thats life/tony bender
sisters are doing it for themselves/4-8-24
Title IX became law in 1972. Half a century later, here we are. The intent of Title IX was to ensure equal opportunities for all students, including athletes, but it took 10 years for women to have their own national basketball tournament.
Like millions of other Americans, I was captivated by the NCAA Women’s Basketball Finals, specifically Caitlin Clark and her Iowa Hawkeyes. So what do we find so compelling? Easy. The quality of the game. The passion of the players and coaches. The intensity and big plays under big pressure. The drama.
More than most games, basketball at its best is fluid, smart and artistic, and that’s what makes Iowa especially compelling. In the same way that Nikola Jokic conducts the Denver Nuggets, Caitlin Clark directs a symphony. Both make those around them better.
March Madness has produced many epic men’s teams with fascinating characters but the last tournament that produced this kind of interest and adrenaline for me was in 1983 when my friends Tim Ost and Jamestown College Men’s Basketball Coach Jay Pivic and I watched Jim Valvano’s North Carolina State Wolfpack complete a series of miracles with yet another miracle.
Television ratings and ticket prices for the women’s NCAA Tournament exceeded that of the men’s division for one reason—the storyline is better. What’s made Caitlin Clark so compelling is not Superwoman physical ability and her ice-blooded ability to hit big shots in big moments, it’s her ability to see and understand the floor and the game itself better than anyone in the arena. The ability to make the right pass, the right shot, a joyful, unflappable assassin. It’s incredibly rare. Larry Bird had it. Michael Jorden. Steph Curry. And a rarified few others. Now Caitlin Clark. (Undefeated South Carolina defeated Iowa in the championship.)
We’ve long had individual women champions. Babe Didrikson. Wilma Rudolph. Billie Jean King. But the evolution of women’s team sports was plodding. It wasn’t a lack of talent. It was a lack of investment by schools, and without that framework, women athletes had little reason to practice the skills needed for team sports.
Most didn’t grow up dribbling and shooting, so when women’s teams were accorded the same opportunities to play by the same rules, and not an abbreviated half-court game as in the past, it was often, well… not good.
As a newspaperman and sportswriter, I was badgered by female employees to give them absolute equal coverage. A team doesn’t have to win to be interesting, but it helps. Winning teams, male or female, always get more column inches. You can’t force interest. Interest is earned.
The early outlier with team sports, as a matter of circumstance, was women’s baseball during WWII, but they were in skirts—skilled players in skirts, but sex sells. Today, college fast pitch softball is a fantastic watch with reflexive athletic plays that would get Brooks Robinson’s attention.
Lest you think I’m a misogynist, I’ll say again, my mother was liberated before Gloria Steinem burned a bra. I did dishes, washed my own uniforms, and wouldn’t in any way shape or form have suggested that women were inferior, as evidenced by my survival.
I lived and breathed baseball, but boys my age were scarce when I wanted a game of catch. My sister Sherry is a year and a half younger, but grew up catching fastballs from me. I gave no quarter. She’d sometimes go inside to ice her hand, but always returned.
When she joined a softball team, I expected her to be great. And she was. We both played centerfield but she looked better doing it. Swift and graceful. I had good wheels, so when I was goaded into a race on the church steps by Gus Speidel, I fully expected to win.
I began lacing up my spikes but there was a protest led by Gus. Everyone wanted Sherry to win, so I lost that argument. It was 385 feet from the centerfield fence to home plate. I was 20 feet behind, spinning my wheels, throwing up grass, before I started moving. Somewhere between second base and pitchers mound, I caught her.
But. She. Would. Not. Lose.
She had me by a nose at home plate as Gus crowed like a rooster. It cost me a dollar.
I had mixed emotions. I’d received my comeuppance and didn’t much care for that, but I was proud of her. When I watched her play, gliding like a gazelle, making tough catches look easy, I knew I had something to do with it.
Women athletes haven’t “arrived.” They’re continuing to arrive. They’ve earned their place at center court.
© Tony Bender, 2024
