Something Lost in Proportionality

Don’t touch Title IX they say. Or if you do, get tougher. Count heads and pennies and don’t deviate.

Those who say Title IX, the 30-year-old law that demands equal treatment of male and female athletes in universities and colleges, should be interpreted strictly by the numbers, always throw out these numbers:

Some 56% of college students are women. Only 42% of college athletes are women. This proves to the proportionality proponents that life is still unfair to female athletes.

But does anybody wonder why so many more women are going to college? Isn’t it more disturbing that so many men aren’t getting college educations than that 58% of college women aren’t playing sports?

It’s funny how statistics can be used. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Cal State Fullerton has 58% female students but only 51% of its athletes are females. Horrors say the proportionality proponents. Don’t you wonder, though, why more men aren’t taking advantage of what Fullerton has to offer?

It’s football that is evil. Big football. Bloated football. Male athletic directors are twirling their mustaches in private glee as they send off the football team to a fancy hotel on the Friday before home games. Such waste, proportionality proponents say. You could fund a wrestling team with this money, they say.

And why is it that an NFL team can get by with 53 players but a college team needs 85 scholarships and often will have 100 players when you add the walk-ons? Take away 20 scholarships and give them to women.

But does somebody wonder whether it is wasteful to fly a USC women’s basketball team cross-country to play Connecticut when the Trojans can’t draw 700 fans at home for nationally ranked Stanford?

Does somebody realize that if an NFL team loses a quarterback and two linemen to injuries on Sunday it goes to the waiver wire and signs three more players Monday? A college coach might have to make a running back a quarterback.

Don’t touch Title IX, proportionality proponents say. Or only touch it to make it tougher.

It is wrong, wrong, wrong to say walk-ons shouldn’t count, say proportionality proponents.

It is the fault of historical oppression that more women don’t walk on or that, according to a General Accounting Office survey, males outnumber females by about 4-1 in college intramural sports participation. It has nothing to do with males and females being inherently different.

So this was not a scientific survey. This was only an attempt to satisfy curiosity.

On a sunny, breezy, beautiful Sunday afternoon in Tustin, who was outside playing sports? How many men, how many women, how many boys, how many girls? Who was shooting hoops, playing three on three? Who was kicking a soccer ball, hitting a tennis ball, fielding a baseball, tossing a football?

The question played on my mind because of the debate -- some of it enlightening, much of it bitter and angry and filled with self-serving statistics from both sides -- about what should be done with Title IX.

I’m tired of the invective-filled rhetoric from women who say that the Bush administration wants to gut Title IX and put female athletes where they belong, in the 18th century, and from men who say female proponents of Title IX are vindictive harpies who will go so far as to build lakes in the desert so women can row while telling men who want to pay to wrestle to go away and become couch potatoes.

At Cedar Grove Park in Tustin Ranch, eight young people were practicing taekwondo. Seven were male, one was female. Both basketball baskets were being used. By six young males. There was a father doing soccer drills with four little boys and three little girls.

At the Tustin Sports Park, eight men were shooting hoops. Two softball fields were being used by about 20 men. There were two women playing catch on the grass and three women running laps. The tennis courts were being used by six men, two women.

What does this mean, that at noon 62 people in two parks were playing sports and 51 were men? Maybe it means nothing. Maybe it means something.

On Saturday, a women’s college basketball game filled Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium for the first time. No. 1-ranked Duke lost to No. 2 Connecticut, which increased its NCAA-record win streak to 59, in a nationally televised game.

This game, Connecticut Coach Geno Auriemma said at his nationally televised postgame conference, should prove that those wrongheaded people are silly to try to take away women’s sports opportunities.

Auriemma was answering a Title IX question, of course.

What the game showed was that, sooner rather than later, we aren’t going to need Title IX. We need more men such as Auriemma and women such as Tennessee’s Pat Summit, coaches who didn’t ask for fancy locker rooms or cross-country plane travel or nationally televised games or news conferences.

They earned all that. Title IX was the start. Achievement was the finish. Have you heard Summit whine that the Tennessee football team has caused harm to her basketball program? Do you hear Auriemma scream that 62% of Connecticut’s sports operating budget is devoted to men or that 52% of the student body is female but only 48% of the athletes are female?

On Saturday in Finland, Canadian Olympic hockey star Hayley Wickenheiser became the first woman to score a goal in a men’s pro hockey game. Title IX didn’t score the goal or bring a sellout crowd to a Helsinki arena. Wickenheiser’s drive and desire and talent did it. And no one, male or female, stopped her. They can’t anymore.

Something’s working. Don’t solve the problems of Title IX’s unintended negative consequences by selling female athletes short or telling male athletes to go away.

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