Johnette Howard and Christine Brennan

Christine--

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Now you've got my mind racing. ...

I love the story you told about Doug Flutie's daughter Alexa looking at Michael Jordan and Mia Hamm in that "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better" commercial and saying, "Who's the guy with Mia?"

Stories like that are one of the reasons I'm unfailingly optimistic that the way the sports pages or TV networks are run today aren't the way they'll stay. The traditional media isn't changing quickly enough for either of us. But they are going to change. They have to. The Internet is going to make traditional media change because it allows readers to choose the content they want, completely bypassing the old SuperEditors who run traditional media now and determine the what we see. Business reasons--not just ethical arguments--are going to prevail on the media to rethink how we cover all sports, not just women's sports. Because the sports landscape has already changed whether some laggard sports editors fail to staff something like the World Cup games. Or not.

I think part of the lag has to do with sexism, of course. But I also think that newspapers and the like rarely start trends. We report them only after they come along--and often, quite a long, long time afterward.

But this absence of coverage doesn't mean change isn't happening all around us. Only that it's not being accurately or presciently reported. That's a huge distinction.

If there's any lesson that men should take from the history of women or women's sports, it's that--like the history of the civil rights movement, or the gay movement, for that matter--people tend to resemble their dreams long before the powerbrokers grant us permission, or the court of public opinion ever catches up.

Flutie's daughter is a great example. Somehow she filtered out the avalanche of attention Jordan receives but felt a kinship with Hamm.

And Alexa has a lot of imitators. Despite those newspapers that don't cover women's sports regularly, the women's World Cup final at the Rose Bowl last summer still drew 90,185 people--the largest crowd ever to see a women's sports event. One of the U.S. players, Tiffeny Milbrett, was dead right when she said lives were changed by World Cup--and not just here in America, but around the world.

Stupid as it sounds, sitting as we are on the cusp of this new millennium, women still lead sharply circumscribed lives trimmed in by mean-spirited nonsense that's meant to keep them down. Last summer, the World Cup team from Nigeria talked about being told soccer "ruins" a woman who wants to have children. And the Brazilian players talked of being told that soccer "isn't for women." But they still played on. They still showed up.

Female athletes like them and Hamm have always had to shoulder the added freight of having to invent themselves. Much like the U.S. women's 1998 gold-medal Olympic hockey team, the World Cup soccer players had no female predecessors. When they began playing, they never thought soccer careers would amount to anything like the month-long World Cup extravaganza or women's soccer's debut at the '96 Atlanta Summer Olympics before that.

You now could argue both events were watershed moments for female athletes because Americans simply love a spectacle. But there's something more powerful at work, too. I also really believe that what people were responding to during the World Cup was the spirit of those women. And not the sport they play.

In the increasingly cynical world of big-time sports--which are businesses that try to pretend they're just games, peopled by too many phonies who get passed off as heroes--the U.S. women were precisely what they appeared to be: An authentic team. Women whose deportment and pursuit of excellence are worth emulating.

They're people who fell in love with something and became determined to exhaust that love to its potential. And they're not "just" pioneers --that word is too benign. They're revolutionaries. They're doing nothing less than changing the world's ideas of what being a woman means. That is a profound thing to be able to say.

Now, you asked what bothers men so much about that. And I think the answer is this simple:

Men aren't used to envisioning a world in which they're not essential.

That's why some men hate the attention lavished on the women's World Cup. That's why they hate it when women make fun of the Super Bowl. Women's successes in non-traditional sports like soccer or ice hockey have underlined how women's sports are not merely spinoffs of games that men have been playing forever. Women's sports are provinces unto themselves--distinct places with their own heroes and rich histories, their own character and ethos and culture

I can't stop thinking, too, that women like the U.S. team force us to invent a new language to describe women. And that's thrilling, too. If Hamm can score from 25 yards out on a shot struck with either foot on a full gallop, or tennis player Venus Williams can hit a serve 127 mph--faster than Andre Agassi was serving at Wimbledon this year--doesn't that force us to reconsider what it means to "play like a girl"?

Suddenly it's no longer a slur, is it?

Perhaps the best thing is, as I said, there's no turning back. The World Cup was about ideas and how women are changing their place in the world. Now, like a boulder rolling down a hill, the process can't be stopped.

The best thing to do is admire its gathering strength. Or get the hell out of the way.

Johnette

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