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6 W OM EN’ 10 SH I S TO LES RY SA IR T 12 IME FOR ICO WO N: B 13 ME EC K N YH AM ICO M N O : N 14 L AI LA A LI C
FROM DR. HARRIS
6
WOMEN’S
SPORTS HISTORY
A HERITAGE OF MIXED MESSAGES NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICA idealized white woman’s modesty, frowning on sports as a threat to elite females’ fertility. This double standard persisted long after slavery was abolished: elite women did not exert themselves; their (female) servants did. Yet there were few sporting outlets for poor women who had athletic gifts and aspirations. Instead, the elite women’s colleges and the country clubs associated with the wealth and leisure of the Gilded Age made certain sports acceptable for aristocratic ladies: tennis, croquet, archery, and bathing-beauty swimming at racially restricted lakes or beaches. In Coming on Strong, historian Susan Cahn notes that these endeavors were also more socially acceptable because they required elaborate outfits, stamping an assurance of femininity onto competitors in costume. Healthful beauty, not aggression or the personal/political desire to triumph over competitors, remained the watchword for active women–with the interesting exception of field hockey, an often bruising sport legitimized as girlish because of its association with boarding schools for daughters of the elite.
THE SCIENTIFIC REASON Medical authorities dating back to Aristotle declared that women were basically ruled by their reproductive systems, with a limited amount of “energy” flowing through the body that monthly hormonal expenditure used up in dangerous quantities to begin with. Too much study or, heaven forbid, bicycle riding and other unladylike sports would render nice women infertile; nineteenth-century campaigns against higher education for women sounded very much like campaigns to prevent women from taking part in active sports.
FEMALE TENNIS PLAYERS, 1922. WIKIMEDIA
7 “HEAVEN
Anti-college campaigns also had clear racial and class overtones: women who graduated from the Seven Sisters colleges were indeed less likely to reproduce, but this had more to do with the lure of professional service careers [such as teaching and nursing] which required women to remain unmarried. Still, the popular connection between higher education and spinsterhood led to notions that learning, like sport, “desexed” women; even President Theodore Roosevelt [not incidentally an advocate of sports and warfare-based manliness] believed that America’s oldest white families were conspiring to commit “race suicide” by sending their next generation of daughters to college. As nineteenth-century America honed white masculinity through warfare and capitalism, baseball and basketball, it also restricted women’s competition in public spheres of sports and politics by retaining inconsistent ideals about females’ innate ability to endure pain, injury, and manual labor. In textile mills and factories, women and children worked unregulated hours in life-threatening conditions; the sacred role of “mother” was violated every time a female slave suffered the sale of her children for someone else’s profit; in 1885 the “age of consent” for a girl child to be pushed into sexual union with an adult male was ten years old in 36 states, and seven years old in Delaware. It was legally permissible for any man to beat his wife and kids. Clearly, socially sanctioned ideals of protecting women and children from harm have always had some gaps.
FEMALE BIKER GANG, 1933. HENNEPIN COUNTY LIBRARY
FORBID, BICYCLE RIDING WOULD RENDER WOMEN INFERTILE.” TOUGH WOMEN
Most women had to be tough to survive–to survive as mothers, child brides, farm wives, sharecroppers, factory girls, millhands, pioneers. But where physical endurance was a highly sought-after quality in farmwives, strength on the home front was separate from an athletic identity. No one denied the muscular effort involved in carrying a child and giving birth; it was public athletic performance by women and girls that was condemned as immodest, selfish, and attention-seeking, the trinity of bad-girl behaviors. And athletic risks undertaken in prime childbearing years were seen as foolhardy. Physical stress was common for rural homemakers who ran a household or family farm with few labor-saving devices or hired hands. Their daily workload rivaled the bricklaying or haybaling assigned to the strongest men; but rural and smalltown wives rarely had their femininity impugned, as long as their “athletic” chores entailed proper domestic duties: scrubbing floors, wringing laundry, ironing, lifting children, tending animals, hauling water, gardening, canning, even splitting wood and dressing freshly slaughtered game. From this Midwestern demographic of bulging female arm muscles came the first female softball players and, ultimately, the All-American Girls Baseball League of World War II. Our collective national memory is slowly erasing images of those American women, black and white, who grew up farming or going out to work at age six. (My grandmother Mia could split an apple in two with her bare hands, a casual act of kitchen athletic power that delighted me as a kid.)
MIGRANT MOTHERING DORTHEA LANGE
8
FIRST FEMALE ATHLETES Who were the first female athletes embraced by Americans? What allowed them to break through restrictive cautions and conditions? When the modern Olympics were brought back in 1896, women were not allowed to compete until 1920 (with a special “Women’s Olympics” convening in 1922 and well into the 1930s.) Scholar Susan Cahn suggests that country club sports like tennis and swimming, with their leisure-class and femininefashion associations, allowed white heroines like Helen Wills and Gertrude Ederle to capitalize on the flapper era’s love affair with sophisticated outdoorswomen: “They helped fashion a new ideal of womanhood by modeling an athletic, energetic femininity with an undertone of explicit, joyful sexuality.”
SPORTS RACISM With American racism at extraordinary levels–despite the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s saw the century’s highest levels of Ku Klux Klan membership, with ongoing lynchings– few if any tennis courts or park pools were open to black athletes, male or female. Thus as white swimmers brought home Olympic gold, and white tennis beauty queens made headlines, African- American “race girls” brought pride to their own communities by defeating white teams at track and basketball meets. This pattern of white celebrity athletes vs. grassroots local heroines heralded only by their own [minority] communities remained in place for decades, further obscuring how many women and girls were, in fact, committed to sports. The association of sport with “rough” girls also continued through the Depression and the 1940s, due to industrial factory softball leagues and the segregated track world of black female athletes. But after the U.S. entry into World War II, gender codes changed to permit and reward competence in war factories’ “Rosie the Riveter” workers (and WAC recruits.) Wartime America embraced an unlikely symbol of victory: the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Though all-white, and requiring strict obedience to absurd standards of femininity in dress, curfews and hairstyles, the League is now praised as radical for its day. Penny Marshall’s 1992 blockbuster “A League of Their Own” and Taylor’s less famous but more authentic documentary “When Diamonds Were A Girl’s Best Friend” make plain the League’s selling point, conceived by Chicago Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley– that his “girls” would play like men but look like ladies. The contrast, and the presentation of strong-armed women as a wartime emergency resource not unlike the Navy’s WAVES, made escapist entertainment profitable. WILMA RUDOLPH AT THE OLYMPICS. BIOGRAPHY.COM
“IN SUCH COUNTLESS WAYS, AMERICA WASTED ITS REAL ATHLETIC POTENTIAL.”
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Since the League continued until 1954–an eleven-year run–it would be inaccurate to say it ended soon after the men returned from war and women were urged out of factories and ballparks and back to the home. But that social shift certainly influenced the League’s postwar wane, along with other factors such as boys-only Little League, the advent of television, and Cold War dramatization of American femininity vs. Soviet women’s mannishness in the 1950s Olympics. I regularly bring in my parents’ high school yearbooks from Fairfax and Los Angeles High of the mid-1950s; while my parents’ soon-to-be celebrity classmates Dustin Hoffman and Jack Kemp were lettering in track and football, respectively, girls had exactly two choices: join the Neptunettes [be like Esther Williams!] or the Bowlerinas [and meet boys at the malt shop later!]. Most importantly, the 1950s introduced television, which would soon broadcast ballgames, sports-themed commercials, and images of a race and gender-stratified America no patriot of the McCarthy era was supposed to question. Television made possible a national rejoicing in U.S. sports heroes once only glimpsed in movie shorts (or at actual games).
WE REMEMBER. This rapid-fire social history of attitudes towards women, their domestic duties and reproductive health, in the years before Title IX are a must for my students–many of whom had no idea that, for instance, ballparks and beaches–the very waves of America’s oceanfronts–were off-limits to black men and women, or that as late as 1967 Boston Marathon officials could declare all women physiologically incapable of running 26 miles. What I teach in my sports history class is how national history shapes physical standards for us all. In such countless ways, America wasted its real athletic potential. And then, in 1972, buoyed by the successes of the civil rights and feminist movements and political mandates to end segregation, women stepped up to the plate. And Title IX became law.
WOMEN’S BASKETBALL, MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, 1975. GETTY IMAGES
KATHERINE SWITZER, BEING ASSAULTED FOR TRYING TO RUN THE BOSTON MARATHON. GETTY IMAGES
“WOMEN STEPPED UP TO THE PLATE. AND TITLE IX BECAME LAW.”
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WOMEN’S SPORTS ARE GETTING LESS AIRTIME MY SON DOESN’T THINK WOMEN CAN PLAY SPORTS. HE’S FIVE. WHO TAUGHT HIM THIS?
BY EVELYN SHOOP When I looked around to point the finger at the forces corrupting my child, I was surprised when my search led right back to us: We love to watch sports on TV. And on TV women athletes wear a cloak of invisibility. When my son started talking about how girls don’t play sports, we jumped in with counterexamples and talked to him about the importance of being fair. Our family bought season tickets to the Portland Thorns, the National Women’s Soccer League team. Going to a match proves to any little boy that women’s sports are exciting, their fans passionate, and their level of talent high. Yet he still insists that women don’t play sports. “You’re raising a little misogynist,” my family keeps telling us. My son’s certainty that women don’t play sports opened my eyes to the fact that America’s leaders in sports coverage are giving us a high-production-value education in what’s important in sports—and it almost completely excludes women.
But wait! What about ESPNW? Unlike the o other major sports media players, ESPN created a s i t website specfically for women’s sports fans: ESPNW.com bb The cursive W and soft colors are bellwether enough, but the stereotypes built in to the site’s architecture solidify ESPN’s treatment of women’s sports as separate but equ The women’s site has a measely three tabs that can be boiled d down to news, lifestyle, and charity. In contrast to ESPN.com w where real-time, meaty sports content is everywhere you cli click, women’s sports fans get lost trying to find sports among th lifestyle pieces. If ESPN is a sleek bachelor pad, ESPNW is t the cottage next door filled with Activia and ultra-soft toilet paper. There’s some trickeration going on here.
Even as I write this, I struggle with the very powerful cultural assumption that men’s sports are more important, and the exclusion of women’s sports in media is only natural. As a sports fan, it’s what I’ve been taught. Over 40 years after Title IX, we’ve made amazing headway in girls’ and women’s access to sports throughout childhood and college. In 1971, the year before Title IX was passed, about two in every 50 girls took part in high-school sports; in 2012 the numbers were about two out of every five.
Spo
ILLUSTRATION BY: SLYVAIN LABS
Development programs and—consequently—talent are high. The U.S. has professional women’s basketball, golf, soccer, and even football leagues. Generations of women are growing up with access to and passion for women’s sports. Yet, according to a study by the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California in 2010, coverage of women’s sports on national television has declined to 1.6 percent of total airtime. A blip? Perhaps, but ESPN’s SportsCenter covered women’s sports 2.2 percent of the time in 1999, 2.1 percent in 2004, and 1.4 percent in 2010—abysmal across the board. Whereas market share should be consistently growing, it’s suffering a slow, apathetic decline. Online coverage has potential to be the equalizer, since women’s sports don’t steal precious airtime from men’s. But sites like Yahoo Sports, ESPN, The Bleacher Report, CBS Sports, Sports Illustrated,
AS MORE WOMEN PLAY SPORTS, THE LESS IMPORTANT THEY BECOME.
and NBC Sports often send the women’s sports fan down a navigational rabbit hole that leads straight to the bowels of the site. With the exception of tennis, and—to some extent, WNBA, women’s sports are ignored or pushed aside. NBC Sports’ National Dog Show coverage is substantially better than their treatment of women’s basketball. The Bleacher Report’s latest women’s soccer story is from the 2013 championship; we’re almost at the 2014 playoffs. The female athlete featured on their home page on a recent Tuesday was WNBA star Monica Wright under the headline, “Durant’s ExFiance Explains Reason for Leaving Him.”
The media is powerful. It doesn’t just respond to our desires as sports consumers, it helps create our demands a and perceptions. How can we think of women’s sports as a anything other than amateur if they’re given D-League attention? This needs to change.
A A 2007 study by The SMART Journal about online coverage of the NCAA basketball tournament on foxsports.com nails it: “[T]he way sports are covered and reported plays a huge role in how female athletes and female sports are viewed by society.” Sports media isn’t waiting for us to get interested in women’s sports, it’s creating our apathy. If it’s not on SportsCenter, America doesn’t care. There’s some hope that the winds are shifting. The 2013 U.S. Open women’s final a nine viewer ship outpaced the men’s; ESPN has match broadcast deal with the NWSL for the 2014 season; the WNBA has an ESPN deal through 2022. But we want more. You know what would be amazing? If the WNBA got consistent ticker time, if next year’s Women’s World Cup sponsors handed out free brackets at MLS games at the beginning of June, if #wewantmore started trending on Twitter. We want real sports coverage for women’s sports, and we want more of it. At the signing of the WNBA broadcast extension in 2013, ESPN president John Skipper said, “[W]e’re putting a commitment of our time on the air to continue to help grow women’s sports and the importance of those sports in this country.” I’m thrilled to hear it, but my five-year-old isn’t convinced.
11
DO YOU KNOW ANY FEMALE ATHLETE AS WELL AS YOU KNOW
JORDAN?
12
MEET BECKY HAMMON
THE NBA’S FIRST FEMALE COACH She’s the new secret weapon for the San Antonio Spurs— and the first and only female coach in major American sports. BY CARRIE BATTAN Eight years ago, Becky Hammon, then a star point guard for the WNBA team the San Antonio Stars, was at a crossroads. She’d made the All-Star team four times during her tenure in the WNBA, but she was fast losing sight of her dream to play in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Despite her successes—before joining the WNBA, she broke Colorado State’s records for scoring, steals, and assists, earning the title of All-American three times—she had been largely overlooked by the U.S. Olympic team. Undaunted and determined to play, Hammon still wound up on the Beijing court—but wearing a Russian jersey. While many female basketball players join overseas teams during the off-season to earn extra money, Hammon chose to apply for Russian citizenship and formally become a dual citizen. It stirred up plenty of flack back home, and also earned her a bronze medal.
The Russian decision “laid a foundation for me to step out and be bold and do what I know is right to do,” Hammon says. “Even if you take some crap.” Today, 37-year-old Hammon has made it to the top of an even steeper hill. As an assistant coach for the defending NBA champions, the San Antonio Spurs, she’s not only the first full-time female coach in the league, but also the first in all four major American professional sports (including baseball, football, and hockey). A basketball-obsessed kid in South Dakota with bedroom walls plastered in Michael Jordan posters, Hammon once asked her dad if she’d ever be able to go pro. “He said, ‘Sorry to shatter your dreams, but no,’” she recalls (the WNBA formed when Hammon was 19). “But he never said anything about coaching.” Now, as one of six Spurs assistant coaches, she’s involved in team operations from front to back: scouting opposing teams, giving the players feedback during practices, and strategizing plays. That analytical mind is what she’s known for. At 5’6”, Hammon compensated for her height disadvantage while playing by developing a keen understanding of the game. “I was always smaller and slower than everybody else, so I had to figure out other ways to be successful,” she says. “Some people can survive on their athleticism; I had to survive on my brain.”
In 2012, on the flight home from the London Olympics, where she again played for Russia (although no medal this time), she switched seats to be next to San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich. The two felt an instant compatibility, talking during the entire trip about “pretty much everything but basketball,” she recalls. So when Hammon suffered a knee injury the following year, she used her downtime to shadow the Spurs staff as a coaching intern, which laid the groundwork for her to join the team full-time. After years of fighting her way into unlikely positions, Hammon is quick to brush off the idea that women have different coaching sensibilities, or that her gender is an issue. Despite the physical differences between the sexes, “skill-wise, there are some women who can compete with the guys: shooting, dribbling, passing, and the IQ stuff,” she says. And on the court and in the locker room with the Spurs, she adds, “You’re getting to know these guys as people, and as players. You have to develop a rapport. They give me a lot of respect.” Still, the gravity of her position is starting to sink in.
“It’s 2015, and I’m the first female coach in any of the major sports,” she says, laughing.
“That’s
ridiculous!”
LAILA ALI
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“IMPOSSIBLE IS NOT A FACT- IT’S AN OPINION.”
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TEN
BAD-A**
WOMEN OF THE BY GABRIELLE FRANK
CROSSFIT GAMES
The CrossFit games are world-renowned as a test for the world’s toughest athletes. This challenge is made up of a series of events that test functional movements—where contestants will move large loads for long distances—at a quick pace. Winners are coined the “fittest people on the planet.” But as you can imagine, these games are not so easy to win. The athletes have an idea of what the games will be like, but there is still an element of surprise, as the series of challenges they will face aren’t revealed until right before the competition starts. Now that you have an idea of what goes down in the CrossFit games, here are 15 women who truly have no fear— they’ve trained hard, and it shows. Check out the truly BAD-A** women in CrossFit Games history:
KARA SAUNDERS
After only one year of training, this famed Aussie made her first appearance in a CrossFit competition. She won her first title at the 2012 Reebok CrossFit Games Australasia Regionals, and She’s been named Australia’s Fittest Female four times.
@THECROSSFITGAMES ON FACEBOOK
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02 ANNIE THORISDOTTIR
© ALASTAIR STALEY
Hailing from Reykjavik, Iceland, Thorisdottir is a CrossFit icon. She is the world’s first back-to-back female CrossFit champion, winning the games twice (in 2011 and 2012). After a serious back injury sidelined her in early 2013, she returned to the game with a vengeance in 2014 and placed second overall. She is currently the co-owner of Crossfit Reykjavik, where she also coaches and trains.
ELISABETH AKINWALE As a 35-year-old who has had several knee surgeries, Akinwale isn’t your typical CrossFit competitor, which is why so many fans across the country identify with her. She wowed spectators at the North Central Regional by performing a 200-pound hang snatch and a 315foot handstand walk. She has since competed in five consecutive CrossFit Games. She is a two-time Regional Champion, winning over 20 events at the Games and Regional levels.
MODERN ADVENTURE.COM
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This former dancer missed qualifying for the 2014 Games by just 29 points. She placed first in the California Regional and went on to place 14th at the 2015 CrossFit Games in her rookie year. Since then, Ence has built a following for her reputation as an elite competitor. After undergoing spinal surgery in March 2017, Ence returned to competing, and has even made appearances as an Amazon woman in Wonder Woman and Justice League movies.
SANDY HILL
You might recognize Hill’s name: she’s the second American to climb the Seven Summits (highest mountain on each continent) in 1996, and survived a deadly storm on her descent from Mount Everest. The CrossFit games were her “next Everest.”
“WHEN YOU WANT TO STOP, DON’T.” BROOKE ENCE (04)
GIRLMEETSSTRONG.COM
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HEALTHYOGI.COM
04 BROOKE ENCE
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“FIND YOUR FOCUS.” ANNIE THORISDOTTIR (02)
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CAMILLE LEBLANC-BAZINET
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ALETHEA BOON
This Aussie is a four-year CrossFit Games competitor with a best individual finish of 20thin 2015. Boon’s a master of the handstand walk, as she told CrossFit. com, “Going upside down—it’s my thing.” As an elite gymnast, Boon represented New Zealand at the Commonwealth Games (in 1998 and 2002). She was also a reserve member of the New Zealand team at the 2000 Summer Olympics.
TUMBLR.COM
REEBOK.COM
Leblanc-Bazinet has competed in the CrossFit Games seven times—and earned the title of “The Fittest Woman on Earth” in 2014. Considered a CrossFit Games veteran, Leblanc-Bazinet is one of CrossFit’s most enduring athletes. She has finished in the top 10 in 4/7 Games appearances, winning five out of seven regional competitions. She also currently serves on the CrossFit Level 1 Seminar Staff, and she has a degree in chemical engineering.
08 AMANDA ALLEN
BREAKINGMUSCLE.COM
Participating in the Women’s Masters 45 to 49 division, Allen won first place in the CrossFit Games. A six time CrossFit Games Athlete, she’s well known for not taking rest days and completing multiple, high-volume training sessions every single day.
After years of playing competitive soccer, Lindy Barber started getting into CrossFit in 2010. In 2011, three weeks into the Open competition—she felt a snap in her lower back. It turns out she had three different spine diseases and had to fight hard to get to where she is today: She was told she would never squat again. Lies. She returned to the games in 2013, and she has qualified for the CrossFit Games twice as an individual, and is now competing on a team.
BROOKE WELLS
Not many people can say they turned down a track scholarship because of their love for CrossFit, yet that is exactly what Wells did when she started at University of Arizona in 2014. She’s dedicated herself to the sport, which was proven at the 2015 Central Regional, where she won at 19 years old. She is currently a student at the University of Missouri and a trainer at CrossFit Fringe in Columbia. PINTEREST.COM
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NICHOLASFERET.COM
09 LINDY BARBER
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“WHEN I TRAIN, I ERASE ALL THE LIMITS AND EXPECTATIONS OF WHAT I CAN DO.
I AM POWERFUL
AND ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.” CAMILLE LEBLANC-BAZINET (06)
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ICON
www.theolympians.co
“THE TRIUMPH CAN’T BE HAD WITHOUT THE STRUGGLE”
WILMA RUDOLPH
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WILMA
RUDOLPH
