Commentary : Women in Sports: Looking Back, Moving On

Arrayed around senators including Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) and Bob Packwood (R-Ore.) Wednesday at lunch were the top-ranked tennis player in the world, an auto racing driver fresh from a victory at Daytona International Speedway, an Olympic basketball star who went on to play for the Harlem Globetrotters and a golfer who won 38 professional tournaments.

Behind them were a famous rower, a marathon runner, an Olympic gold medal swimmer, a world-famous gymnast whose face has been on a million cereal boxes and a squash champion who, that morning, had so bamboozled Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) that he bloodied his own lip with his racket on one wild shot.

What united all of these remarkable athletes, and brought them together on Capitol Hill, was their common femininity.

These women were proud of the present and wanted to celebrate it on National Women in Sports Day; but they were also women worried about the future and anxious to express their concern.

Just 15 years ago, such a gathering would have been impossible. Women did not drive race cars or play for the Globetrotters. A woman tennis player did not bank millions of dollars in prizes and endorsements. The most popular reigning American Olympic champion would not likely have been named Mary Lou.

America has long been proud of its occasional Babe Didrikson or Althea Gibson. But it is only in our most recent generation that this country has produced world-class women athletes in quantity. Once, our female athletes were the embarrassment of the Olympic Games when it came time for medal collections. In the 1984 Games, some Tracy Caulkins, Cheryl Miller or Mary Lou Retton was marching to the highest pedestal every time we looked up.

Far more important, it is only in the last 15 years that girls and women in this country have begun to have, from school age through college, reasonable outlets for their natural athleticism and physical competitiveness.

It’s hard to believe, but true, that in 1972 there was no such thing as an athletic scholarship for a woman anywhere in the United States. Now, there are more than 10,000 at more than 800 colleges. Back then, not long ago at all, only 16,000 women played sports in our universities; now, there are 150,000. At the high school level, six times as many girls participate in sports as did in ’72.

No federal regulation or government law forced these hundreds of thousands of women to pick up field hockey sticks, leap to spike volleyballs or dive on the floor for a loose basketball. They didn’t become swimmers and divers and acrobats and sprinters because of bureaucrats or politicians or even because of the consciousness-raising of the women’s movement. If the desire to be athletes had not lain latent and unexpressed in countless women, it could not possibly have been aroused in such volume by any amount of drumbeating.

That’s what stars in their prime like Martina Navratilova and Lynette Woodard, and oldies-but-goodies like Billie Jean King and Carol Mann, came to town to say in dozens of ways.

“We reflect the diversity of passions and people that the phrase ‘women in sports’ means,” said Mann, president of the Women’s Sports Foundation. With that, the 6-foot 2-inch former golf champion got down on her knees so that she would not block the view of photographers who were trying to snap the 4-foot 10-inch Retton standing behind her.

As a surprise gesture on a symbolic day, the Women’s Sports Foundation inaugurated a new honor--the Flo Hyman Award, named after the popular volleyball Olympian who died suddenly of Marfan’s syndrome a year ago this week. The flabbergasted winner was Navratilova, who, moments earlier, was whispering to a friend in a back row: “I missed hearing about this. Who’d they give it to?”

“We’re here to help improve attitudes and behaviors toward girls and women in sports,” Mann said. “Our purpose is to aid the cause of healthy, capable and confident women.”

Put into political terms--and this was an unashamedly political day--all of these women and legislators gathered together to fight for the restoration of Title IX.

You remember Title IX--the legislation that served as catalyst for all those dramatic changes in women’s athletics at the school and university level. Yes, Title IX. Born in 1972--the product of a marriage between Congress and the women’s movement. Died in 1984--killed by the Supreme Court in an ambiguous decision called Grove City College v. Bell that had much more to do with states’ rights versus big government than it did with women’s sports in schools.

For two years, Congress has tried to enact legislation that would stamp out Grove City and restore the old Title IX status quo. This is hardly a sharply divided issue. Just such a bill passed the House, 375-34, in 1985; however, it died in the Senate because of an encrustation of controversial and extraneous amendments touching subjects as far afield as abortion and religion.

“Since the Grove City decision, women’s athletics have been left virtually unprotected,” said Anita DeFrantz, former U.S. Olympian and the first woman member of the International Olympic Committee. “Even equal cutbacks result in proportionally greater reductions for women’s programs. We must testify for the next generation. We can’t stand by as the teams and programs that meant so much to us are dismantled.”

The overall success of Title IX from 1972 to 1984 should be protected by new legislation. In the mid-’70’s, Title IX led to some silly excesses. Would a women’s archery team have to be given golden arrows to make sure the equal-funding letter of Title IX wasn’t violated?

However, by 1980, common sense had prevailed. Men’s revenue-producing sports, such as football and basketball, were not being damaged. Women’s sports, which got 1% of university athletic budgets in 1972, were up to 16%, but not headed much higher. As long as colleges tried hard to provide “proportionally equal” athletic programs for women who wanted them, the Justice Department didn’t pick nits or try to force the creation of ritzy programs where no common-sense reason for them existed.

The growth of women’s sports is a phenomenon that has become so much a part of the grain of our experience that we hardly notice when a woman drives a stock car or America suddenly has the best women’s basketball or volleyball team in the world. We expect a 12-year-old girl or a 20-year-old college woman to have a wide range of adequately funded athletic choices if that’s what makes her happy. Gains we take for granted, however, are also the ones we sometimes lose.

“This day is both a challenge and a reassurance for those of us who believe in the rights of women to be the best they can be,” said Bradley. “It’s also nice to be able to go home and tell your 10-year-old daughter about how you got to meet and talk to so many of her heroines.”