Law Did Job, Now Change It

Title IX in 2002, as it’s being interpreted, as it’s being used, is an anachronism.

Thirty years ago, Title IX was a great and necessary legal solution to a genuine problem. Women weren’t being offered fair chances to participate in sports in our high schools and universities.

The law has worked. Better than women athletes could have hoped. Not only are there thousands of scholarships for basketball, softball, volleyball and tennis players, there are free rides offered to women in sports such as rowing and equestrian.

Title IX, as it is currently being implemented, is too often used as a mathematical cudgel, a blind and blunt instrument that ignores common sense and beats out a one-note tune ... proportionality.

If 200 men play sports, 200 women must play sports. And that’s if the school has 50 percent male and 50 percent female students.

More and more that’s not the case. If 300 men want to play sports and 250 women want to play sports, 50 men can’t play sports in that same scenario.

Title IX, as it is being implemented, is making women’s college sports into a welfare state. The assumption is that women’s sports can’t stand on their own.

Title IX in 2002 assumes that women are too weak to fight for themselves, too weak-minded to continue creating opportunities for themselves, too gutless to demand with their numbers and voices and financial power to push forward what was started by Title IX.

While the numbers of women in professional schools, such as medicine and law, have risen dramatically without the kind of strict interpretation of Title IX upon which sports has relied, Title IX backers seem to think women in sports would give up meekly without that interpretation or without the law.

Why?

If Title IX went away tomorrow, why would athletic directors and their bosses, university presidents, start slashing women’s sports programs? They wouldn’t dare. Fathers are as involved in their daughters’ athletic opportunities as in their sons’.

Maryalyce Jeremiah, assistant athletic director at Cal State Fullerton, said Bobby Knight once told her, “The best friend of women in sports are men with daughters.” He’s right.

Dan Guerrero, the new UCLA athletic director, has two sports-loving daughters. One is a scholarship volleyball player. If Title IX went away tomorrow, Guerrero would never consider dumping women’s sports or cutting their budgets or marginalizing female athletes.

If Title IX went away tomorrow, would women quit wanting to play sports, would this whole generation of young women who consider it “olden times” if someone talks about how it used to be that girls didn’t get to play team sports, sit quietly if schools cut back on athletic scholarships or made the women’s teams travel by coach-driven vans while the men flew?

That’s an insult to the women.

In 1972, the year Title IX was voted into law, I was a high school senior. In my last semester, Waukegan High in Illinois began offering team sports for girls. My picture was in the local paper, proudly teeing off, as a member of the first girls’ golf team. I remember wishing more than anything that I was a freshman and not a senior on that day we played our first varsity match.

But Title IX had nothing to do with that team. Progress had begun, senses had been arrived at already, without the help of law or bureaucrats.

Chris Gobrecht, the well-grounded, sensible, talented coach of USC’s women’s basketball team, says she’s afraid that if Title IX were rescinded, “it would be a scary thing. You would be at the whim of the policy-making people at each institution and all this progress could be stifled.

“I lived a life of quiet desperation for so long, wanting to play baseball and basketball when I was a young girl,” Gobrecht says. “I very much wanted to be an athlete and in the society I grew up within, that was not allowed. My biggest argument about Title IX is that I don’t think any race, religion, any sexual orientation in our world has experienced the depth and consistency of discrimination women have suffered relative to men.”

That is a strong feeling and a sad one.

And it is a feeling male athletes are beginning to share. While Title IX supporters say that it is not Title IX at fault but short-sighted administrators who cower in the face of big football, unwilling, for example, to cut the numbers of scholarship gridiron players or unwilling to reduce the big football coaching staffs or travel squads, Marquette University cuts its men’s wrestling program. Marquette doesn’t have football.

Men, numbers tell us, are more willing and eager to be walk-on athletes, to participate on a team as nothing more than a benchwarmer or tackling dummy or practice fodder. Women, numbers tell us, want to be significant and contributing members of a team or they will do something else.

According to NCAA numbers, it takes 18 scholarships to produce a 21-woman track and field team but only 12.6 scholarships to field a 32-man track and field team. There are 600 more women’s NCAA teams than men’s yet there are 50,000 more male NCAA athletes.

So now schools tell men they can’t walk on. Can’t ruin the numbers. And coaches of teams like women’s crew desperately seek out tall, athletic-appearing women at freshman orientation and beg them to come out for the sport. A scholarship is waiting.

The men are starting to fight back. An intercollegiate wrestling organization has filed suit claiming that Title IX ramifications are discriminatory to the nonrevenue men’s sports.

If the only way to treat one group fairly is to treat another unfairly, what has been accomplished?

Is it not possible that maybe women will never want to participate in sports in the same way or in the same numbers as men? What is being improved for women or men when men are told there is no place for them and their sport on a college campus?

What would be the reaction if there were a Title IX for, say, professional basketball? What sense would it make to say that the Lakers could sell no more tickets than the Sparks sell because it’s just not right that the Lakers have 20,000 people cheering for them while the Sparks have only 8,000? Would that make fans more eager to buy Sparks’ tickets or angry that the Sparks exist at all?

The world is not always perfectly proportionate. It was long overdue that women got to play team sports and learn the lessons of competition, leadership and sportsmanship.

But women have arrived in that place. More arrive every day. Force isn’t necessary and a law that was once helpful is now more often hurtful.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com