Difference in This Case Is Striking

Normally, sports strikes are stupid. Millionaire NBA players versus millionaire owners. Yuck. Millionaire baseball players versus millionaire owners. Ick. Even close-to-millionaire hockey players versus millionaire owners. Don’t do it again.

But, geez. Three days before Christmas the women who made it cool to care about soccer in the United States announced they are on strike.

The chest-baring, Sports Illustrated sportswomen of the year, magazine cover-loving, U.S. women’s World Cup soccer champions want a raise. From $3,150 a month to $5,000 a month. Oh, yeah. The women got $50,000 each from the World Cup organizing committee after winning the Cup, but they got a whopping $7,500 from U.S. Soccer. Go crazy, girls. Buy yourselves something nice.

These greedy, money-grubbing, unappreciative women want to make, like, $60,000 a year. Yikes. See what happens when women play sports? They want to make a living wage.

Now understand. These women haven’t asked for a raise without proving something. They are not, say, high school basketball players who have never won a title and who come to the NBA without stopping at college and expect millions.

They are not baseball pitchers who come to town with $105-million contracts and also ask for team-paid private jet transportation for their families.

Joy Fawcett paid for World Cup tickets for her family when they attended the tournament opener in New Jersey. All the extended Fawcett family members paid their own travel expenses too.

No, these women, many of them for nearly 15 years, have given up on nurturing paying careers because they believed in soccer, believed in themselves. They lived on stipends and were happy when their own travel expenses to training camps and tournaments were paid. In the off-seasons, they would come home and hold down one or two jobs. Fawcett, a Rancho Santa Margarita mother of two, coached the UCLA women’s team as well as a local club team one winter.

Julie Foudy, Mission Viejo’s affectionately nicknamed “Loudy Foudy,” was thrilled to be included on the ESPN announcing crew during the 1998 men’s World Cup. Her television commentary was more entertaining, more enlightening and more popular than any single thing the U.S. men did.

But being popular shouldn’t have gotten the women a raise.

Being popular, talented, charismatic and winning certainly should.

That’s what we say we want from our athletes.

We say we want them to practice hard, play hard, sign all our autographs, fill up our stadiums, be respectful of their coaches, be role models for our children and win.

Which of these things did they not do?

They did them all. Did them all well. Did them with class. Toss in that gold medal the women won at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, and it has been a darn few years here.

There are often people who have argued against Title IX, the landmark 1972 ruling that forces college athletic programs to fund men’s and women’s programs equally. The argument when women’s teams have demanded the same class of travel, the same size media guides, the same quality of uniforms, the same salaries for their coaches, is that men’s sports make more money. Fair enough then.

This summer it was the women’s team that filled up giant stadiums from Giants Stadium to the Rose Bowl. It was the women’s game that brought 40 million viewers to their television screens for the championship game. The women accomplished in one summer what U.S. men have been unable to do for decades. Bring this country together over a soccer tournament.

In return, from U.S. Soccer, the women have gotten a lot of not much.

As the 2000 Olympic year approaches, the women have no coach. Tony DiCicco, who announced his resignation in November, has not been replaced. The women got grief from U.S. soccer officials for putting together their own victory tour, an indoor one that reportedly paid the women $100,000 each, instead of going along with U.S. Soccer’s plan for an outdoor tour that would have not been nearly as lucrative. Some of the women are feeling that, instead of celebrating with them, the officials who run their game are bitter because the men are being overshadowed.

This all smacks of a bunch of men at the helm of U.S. Soccer feeling some need to keep the women in their place. It seems U.S. Soccer finds it unpleasant, somehow, that these women have succeeded so thoroughly that the country actually likes them.

So the women have announced they will not be traveling to Australia next month to play in a four-nation tournament, and maybe they will not play in a high-profile match in Florida against Norway in February either unless they get a new contract.

Good for them. They’ve earned the raise and they’ve earned our support.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.