Speak for yourself mate! :-p
Posted on 09/18/2003 5:24:41 PM PDT by CanisRex
If all the people who showed up for the wake had actually bothered to attend even one game, there might still be a women's pro soccer league in America today. For all the good it did the WUSA, there were almost as many editorials lamenting its demise this week as spectators in some stadiums for the league's final regular-season games.
"Critical mass will someday be reached when women athletes and their fans will demand, and sponsors will provide, another women's league. The shame is that that day is not here yet," opined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
"It is highly regrettable," concurred the Deseret News of Salt Lake City, "that athletic wear, fast food and sport nutrition companies that hand multimillion-dollar endorsement to individual athletes won't support a league in which players themselves had taken pay cuts and agreed to scaled-back rosters to help the struggling organization. It's unheard of in professional sports."
High-minded lectures about supporting athletic opportunities for women are fine - as far as they go. It's fine, too, to bash corporations for failing to put their money where their ads are, or to rail against the inequity of measuring success solely by how much buzz an enterprise creates in an increasingly crowded sports landscape.
But none of that is a substitute for getting eyeballs tuned in or putting fannies in the seats on a regular basis. At about the same time organizers of this year's Women's World Cup were announcing a handful of sellouts, all the WUSA had on the books at the end of its three-year run was a $16 million shortfall.
The problem is that pay checks and the rent are due every month and you can't cover either with good intentions for very long.
The obvious problem with women's sports, of course, is men. They still hold the purse strings as well as the remote control in most places and they still won't watch women's sports.
Men never fail to mouth platitudes about how sport is the last frontier where old-fashioned virtues like sacrifice, effort, discipline and teamwork are still rewarded. But when it comes to those qualities, the truth is that women playing the same games at the highest level put their male counterparts to shame.
Annika Sorenstam made eye contact with more fans on every hole during her brief foray on the PGA Tour than Tiger Woods does in a season. And who could forget the disparity between the two U.S. hockey teams at the 1998 Nagano Olympics?
The women, many of whom had put careers and families on hold so they could make their debut in a sport that took years to gain official recognition, couldn't have been any more professional in their successful pursuit of the gold medal.
Meanwhile, the men, all of whom had been highly paid professionals for years, complained nonstop about the accommodations, behaved like drunken frat boys and proved more adept at busting up the furniture in their dorm rooms than opposing defenses.
And sportsmanship? Don't even get us started on the irony of that term.
But men are only half the problem - if that.
Women, too, tune in and turn out to watch these leagues of their own in numbers that are not just embarrassing, but almost disrespectful.
The WUSA's own crowd figures show seven of every 10 people in the stands were women. The number in attendance at WNBA games is closer to eight of every 10. But the totals still fell way short of keeping the WUSA in business, and the major reason the WNBA hasn't yet met the same fate is because of those last three letters.
The pioneers in every sport spend much of their free time glancing back at the horizon for reinforcements. Women have been no different, and to be sure, there is still reason for optimism.
Today, the number of girls playing high school sports is one in three; among their mothers' generation, it was one in 27.
Women's basketball programs, such as Connecticut and Tennessee, have become proven performers at the merchandising stands as well as the grandstands.
More important, perhaps, girls are already enjoying most of the real benefits of playing. They're getting in shape and staying fit, learning how to cope with those necessary evil twins, competition and cooperation, and learning how best to deploy them.
What a stable women's pro sports league in this country can do is provide a place for the very best to continue that education. For the rest, it can animate the occasional daydream, as it has for boys throughout this century.
If the reality is that women are paid less, that they have to hustle and market and entertain more for the same dollar, that's a lesson that unfortunately applies to the rest of the world, too.
But if "You go, girl" is ever going to have any real meaning in pro sports, girls and women will have to do more than just play the games. At some point, they're going to have start going to them, too.
Get's 'em every time. The free market speaks.
Speak for yourself mate! :-p
Garbage. Has Jim the Eunuch ever head of the WFL? The North American Soccer League? Truth is, it happens all the time. The American Basketball Association hung on long enough to be absorbed into the NBA but it was headed the same direction.
The problem is that Jim-boy expected the league to succeed because the women in it deserved it, because they were women. That's why the "shame" comment was dropped into the article like the proverbial ordure into a punchbowl. It's all the fans' fault for not being worthy and politically conscious. Ballocks.
Well, there's always Slamball. That would have the additional merit of girls on trampolines. Think it over...
Women's Professional sports?. I'd watch a re-broadcast of a classic NFL / college / game / Nascar race first.
Way too boring. And, obviously, I'm not the only one with that opinion.
Let the paying fan be the judge. Not the liberal / femma-Nazis. If the fans will support it, it will work. If not, you had an idea that is not acceptable to the public. It's called reality. Your flaky dreams don't matter. Understand? Probably not.
LVM
You have a bunch of people playing a sport and getting paid where many could not make it on a good boys HS basketball squad.
Who the hell wants to watch them?
Same as the WHA (World Hockey Association) in the late 1970s. The successful teams joined the NHL.
Well the editorial writer of the Deseret News of Salt Lake City gets first prize in cluelessness. Does this editorialist seriously think that corporations like Nike, McDonalds and Gatorade hand out multi-million dollar endorsements to athletes like Michael Jordan and Brett Favre out of charity? You've got to be kidding.
Those athletes get the endorsements because they are watched and admired by tens of millions of people and the endorsement of these stars bring millions of dollars in revenue back to the companies paying these endorsements out. On the other hand, you'd have trouble filling a VFW hall with admirers of even the most elite female athletes.
Women sports just don't go over very well. I wish I could come up with an intelligent explanation for it but I can't. When I flip channels and see a bunch of women playing basketball, soccer or some other team sport, I immediately start yawning and even that "Masterpiece Theatre" thing on PBS starts looking good.
Same for the women. Most women couldn't be bothered with sports, even sports featuring other women. They'd rather be out shopping or out at one of those Tupperware or lingerie parties than to go to a professional women's sporting event. Hell, they'd rather sit on the couch at home doing their nails and watching the latest wife-beater movie on the Lifetime channel.
You might laugh or snort in contempt, but it's true! Otherwise, these women's leagues wouldn't be folding like they are. Even that Women's Basketball Association is in real trouble. Nobody comes to the games, nobody watches on TV, nobody cares. Well, maybe not nobody. But most everybody.
Wish I had a better answer but I don't. Maybe women just weren't cut out to be sports fans. And maybe that's not such a bad thing. After all, supper still needs cooking when the men are all sitting around watching the football games.
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