WORLD CUP USA ’94 / THE FINALS : Whither a Cup for Women?

Where are the women?

This is what I wonder most.

As I watch (and watch and watch) these patriot games, these World Cup shoot-’em-ups, I am aware of their many similarities to the Olympics, the same rich pageantry, the same painted faces, the same love for fatherland or motherland. There is only one thing missing. Well, a whole lot of one thing, actually.

The women.

Next summer in Sweden, the second world championships of women’s soccer will be contested. Quick quiz: Anybody know who won the first? Hurry, now. Clock’s ticking.

Brazil?

Bzzzzz. Wrong.

“Brazil was weak,” remembers Karen Stanley, women’s soccer coach for USC who was there. “A good college team could have beaten Brazil.”

The United States?

Uh, as a matter of fact, yes.

“I remember Alan Rothenberg (U.S. soccer federation president) standing up before some big World Cup thing and addressing the issue: ‘When are we ever going to win a world championship?’ ” Stanley was saying Thursday, after attending the previous day’s game between Brazil and Sweden. (At that men’s tournament.)

“I got kind of hot. I wanted to shout: ‘Wait a minute. We did win a world championship.’ ”

Stanley traveled to China for those 12-team finals in 1991. They were the first actual world championships for women, fully backed by FIFA. Oh, except, once again, there was one thing missing.

It wasn’t called World Cup.

As Stanley recalls, “They said there’s only one World Cup, and that’s the men’s World Cup.”

Funny, I thought there was only one Olympics, for men and women.

Are American women any good at soccer? Here’s how good. In qualifying rounds for the ’91 finals, they outscored their opposition, 49-0.

Then they wiped out their first-round group, Sweden, Brazil and Japan. Then they played Chinese Taipei and squeaked by . . . 7-0. Then they took care of Germany in the semifinal, 5-2, with Carin Gabarra scoring three times in the opening 32 minutes. And then they won the final over Norway, 2-1, after which Seattle native Michelle Akers-Stahl was awarded the “golden boot” for most goals.

And then they came home.

The champions were met at the airport in New York by exactly one man, carrying flowers.

Stanley says, “Not only did our women win the championship of the world without anybody knowing we did it, nobody seemed to even know that such a thing even existed.”

The official U.S. soccer guide has 160 pages. The women get three.

And yet, as goalkeeper Amy Allman later said, “It’s better than one page.”

Some of the women from the U.S. team are hardly school kids. Allman, for example, coaches at the University of New Mexico. And one of the top players is Joy Fawcett, who broke scoring records at the University of California and now coaches UCLA. Even though she just had a baby a few weeks ago, Fawcett played soccer at last week’s U.S. Olympic Festival in St. Louis.

Women can make a good living playing soccer. Akers-Stahl is quite successful in a pro league in Sweden. Mary Harvey, a 5-foot-4 goalkeeper from Cal, plays in the same league. Competition is prospering in other parts of the world as well.

“It’s a long, slow haul,” says Stanley, who is working for SoccerFest during World Cup ’94 and laboring with a women’s soccer foundation to educate more of the world that men aren’t the only ones who know how to kick a ball.

“Some of the top teams I’ve seen so far, Norway, Sweden, our own, come from countries with a slightly more liberated attitude toward women. But things seem to be improving everywhere.

“Still, I’ll have to ask some of these Brazil people this weekend, do they even know that Brazil has a women’s team?”

I’ll ask too.

After all, women’s soccer will be a medal sport at the Summer Olympics in 1996 for the first time.

How about a women’s World Cup in 1998, same as the men’s?

American women. Bulgarian women. Nigerian women. Norwegian women. Korean women. Saudi Arabian women.

Well, Saudi men might have something to say about that. Otherwise, though, this has real possibilities.