With Soccer, Women Sip of Superstar Cup

Women’s soccer takes a giant cleated step forward today as more than 74,000 curiosity seekers settle in at Giants Stadium for the opening doubleheader of the women’s World Cup. Millions more will be watching at home on live network television.

For the first time in its history, women’s soccer has the world’s attention.

And now that it has it, what does it intend to do with it?

Tony DiCicco, coach of tournament host and favorite Team USA, has a thought or two.

“No. 1, our team wants to leave its own legacy,” said DiCicco. “To have a women’s team, a women’s soccer team, go down with the great men’s sports teams in history. . . . We want that legacy for this team.

“But we also want to leave behind a legacy that is more universal. And that is for women’s athletics to be viewed a little differently by everyone. By the corporate world, by the media world, by the sporting world--by everyone. That’s there for the taking, if we can accomplish our goals.”

Those are some tall orders.

But then, women’s team athletics has never had a forum or a stage that compares to this one.

For the next three weeks, beginning with today’s doubleheaders here and in San Jose and ending with the final in the Rose Bowl on July 10, women’s soccer teams from 16 countries will travel across the United States. They will play in front of half a million paying spectators, with U.S. television broadcasting every minute, every shot and every tackle of every game.

Today’s doubleheader at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, featuring the United States and Denmark at noon PDT (Channels 7, 3, 10, 42) followed by Mexico-Brazil (2:30 p.m. on ESPN), has sold out a mega-complex most often reserved for America’s autumnal religion: NFL football. Likewise, the Rose Bowl, a shrine of college football, is expecting a capacity crowd of 90,000-plus for the World Cup final.

This is uncharted territory for women’s team sports. Individually, female athletes such as tennis stars Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova or track stars Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Florence Griffith Joyner have commanded the world’s stage. But women’s team sports--basketball, softball and soccer--have generally been consigned to sideshow status every four years at the Summer Olympic Games.

As the U.S. women’s soccer team, which won the first women’s World Cup in 1991 and the first Olympic gold medal in women’s soccer in 1996, knows all too well.

During the summer of 1996, the United States, playing at home at the University of Georgia’s Sanford Stadium, won the inaugural Olympic women’s soccer tournament while playing under a virtual television blackout. The United States defeated China, 2-1, in a scintillating match for the gold medal, but American viewers saw only a few minutes of action and a portion of the medal ceremony. NBC, with broadcast rights to the 1996 Olympics, opted to devote most of that evening’s coverage to an exhibition “gala” featuring America’s gold medal-winning gymnastics darlings.

Since then, Atlanta ’96 has become a battle cry for World Cup ’99 organizers. As in: Never again. As a result, organizers struck a deal with ABC, ESPN and ESPN2 to televise every game of this summer’s tournament, with the networks paying no rights fees.

Similarly, no women’s sporting event has ever sold advance tickets at the pace of World Cup ’99. With about 700,000 tickets available for the 32 matches, 460,000 tickets have already been sold. Only 112,000 tickets were sold for the entire 1995 women’s World Cup, which was hosted by Sweden.

DiCicco realizes this is an opportunity not to be squandered.

“We are just breaking ground where women’s athletics are going to be in the next generation,” he said. “You’re going to see the way some of the women around the world play the game--it is very, very entertaining. And that’s what’s going to sell the sport and bring more fans in.

“If we do well--if we win this thing, and that’s our goal--I think we can speed the process along.”

Internationally, women’s soccer is a relatively new phenomenon. This is only the third women’s World Cup tournament; the first was held with little fanfare and media coverage in 1991 in China. The United States won that tournament, and has remained the dominant force in the sport, largely because the rest of the world has been more reluctant to embrace the idea of women playing soccer.

“I grew up in Mission Viejo, where everybody plays soccer and no one says, ‘This sport is too physical for girls,’ ” said U.S. midfielder Julie Foudy. “Things aren’t the same abroad.”

This World Cup, then, represents women’s soccer’s best chance for global tolerance, if not outright and enthusiastic acceptance.