Video for Women Tackles a Gender Barrier

Becky Ayers owes one to the Department of Defense.

Or, in the parlance of the true football fan, the Department of Dee-fense.

There she was, hosting fellow West Point parents to an Army-Navy game party and yelling her head off with everyone else when it struck her: She had no idea what she was yelling about.

There were maybe 50 cadet parents whooping and hollering at the TV in her Thousand Oaks living room. Not one betrayed any sign of gridiron cluelessness. They knew the triple-dip buck-and-wing spinal-tap offense as thoroughly as their buzz-cut progeny knew left-right, left-right. At least, they didn’t let on otherwise, and neither did Ayers. Like an illiterate at a graduate seminar, she kept her own counsel, awed by the scope and depth of all she did not know.

But necessity, as Vince Lombardi may have noted, is the mother of instructional videos.

Two years after Ayers’ Army-Navy Moment, she has mastered the game’s fundamentals and come out with a 35-minute videotape called “Football: A Woman’s Guide.”

“Women don’t play, they don’t have it in P.E. class, and they don’t have an incentive to learn it like guys do,” she said. “It’s a hard game to watch if you don’t understand it.”

When I was sick at home one day last week, I slipped “Football: A Woman’s Guide” into the VCR.

I’m no football fan, but I do like a good instructional video. The narrator was an actress named Nancy Barnes. She looked better than Vince Lombardi and she had a fetching, just-between-us-girls way about her. A play diagram with the standard Xs and Os flashed on the screen.

“Now let’s say your team is the Kisses and the other team is the Hugs,” Nancy said. That’s when my house painter came in.

“What are you watching?” he asked, with a hint of accusation in his voice.

“Oh . . . nothing. It’s for work.”

Explanation would have been difficult. One does not wish to be discovered in the solitary viewing of something billed as a football guide for women, any more than one wishes to be found studying “A Woman’s Guide to Parallel Parking,” or for that matter strutting into the locker room wearing spangled pantyhose and red pompoms. There is something so not right about that.

The odd thing is that today we realize men and women are the same in almost every regard, except men are basically reptiles--with high cholesterol and soft abs--and, according to Ayers, a cultural bias toward spending the fall yelling their heads off in front of the tube.

Her guide offers some solid information and some humorous moments for women who want to know football, and for men who feel a secret need to learn things their fathers never taught them--or never even knew.

For instance, there’s the matter of the field itself.

Picture a mall, we’re told. Now imagine your best friend is outside Sears and you’re all the way up at Macy’s--and you have to throw a package to her, past 11 of the biggest, strongest, meanest shoppers in the mall, whose mission in life is to pulverize you.

Even more, we’re urged to picture all this happening amid “rain and snow and mud and cramps--well, you get the point.”

A veteran producer of corporate videos, Ayers acknowledged that “when people hear only that part, they might think this is kind of stupid.” But, she added, the mall comparison and the Hugs and the Kisses and the references to “cute” quarterbacks were merely meant to add a bit of fun; the bulk of the tape is good ol’ gender-neutral, all-American football fundamentals.

(I won’t count the part about the “odd” ritual of the center snapping the pigskin to the quarterback behind him. “A guy has to pass the football through his legs to another guy,” the narrator muses. “Maybe it’s for luck--or maybe it’s a guy thing.”)

Next up on Ayers’ screen are woman’s guides to baseball, basketball and hockey. She didn’t mention any plans for “A Man’s Guide to Figure Skating,” and that’s OK with me.

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.