Her Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice Was Football

Whatever neighborhood my family lived in while I was growing up, and for a long while it was a different one each year, boys always knocked on our door and asked, “Can Julie come out to play?” Before my mother had a chance to say no, I rushed past her and was off, embroiled in some game.

I grew up surrounded by boys--my two older brothers, our closest family friends and their four sons and my pack of rough-and-tumble cousins, mostly boys. If I was to have playmates, they were to be boys. And if I was to be welcome, allowed, I would have to learn the language of their lives. Sports.

Because I could play football or capture the flag, and was good, boys were willing to overlook the fact that I was a girl, a concession for which I was slavishly grateful.

Looking back, I believe my chief athletic attribute as a child was not speed or balance, but stubbornness. In football, I was prized as a running back, not because of skill,--but because it was not possible to pry the ball out of my hands. I never gave up. I would continue searching the woods in the dark for the enemy ‘flag’ long after sensible children had gone in for dinner. When my brothers snickered and said, for the umpteenth time, “Go long, Julie!” I would keep running and looking back for the pass, even though I knew I was the butt of a practical joke.

I didn’t care. In this way I had an entree to a boy’s world, which, to me, seemed terribly exciting. There seemed to be no limits on what boys were allowed to do or what boys required of themselves. Every day, we fell out of the house, with our beloved Army surplus packs and canteens and a raw potato for lunch and we’d hike and run and climb all day until, exhausted, we collapsed at home and exaggerated our bravery or cunning or strength.

What I could see of girls’ lives was so static. Girls’ play operated almost entirely on an interior level, with emphasis placed on imagination. My simple mind wanted action.

The folklorists Peter and Iona Opie came to a simple conclusion years ago in observing the playground games of English schoolchildren. Boys’ games were about winning, and domination, and had as their goal a single winner. King of the Hill is an example. Girls’ games taught cooperation and teamwork, with little emphasis on a winner. Jump rope, for example. As inculcated through their games, boys were competitive, girls were cooperative.

Too young and too ignorant to embrace the humanity of girls’ games, and the friendship and bonding allowed of girls, I rushed headlong into the world of sports as defined by boys’ rules.

This was also a time when I shunned the succession of garish dolls that my mother, ever the optimist, presented to me every year. Oddly, my brothers and I enthusiastically played with G.I. Joe, whom we were assured was not a doll, but a Male Action Figure. Eventually we put aside dolls; G.I. Joe and Barbie--who began dating in her senior year--perished in a fiery crash on prom night when my brothers and I set fire to Barbie’s orange plastic convertible and sent it careening down the hill at the top of our street.

By the time I got to high school, I had been playing and competing for 10 years, albeit in highly unstructured situations. Our parents’ disdain for the unfettered authority exhibited by some youth sports coaches transferred to my brothers and me. As athletes, we were disciplined and hard working, but we did not respond well to whistles tweeted in our faces.

While my oldest brother’s activities seamlessly folded into sports in high school, for me, there was little question that I would not participate: Only two sports were offered for girls, 10 for boys. The boys’ basketball coach, who was the school’s athletic director, did notice the popularity of the two girls’ sports, but never made the connection that 150 girls were trying out for the tennis team because there was nothing else for them. We had 6-foot volleyball players coming out for the gymnastics team because their sport wasn’t offered and they simply wanted to participate. In anything.

As the editor of our high school paper, I made more than a few enemies in the school administration when I wrote about the impending national legislation that would change all of our lives--Title IX.

As a 16-year-old, what I knew about the complexities of Title IX was laughable, but my teenage logic told me that if adults didn’t want something and said it was bad, there was a good chance that I might like it. I interviewed our athletic director, Mr. Overstreet, and asked how Title IX might be applied at our school. “Will we get more girls’ sports?” I asked expectantly, probably smiling happily at the thought.

His anger fairly knocked me down. I hadn’t thought about what Title IX might mean to the football team, for all practical purposes the most powerful entity at our school. I hadn’t thought that the school’s athletic budget would somehow have to be stretched to accommodate the girls. He was so mad he was spitting, and all girls were the troublemakers who had thrown everything so off kilter.

It was the first time in my sheltered life that I had looked on the face of prejudice. To me, it looked exactly like fear. I knew that this time, no matter how good we were, the boys did not want girls to play. They would not be ringing our doorbells and asking our mothers if we could join them. For the first time, I wasn’t welcome.

I was then, and have remained puzzled, by his reaction. Mr. Overstreet and the athletic directors of the world stand before principals and school boards and ardently advocate that sports should have a place in the schools. They argue that sports can teach discipline and teamwork and imbue children with a sense of self-worth. I absolutely agree. Why then, would they deny this character-building opportunity to girls?

If the male athletes at my school were angry, the females were too, for we could see that we had been cast as the villains, the interlopers who had pushed our way in and would take from them. We, who had so much in common, had been pitted against each other. If only an adult had thought to introduce the girls to the boys and say: Here are some other athletes who love the same thing you do, they will train with you and share the pain and triumph. Help each other.

Other consciousness was being raised. My father, a resolutely traditional Southerner, was suddenly questioning the fundamental truth in his life--the sports section. He began to notice that our small local paper would print even the most minute result from a boys’ sport and my modest accomplishments, although gained in track and field at a national level, were never deemed worthy of space. It was a small unfairness that many mothers had noticed for years, but it never began to be rectified until a generation of irate fathers got on the phone to sports editors.

My resolutely traditional Southern mother changed too. Her universal abhorrence of sports--in which all participants seemed rather ill-behaved and smelly--gradually grew to a benign acceptance. Once she saw that her daughter’s essential chromosomal makeup would not be altered by weight training, she finally stopped carrying a torch for ballet as a career choice for me.

An athletic scholarship to college no doubt cemented the general family attitude of, “Well, if it’s really what she wants to do, I’ve got no problem with it. . . .”

At first, college seemed much like high school. My athletic-factory university enjoyed a national reputation for its fabulous sports facilities. Couldn’t tell by me. We girls had no locker room. My freshman year, I changed to my workout clothes in the ladies room of the old campus gym and rode my bike to practice on the other side of campus. I showered at my apartment.

We’d never have known we had it bad if we didn’t use the weight room in the sparkling new sports complex. Walking through the subterranean maze of this off-limits facility, we saw the male athletes turning in their sweaty clothes at the end of the day to the equipment man, then retrieve them, cleaned, the next day. Since I had moved out of the house, it never occurred to me that anyone would do my laundry. I liked this.

We got those privileges the next year, when the female athletes moved into our new locker rooms, which were darker, smaller and colder than any of the men’s. It was heaven.

Slowly, things began to change. The men became accustomed to us in the weight room and training room and sauna and the other close-and-intimate spaces where we all spent so much time. They saw we worked hard, were dedicated, fought through injuries--just as they did.

I was lucky. In track and field, the men and women trained together. We had no problems. We respected each other because we did the same training, we were all tired and we all hurt.

Sports were unifying for us, men and women of vastly different backgrounds, of different races from different countries. We had fun, and for once, the men didn’t set the rules. New rules emerged. I used to think that the presence of women civilized the men in our training sessions, but it wasn’t so. We each brought the rules of play from each of our lives, and they melded into something else. Humanity flourished in a setting of respect and love, and sports caused that to happen.

In my life now, I am not called upon to do any of the things I spent so many years obsessively perfecting. I don’t identify myself as an ex-jock or, indeed, even as a sports fan. But whatever ethic or life lessons I gained from that time are still with me. I feel capable and adequate because I have been tested and pushed and I have competed. And, especially, because I have also failed.

I am not easily intimidated, but I am easily moved by the sight of human effort and endurance. I feel enormously humble and terribly fragile and have to believe that sports, that trying them, have meant everything to me. I would never want to deny that opportunity to anyone. I would celebrate their choice and their right.

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Today is the 10th annual National Girls and Women in Sports Day, a day set aside by Congressional resolution. It is meant to be a celebration of the achievements of girls and women in sports. One of those who has achieved and can celebrate--as well as relate the true meaning of the day--is veteran Times sports writer Julie Cart, who attended Arizona State on a track scholarship and competed in the discus.