Wednesday, July 15, 2015

YOU GO, GIRLS!

               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? 







Wednesday, July 1, 2015

NEWS & VIEWS

               NEWS: ST. LOUIS CARDINALS ACCUSED OF HACKING HOUSTON ASTROS’ COMPUTERS
             
               VIEWS: ???
             
              The idea that truth is stranger than fiction gains support daily, but rarely more forcefully than with the story above. What can one baseball team learn by stealing another’s data—that so-and-so can’t hit a curve or that whozis has lost a foot off his fastball? Baseball is played in public with everyone invited to watch and analyze-- teams employ large scouting staffs for that purpose. It’s hard to imagine why any organization would risk criminal prosecution to secure such information.
              
                Published accounts of the alleged theft attribute a possible motive to revenge; apparently Jeff Luhnow, a computer whiz who departed the Cardinals to become the Astros’ general manager in 2012, left some personal animus in his wake.  But if the Cards were paying attention to Luhnow during his nine-year tenure with the team, some current employees must know his tricks. Further, few teams receive higher marks than the Cards for managing personnel, so it seems they need little help on that score.

               The FBI investigation into the charge reportedly is stalled because the agency can’t pinpoint who in the Cards’ offices did the hacking. If history is a guide some low-level minion will be fingered, and after some backing and filling business as usual will resume. The real culprit, though, is the paranoia that permeates big-time sports, tied to practitioners’ inflated notions about the importance of what they do. It’s a game for heaven’s sake, not the rocket science that might justify cloak-and-dagger intrigue.

               NEWS: AROD RETURNS, STILL CAN HIT

               VIEWS: …AND THE WICKED FLOURISH LIKE A GREEN BAY TREE

               When Alex Rodriguez returned to the New York Yankees from PED prison this spring, not much was expected of him.  Nearing age 40 (you can sing “Happy Birthday” to him on July 27), with an injury record to rival Evel Knievel’s and having played in only 44 Major League games the previous two seasons, he was widely deemed to be over the hill, playing only to collect what was left of the ridiculous, 10-year contract the team gave him in 2008. The Yanks weren’t happy to have him back, it was reported.

               Surprise! The guy still can hit. After 72 games he was batting .286 with 15 home runs and 45 runs batted in, on a pace to post 35-100 figures in the last two categories, as in former days. This season he has passed Willie Mays’s 660 home runs to rank fourth all-time (he has 669 now) and got his 3,000th career hit.

 Ordinarily such feats would have been celebrated but those weren’t, at least not outside Yankee Stadium. Rodriguez is the Lance Armstrong of baseball, a guy who didn’t just scarf every performance-enhancing drug around for more than a decade but also lied about it persistently and attacked anyone who didn’t buy his story. When finally nailed in the Biogenesis raid, he didn’t initially plead guilty but sued everyone in sight including the players’ union, and organized picketing of the commissioner’s office. That wasn’t endearing.

Then he said “never mind” and took his medicine (ha!), but few were impressed. He’ll be remembered as one of the best baseball players not to have a plaque in the game’s Hall of Fame. Baseball willfully put its head in the sand during the HITS era (1990-2005, for Head In The Sand) but will pay for it forevermore. That will be more than ARod wants to do, because the law firm that carried his legal ball while he was protesting his innocence is suing him for nonpayment of fees.

NEWS: CHICAGO BLACKHAWKS WIN THE STANLEY CUP

VIEWS: SUSIE AND I HELPED

For the last 40 or so years I’ve had a love-hate relationship with hockey and the Chicago Blackhawks. I grew up rooting for the Hawks, and for several years had a piece of a season ticket for their games in old Chicago Stadium, but chafed under the price-gouging ways of Arthur Wirtz, the pirate in a three-piece suit who owned them. When in 1972 Wirtz allowed Bobby Hull, the best Blackhawk ever, to jump to a new league for a salary ($2 million over 10 years) that quickly would be seen as ordinary, I swore off the team, literally.  My aversion to it deepened when ownership passed to Arthur’s son, Bill, who had all his dad’s bad qualities but none of his smarts. 

My feelings about hockey in general were similarly negative. The National Hockey League caters to its fan base’s base instincts by countenancing on-field fighting, and who can respect a sport that has no respect for itself?

Time passed, however, and the NHL’s fighting addiction has lessened. Also, Bill Wirtz joined his father, wherever. He was replaced by his son, Rocky, who became popular by following the obvious plan of doing the opposite of everything his dad and grandpa had done. The team acquired good players and managers. Reverting to my love of all things Chicago, I cheered when they broke a long drought by winning a Stanley Cup in 2010, and 2013.

The Blackhawks’ prospects for another title this year seemed dim for a time, but Providence intervened.  They were down three games to two in the best-of-seven semis with the Nashville Predators when my wife, Susie, found a battered hockey puck in the gravel driveway of our Scottsdale, Arizona, home. We brought it in and clutched it while watching the Hawks sweep the last two games of that series and put away the Tampa Bay Lightning, four games to two, in the finals.

Think about it for a moment: what are the odds of finding a hockey puck lying around in a desert-clime block where the average age of the kids is about 45, on the afternoon of a make-or-break playoff game?  The puck now has a place of honor on a shelf of our family-room etagere. It looks like the Stanley Cup to us.