with none of the chest-thumping arrogance that came to mark the U.S. men’s team that summer.

“People would come up and tell us how much fun they had watching us,” Edwards says. “They would tell us they thought we were winning in a fun way. It was pretty cool.”

It was natural to think the “Summer of Women” would become the “Decade of Women.”

It was not to be.

In those heady days in Atlanta it seemed women’s team sports had arrived in a big way. Title IX was 24 years old and the girls of the ’96 Games had been raised to expect high school teams and college scholarships. Their parents were happy to have daughters with scraped knees and dirty shirts.

As the U.S. women’s gymnastics, softball, soccer and basketball teams won gold medals, as those teams sold out arenas and stadiums, plans began to form.

There would be two professional basketball leagues. The women’s gymnastics team was plotting to produce a pro tour to rival the sequins-and-sparkle success of similarly pixieish figure skaters. The softball team was hoping to jump-start a professional league. And it took the soccer team only until 1999 -- when it added a world championship won in the U.S. -- to catapult the Women’s United Soccer Assn. (WUSA) into being.

But now, a decade after the Women’s Olympics, as it also became known, only one of those lofty enterprises is still going. The WNBA, for the most part run and subsidized by the NBA, is celebrating a decade of existence. Attendance peaked in 1998 and has fallen since.

Edwards says she would like to be optimistic about the women being independent from the men.

“But right now,” she said, “I don’t feel the WNBA would survive if the NBA walked away. We’re fooling ourselves if we think it would.”

It was a different story for the well-funded, well-publicized WUSA, which stayed alive for three seasons starting in 2001. It reportedly lost nearly $50 million.

“Obviously,” said Foudy, the passionate star of U.S. national teams for more than a decade, “we started too big and had the wrong business plan.”

Women’s softball has sold well at the college and national team level. The NCAA tournament has risen in the ratings each of the last five years on ESPN, outdrawing the NHL playoffs this year, and the USA-Japan World Cup of Softball championship earlier this month posted a 1.1 rating on ESPN, the highest-rated softball game in history on the sports network.

But if women want to make a living playing softball, they have to move to Japan like Smith or supplement their national team stipend by coaching or giving clinics.

“I can’t tell you why we weren’t able to take advantage of the power we had in 1996,” Richardson said. “I can tell you it has been a huge disappointment.”

Not only does women’s softball not have a financially lucrative professional league in the U.S., their sport was voted out of the Olympics after the 2008 Beijing Games.

High hopes for an enduring women’s gymnastics pro tour crumbled almost immediately after Atlanta when Strug -- who became the star of the team known as the Magnificent Seven -- chose to do her own post-Olympic tour instead.

“We did have a small window,” said Dominique Moceanu, who had been the youngest member of the Magnificent Seven. “I don’t think we capitalized on it. I don’t think we had the entire package like figure skating with the costumes and the music. I think we learned that winning opens doors for you, but you have to work very hard afterward. Nothing is served up on a platter.”

Peter Roby, director of Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society, said women’s sports marketers “need to create recognizable icons,” and that while fans seem to accept women’s sports at the collegiate and national team levels, “the demographic that will watch women’s pro sports hasn’t been discovered yet.”

Steve Penny, president of USA Gymnastics, says that promoting women’s sports post-Olympics has become more difficult in the last decade.

“The world is different,” he said. “Internationalism is bigger not only in the Olympics but in tennis and golf. It used to be us against the world, not anymore.”

Women who have a brief moment of fame during an Olympics or World Cup have no platform afterward. “They can’t continue to promote themselves after the moment is gone,” Penny said. Carly Patterson, who won the women’s all-around gold medal at the 2004 Athens Olympics and who expected to follow in the footsteps of Mary Lou Retton as America’s sweetheart, reaped almost no financial benefit after the Games, according to several sources.

“Carly is pursuing a singing career now,” Penny said. “She’s exploring different fields in her life instead of sports.”

Becky Heidesch, founder of Women In Sports Careers, believes there is an audience for professional women’s sports teams in the U.S. It’s just that no one has figured out the right marketing plan.

“We have a very fragmented marketplace these days,” Heidesch said. “I have stacks of business cards of organizations that have tried to market women’s sports and who aren’t around anymore. Remember Sports Illustrated for Women? They thought it would be easy to identify the female audience who would become subscribers. Just take the wives of regular SI subscribers and marketers and advertise to them. They completely missed the boat. There’s been similar processes for several women’s sports leagues that have missed the boat.”

The eight-team WUSA has been the most extravagant failure.

“I think we assumed it would be easier,” said Kristine Lilly, a mainstay of the U.S. 1999 world champions. “We’re still trying to figure things out.”

Foudy agreed.

“We had good sponsors, we had revenue,” she said. “I think the players were popular and worked really hard. But we didn’t control our expenses well.”

In a way, Foudy said, the women who have grown up with Title IX, which legally mandated that women in college receive the same types of scholarship money, travel budgets and training facilities as the men no matter how few fans came to the games or how little television revenue was produced, may have put themselves at a disadvantage.

“It’s hard for women to realize that at the pro level we may not be able to compete with the men in terms of funding and salaries,” she said. “I think we’ve found that investors have a larger appetite for financial loss on the men’s side because they think there’s a greater potential for revenue.”

Foudy is hopeful that a women’s soccer league will be reborn by 2008, perhaps affiliated with MLS in the same way that the NBA and WNBA share infrastructures.

“It makes sense not to have a new front-office staff, the overhead of 20 or 30 marketing people,” Foudy said. “We need to be smarter across the board on salaries and what the executives make.”

She also said having soccer stadiums in place now, thanks to MLS, would benefit a new women’s league. “We were having to rent college stadiums for $85,000 a game just to open,” Foudy said.

The Women’s Professional Softball League (WPSL) that was founded in 1997 has morphed into the National Pro Fastpitch League. The nerdiest sports trivia freak probably couldn’t name a team in the 2006 NPFL. There are seven of them -- Chicago Bandits, New England Riptide, Connecticut Brakettes, Akron Racers, Arizona Heat, Texas Thunder and Philadelphia Force.

Sheila Cornell hit a memorable game-winning home run for the U.S. against China in the 1996 Olympics. She now goes by Sheila Cornell Douty and said the men who ran the WPSL didn’t listen to the women who had starred in Atlanta.

“They didn’t want our help or our input,” said the grandmother of six who lives in Diamond Bar. “We would be playing our games at the same times as girls were playing in tournaments and they didn’t even know we were playing. Our audience would have been the same girls who were playing when we were.”

She is more optimistic about a new venture spearheaded by Richardson: the ProFastpitch X-treme Tour (PFX).

“What professional level have women succeeded?” Richardson asked. “The LPGA. The WTA. Beach volleyball. Golf, tennis, volleyball. Tours, not leagues. We have a viable amateur level with millions of kids who play every weekend. So here’s what we do. Kids play their games. Pros play in the middle of it. We have two pro teams right now. They play a game, they give clinics, they sign autographs. It’s showing tremendous progress.

“Our first tour stop this year we had 1,200 the first day, 2,400 the next. Last weekend in St. Louis we had close to 5,000 people. It’s a different model than six guys in six cities, individual owners trying to make the major league baseball model work. We’re starting like NASCAR, going to the fans instead of expecting the fans to come to you.”

Fans have not always flocked to see women. WNBA average attendance peaked in 1998 at just over 10,000 a game. By last year it was around 8,000. In 1999 the USA women’s soccer team was averaging 33,099 a match. By last year it was 4,153. TV ratings have done the same, falling each year since the 1999 World Cup.

Revenue from broadcast rights remains an issue. Lucrative TV contracts do not always happen with women’s sports.

The WNBA is among the exceptions.

According to Ron Howard, a spokesman for the league, television contracts with ESPN and ABC are separate from any NBA deals, and run through 2008.

The contracts are revenue-sharing deals, and that revenue stays with the league.

Even during the Olympics, televising women’s sports live is not an automatic.

“There are more challenges to televising Olympic sports outside of the Olympics,” said Mike McCarley, vice president of marketing and communications for NBC. “An Olympic sport that might generate a 15 rating during the Olympics may do well to do a 2 rating outside of the Olympics.

“Sports for women that you look at are, almost without exception, star driven,” he said. “Annika Sorenstam, Michelle Wie, Jennie Finch. You look for stars who come into a sport and elevate that sport. For us to look at televising any sport or league, men or women, there has to be limited risk, it has to prove to be profitable in the long run from the business standpoint.

“In general, it’s hard to start any league in this day and age. For women, it’s a little easier at the college level because there are natural alliances formed around college sports. I went to Arizona so I’ll watch an Arizona women’s softball game on television.”

Heidesch thinks it’s time to look at women’s sports as separate entities, the same way Procter & Gamble looks at cereal and soap and realize each has a different customer base.

“You have to come up with a viable business model and it doesn’t matter who you are -- private investors, corporations -- sooner or later there needs to be a return on the dollar,” she said.

That hasn’t happened for the WNBA. Sources indicate that only two or three teams are turning a profit.

“Is the WNBA where people thought that it would be after 10 years of energy and the marketing power of the NBA behind it? I don’t think so,” Heidesch said. “But then, men’s leagues were given decades of time to succeed.”

Times staff writer Mike Terry contributed to this report.