If
women’s soccer in America—or women’s sports generally—ever had a better day
than Sunday, July 5, I can’t recall it.
That was the day the U.S. team won the Women’s World Cup by beating Japan in the final, 5-2.
Everything
went right. The game was high scoring, something we Yanks typically castigate
soccer for not being. It had an appealingly animated hero(ine)—Carli Lloyd—who
scored three goals in the first 16 minutes, capping a 4-0 spurt that all but
secured the victory.
It was played at a U.S.-friendly
time (7 p.m. in the East) before a U.S.-friendly crowd in Vancouver during a rare
slow day for sports on television. It later was announced that the total U.S.
TV audience of 26.7 million people-- 25.4 million on Fox and 1.3 million on
Telemundo—was this country’s highest for any soccer game, and exceeded that of
any game in the recent NBA finals or the seventh game in last October’s
baseball World Series. It was drinks all around for everyone connected with the
team, and deservedly so.
We’re a nation of analysts, though,
and it wasn’t long before the question was raised of what the victory might
mean for women’s sports in this land; more specifically, why they don’t get a
bigger share of the pie. Indeed, that was a topic of discussion throughout the
two-week fest.
As is customary when male-female issues come
up, knees immediately start to jerk and the all-purpose shibboleths that often
substitute for thinking about such matters are rolled out. We heard about “glass
ceilings” and women’s sports being held back by news-media conspiracies. Bill
Rhoden, a usually sensible sports columnist for the New York Times, combined
those notions in a single sentence. “A confluence of chauvinism and gender bias
have made the ceiling they [women’s sports] are up against a particularly
difficult one to shatter,” wrote he.
Well. Conspiracy theorists are hard
to dissuade, but if a journalists’ cabal to belittle women’s sports exists it
never bothered to try to recruit me during my 46-year newspaper career. And
while unacknowledged barriers to women’s advancement certainly obtain in some
areas, it’s hard to see how they apply to what boils down to a spending choice
in an economy in which, many surveys have shown, women make most of the buying
decisions.
Further, the market’s preference
for men’s sports over women’s isn’t uniform. The women outdraw the men in
activities that reward grace more than strength (figure skating and gymnastics)
and do about as well in ones where the playing fields in national and
international competitions are shared, albeit separately (tennis, swimming, track
and field). Add sustained success to the
mix and women can be dominant in many an athletic endeavor; over the last 10
years Serena Williams probably has gotten more ink, and made more money, than
all American male tennisers combined.
Two big reasons women’s sports have
had a hard time getting traction have to do with the calendar. First, it’s
crowded, more crowded than anyone might have imagined just a few years ago. One
of sport’s biggest milestones was the creation, in 1979, of ESPN, the
all-sports TV network. Before ESPN, sports on television consisted mainly of a
few weekend-afternoon hours and the occasional local game. Now it’s wall-to-wall
and floor-to-ceiling.
Time was when a week’s sports offerings could
be listed on a single page of TV Guide. By contrast, on a recent weekday in
Phoenix, with the NFL, NBA and NHL idle,
one could watch summer-league basketball, Canadian football, cycling
(the Tour de France), golf, lacrosse, “motorsports,” rugby, men’s international
soccer, swimming and Wimbledon tennis. That was in addition to every Major League
Baseball game on the “Extra Innings” package and whatever the half-dozen single-sports
channels I receive had on. It takes more than a shoehorn to find room on that
schedule.
The numbered year on the calendar
works against some women’s sports because they’re relatively young and sports
watching, like many other things, is at least partly habitual. Women’s team
sports in America hardly existed before the passage of the U.S. Education Act
of 1972, whose Title IX went a long way toward correcting the vastly unequal
funding of men’s and women’s school sports that prevailed to that point. The
two biggest U.S. women’s pro-team circuits, the WNBA and the National Women’s
Soccer League, date from just 1996 and 2012, respectively. Soccer generally still is viewed as an
immigrant scrambling for a foothold on these shores, and average attendance at
NWSL games last season was only about 3,000 a game. Thus, even a double-figure
percentage jump during the current July-August campaign wouldn’t put more than
a few hundred more fannies in the seats.
Finally, although it’s not fashionable
to say it, men and women have physiological differences that make most men’s
sports better. That’s apparent to anyone who looks and is why most of the men’s
brands outsell the women’s in a bruisingly competitive marketplace, no matter what
the sex of the customer.
Many women are fine athletes who deserve
applause. Their games aren’t as commercially warped as are many of the men’s, making
their competitions purer, and the fact that no huge pot of gold will reward
their success causes female jocks to develop their other abilities. Need I say
that’s not a bad thing?
