A Great Time to Be a Girl

To the girl’s embarrassment, her mother has kept a scrapbook. Well, she’s a teenager. She can’t know how things were, even as recently as her own childhood. Picture a single mother in Claremont whose own upbringing was as the quiet daughter of a fundamentalist preacher. Now picture her amusement as her eldest--tiny 5 1/2-year-old, freckle-nosed Brittany--announces out of the blue that her heart’s desire is . . . soccer camp.

The mother thinks, fleetingly: Soccer? Where’d that come from? The mother is not athletic. The father played a little football in school, but the class jock he was not. There are no needling older brothers, no upper-class pressures to keep up with the Jones kids. Mom’s only thought is to keep her two girls whole and happy while she gets through her divorce and into divinity school, preferably in a kind of Christianity less constrained than the one she was raised with. “I have no idea where she got the idea,” the Rev. Joyce Kirk-Moore now recalls in her living room over coffee. “One day, she just came home with a brochure.”

I’ve had 3 soccer sesons, the child would write at age 8, her spelling not yet up to her scoring. Two times I was frist place. The report, Page 3 of the scrapbook, includes a self-portrait in full soccer regalia. Brittany Kirk, 17 1/2 now but still tiny and freckled, cringes. Her mom, still amused, smooths the page.

This is on the Saturday before the final game of the Women’s World Cup in Pasadena, an event expected to draw a stunning 85,000 spectators and an audience of millions on TV. I have come looking for Brittany because, until she recently settled on UC Berkeley, she was said by collegiate coaches to be one of the most coveted female soccer recruits in the nation. Where did this all come from? The question is posed.

“It’s like, you get this rush when you score,” Brittany says, her bare feet planted on the wall-to-wall carpet, her wiry body leaning forward in the parlor chair. “Or when your whole team is playing well. Like, at the top of its game. It’s a feeling of, I don’t know, like . . . “

“Accomplishment?” offers her mom in the most helpful of voices.

“No. Power,” the teenager says.

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To read the sports pages, which can look more like the business pages sometimes, you’d think that the best thing about the rising profile of female athletes now is that the world has a new marketing tool. What will the fallout be, say, for Alexandra Stevenson, the San Diego tennis phenom? Is being Dr. J’s love child good or bad for endorsements? How about that UCLA athlete who posed nude on that calendar? Will she sell?

Nowhere has the buzz been as excited as around the clean-cut U.S. Women’s World Cup team, with its promise of opportunity for youngsters like Brittany. But there is something better than being shown the money, and that is: hearing the truth about women, in life and in athletics. After eons of baloney about women being innately less competitive, better losers, etc., it can finally be said that normal girls, like normal boys, get a kick out of such things as the thrill of competition, the camaraderie of teammates, the rush of conquest. People are not so different. To say so is no small thing.

The rise of women, particularly in the last 30 years, has been one of the big stories of this century. In recent years, we have tended to dwell on the backlashes and pay gaps and injustices. But sports reflect the societies that play them, and if there has been one message between the lines on the current sports pages, it is that, in this society, the women’s movement is working, quietly and irrevocably.

Yes, women still struggle in too much of the world, but to speak to a young female athlete now is to feel that every woman’s day will eventually come. Millions of eyes. On a woman’s sport. That has packed the Rose Bowl. You’d cheer out loud, were it not for the lump in your throat.

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In her bedroom--phone, trophies, prom pix, trophies, posters, trophies, unmade bed--Brittany is talking about the ways she’s been changed by her sport. Things she has learned: “In team sports, the best players are the ones who make everyone around them better players. Also, when you show confidence in your team, that makes you a better player. Like, more than the sum of your parts.”

She stops for a swig of orange juice. Her pager goes off. The phone rings. You think, fleetingly, What a gift, to be a girl in this age. Downstairs, her mom remembers a speech she gave at Brittany’s high school baccalaureate. “These kids are not limited,” the woman who rose to become associate pastor of Claremont United Church of Christ Congregational said, “not even by the limitations of those of us who love them. We sit back and watch in wonder.”

Indeed.

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Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.