Jock stars

Women's professional sports leagues would have you think they are more Barbie than Gloria Steinem -- but don't believe it

by Kathleen Hughes

WHEN I WAS nine years old, with my Little League baseball hat, short hair, and non-pierced ears, people often mistook me for a boy. Apart from being embarrassed by people's embarrassment upon learning their mistake, I didn't much care. In my third year of Little League, however, my name was misspelled on my jersey -- "Hughs" instead of "Hughes" -- and people teasingly called me "Hugs." That I loathed.

The next year, when Coach read us a poem about nicknames and asked us to select one for the backs of our shirts, I was distraught. I wasn't bold enough to select "Blazer" or "Hot Rod," and I was unwilling to subject myself to the girly-sounding "Pinky," "Buttercup," or "Pie." So in my distress, I requested that my name simply be misspelled again: "Hughs." Sadly, when I got my shirt back, it said "Hugs." This was all the more galling because, whether or not I'd deliberately set out to prove something that year, I'd eagerly accepted Coach's offer to play catcher. This was a bigger deal than it sounds: one of our pitchers, after all, was Eric Montross, who would become the Celtics' first draft pick in 1994 and is currently a Toronto Raptors center. By the fifth grade, he was nearly six feet tall and had an arm that knew torque better than accuracy.

Two more seasons passed before the boys were required to wear cups and my female friends started cheerleading -- both portending the conclusion of my baseball career. Although I took pride in never "throwing like a girl," or hitting and catching as such, I was a girl, and that's what it came down to. Girls don't play baseball, not seriously.

Most American women in their 20s or 30s today have similar recollections of being left on the sidelines. And apparently enough of us want to redress such memories that there's an audience for women's professional leagues. Since 1996, women's professional basketball (WNBA), soccer (WUSA), and softball (WPSL) leagues have formed, along with three small semi-pro football leagues. Each plays to crowds of anywhere from a couple hundred to tens of thousands.

This support represents a radical shift in our culture, and the leagues have capitalized on this sea change with clever slogans that emphasize the skill of their players. "We got next," the WNBA proclaims. "Gimme the ball," sings the National Women's Football League.

But another, more concerted marketing effort promotes another set of qualities: the affability and attractiveness of league players. This approach stresses that women sports figures are good role models; in some cases, emphasis is placed on what good mothers they are. Not surprisingly, some critics say the emphasis on off-the-court identity is sexist or even homophobic. (No professional women's league has yet touted the home life of one of its lesbian players, for instance.) In addition, the leagues studiously avoid reference to the women's movement, to which they owe a large and obvious debt.

THERE'S NO question that the current success of women's professional sports leagues like the WNBA and WUSA has come courtesy of Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments, signed by President Richard Nixon. The act prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender in educational institutions. Among other things, this means that schools, at all levels, must offer equal opportunity to female athletes. Women had excelled for decades in sports such as tennis, gymnastics, and ice skating, which are largely contingent on private instruction, but it took Title IX to give many of them a chance in team sports, which thrive in schools.

"It all started with Title IX," says Donna Lopiano, executive director of the New York-based Women's Sports Foundation. "Since the early '90s, Title IX babies have been coming of age." At the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, American women's teams took home gold medals in basketball, hockey, and softball. Those gold medals, in turn, spurred investment in today's leagues. Indeed, all of today's successful professional leagues were formed after the 1996 Olympics.

Though Title IX may have laid the groundwork for today's leagues, growing public dismay over men's professional sports has also bolstered the women's leagues. Since the advent of free agency, men's pro teams have devolved into temporary groupings of hired guns, which doesn't inspire fan loyalty. Besides, it's difficult, if not impossible, to market the likes of Rae Carruth, who shot his pregnant girlfriend, or the coach-choking Latrell Sprewell, or even superstars like Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal, who engage in petty on-court squabbles. Then there are skyrocketing ticket prices, coupled with the could-happen-again-at-any-time baseball, basketball, and football strikes. If there was any doubt that the public was growing impatient with its bad-boy superstars, it was put to rest with the failure of the XFL, which suggested that sports and sportsmanship may be in greater demand than previously thought. "Society made a pretty good statement with the failure of the XFL," notes Richard Lapchick, director of Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society. Apparently, most Americans don't want to watch brutal men and nearly naked women on the gridiron.

Between the apparent lack of talented, affable male athletes and the coming of age of Title IX-generation female athletes who have those qualities in abundance, the arrival of the women's leagues seems timely. Indeed, the 16-team Women's National Basketball Association, a younger sibling to the NBA, blew away average first-season attendance projections of 4500 in 1997, with early crowds of 12,000 to 15,000 and an overall average of 8700. Last year, attendance was stable -- an average 9100 fans per game, just above the 9000 target, according to WNBA chief operating officer Paula Hanson. When the Women's United Soccer Association was launched on April 14, 2001, the Washington Freedom took on the Bay Area CyberRays before 35,000 fans at RFK Stadium in Washington, DC. With eight teams in major cities across the country (including the Boston Breakers), and $64 million invested thus far (largely from the cable television industry), the WUSA could expand next year if the first season goes well and average attendance meets the goal of 7500.

Selling tickets, the leagues believe, requires fans to admire the players as role models as much as they admire the game the athletes play -- and leagues market accordingly to a target audience of female former athletes and their families. It's true that the leagues focus on the quality of sport and brag that they have the world's best players; just consider all the attention given to soccer player Sun Yen of China and basketball star Margo Dydek of Poland. Yet when asked about the key to the soccer league's success, Boston Breakers goalie Tracy Ducar says without hesitation, "Making connections with the local community. . . . Kids need to see us as attainable, reachable -- they need to see that we're just like them."

One way to generate connections with fans is through elaborate "fan zones" on team Web sites, where mostly teenage fans post notes to each other. The players check in weekly, and some post essays and journal entries, too. Another way is through one-on-one contact. In 1997, Sports Illustrated pointed out the unusual accessibility of WNBA players during a New York Liberty fan-appreciation night. A young girl told Teresa Weatherspoon she was her hero, and Weatherspoon went into the stands to hug her. "Somehow, I don't envision Patrick Ewing doing that," a Madison Square Garden usher commented. Then again, the NBA doesn't mandate such behavior in Ewing's contract; the WNBA does. Two players must stay after every game to sign autographs.

"We are world-class soccer plus a whole lot more," says Barbara Allen, CEO of the Women's United Soccer Association. "Players are a great example of what we all want our kids to grow up having: believing in themselves, working hard, never giving up, staying focused but having fun, and feeling passionately about what they do."

But the ways in which women's leagues promote their agreeable, uncontroversial athletes rankles some fans. Take the WNBA's infatuation with Sheryl Swoopes and Lisa Leslie, the league's two most heavily promoted players (but by no means the two most talented). Swoopes is hailed as a great mother and player -- in that order, more often than not -- while Leslie is recognized as a fashion model. Then there are the background bios like this one tossed off a few Saturdays ago during a soccer game between the San Diego Spirit and the Atlanta Beat: TNT commentator Wendy Gebauer, watching Kim Pickup do a front flip while throwing the ball in bounds, remarked that Pickup was her high-school prom queen and noted, "That's something that's so great about this sport -- how attractive these athletes are." Of course, athletes are attractive because they're healthy and agile, and there's nothing offensive about being a prom queen. But Gebauer's comment seems, well, very 1950s.

It could be argued that there's nothing wrong with this kind of marketing -- that promoting the appearance of the athletes does not diminish their athleticism. Critics, however, see the message as a form of not-so-subtle homophobia. Mary Jo Kane, director of the University of Minnesota's Tucker Center on Research for Girls and Women in Sport, notes that it's perfectly appropriate to praise Swoopes and soccer star Julie Foudy for being good working mothers, or Kim Pickup for being a prom queen, as the case may be. "But . . . the real subtext is, `Don't worry, these female athletes are heterosexual, your daughters are safe,' " Kane says.

IT WOULD be naive to ignore the leagues' financial interest in being as apolitical as possible. After all, their success will rise and fall on the work of the finance, marketing, and media wonks in the front offices, and not on the words of activists or academics. To this end, the leagues tend carefully to corporate structure and player salaries, and they set modest goals. Above all, they focus on their fans and the media coverage needed to reach them.

To be sure, the leagues' target audience is not the male beer drinker in the bleachers at Fenway, but a whole new demographic that includes young girls, teenagers and their parents, and former athletes like myself who were weaned on the advances of Title IX. The buying power of these fans is best evidenced by the 80,000-seat stadiums that sold out across the country for the 1999 Women's World Cup soccer finals and semi-finals, and by the fact that tickets for the women's college basketball Final Four sell out nearly a year in advance. It's no coincidence that, as more than one league official has observed, women make "80 percent of a household's purchasing decisions." To further appeal to these consumers, ticket prices are kept modest, with soccer averaging $11 per ticket and basketball averaging $15, as compared with the NBA's $50. "It's family entertainment within a family budget," soccer-league CEO Allen says.

The women's leagues also rely heavily on television contracts and sponsorship money -- partly because the media have volunteered so little coverage. According to Women's Professional Softball League chief executive John Carroll, female athletes and teams in recent years have garnered only eight percent of sports-page coverage. As Kane says, "It's amazing what's happened with women's sports in the midst of a major media blackout."

In fact, the lack of a television contract may well have been the death of the women's American Basketball League. The ABL started one season ahead of the WNBA and even had more player and coach talent than its rival -- thanks, no doubt, to the ABL's salary average of $75,000, twice that of the WNBA. Yet the ABL had no television contract and was outspent 10 to one on marketing by the WNBA, which signed contracts with ESPN, NBC, and Lifetime before any coach, player, or staff member was signed.

Television is also, quite literally, the Women's United Soccer Association's raison d'être: the league's $64 million initial investment came from Cox Communications, Comcast Corporation, the Discovery Network's John Hendricks, AOL Time Warner, and Amos B. Hostetter Jr., former chair of Boston-based Continental Cablevision. WUSA games are seen weekly on TNT and CNNSI, plus local cable stations like AT&T 3 in Boston and the Madison Square Garden Network in New York.

The women's soccer, basketball, softball, and football leagues have something else working in their favor: most are organized according to what's known as a single-entity structure. The WUSA, for example, was developed with 20 former Olympians and World Cup team members, dubbed "founding players," who were seeded throughout eight teams and offered equity in the league. (Kristine Lilly, Tracy Ducar, and Kate Sobrero are the Boston Breakers' founding players.) And each 20-member WUSA team has an $800,000 salary cap. The single-entity structure "controls cash," says Breakers general manager Joe Cummings. "No owner can come in and say, `I'm gonna pay so-and-so a lot more.' "

To their credit, the leagues are realistic about how long it might take to achieve stability. Although the sports media love to point out that the WNBA has yet to turn a profit, Hanson says, "We've added teams every year and doubled expenses since the time we started. We didn't expect to be profitable by now." And as softball CEO Carroll points out, it took the men's NBA 28 years to average 10,000 fans per game. The WNBA is almost there at its fourth birthday.

Still, as the leagues cling to their profit-and-loss sheets, they generally ignore political questions sometimes raised by their own marketing decisions. But women's professional sports leagues have the power to change the politics and perceptions of the female body dramatically. Cummings points out that although his team could not keep up with its men's equivalent, the New England Revolution, the women's game doesn't appear markedly slower or less physical than the men's. Women's basketball, though lacking the flying, twisting dunks of the men's game, is a more tactical team-based game, preferred by the likes of legendary UCLA coach John Wooden. Indeed, a growing fan base out there likes the women's game -- be it basketball or soccer -- better than the men's.

At the very least, the advent of the female team athlete in the past 10 years has already put out more images of strong, muscular women than ever before. And if the sight of soccer player Brandi Chastain -- in her sports bra, hands clenched in exultation upon winning the 1999 World Cup -- was controversial, how refreshing that her exhibitionism revealed rippling abs rather than silicone breasts. Soccer CEO Allen feels the image was "excited, thrilled, celebratory -- perfect" and notes that tearing off one's shirt is a European men's soccer tradition -- a point lost in much of the controversy following Chastain's impulsive act.

Exposure to women's professional sports could also change perceptions of motherhood. Usually, women have children after they stop playing sports, partly because team participation generally ends in college, and partly because pregnancy and motherhood are seen as incompatible with athletics. But numerous WNBA and WUSA players have children. Soccer player Carla Overbeck gave birth while a member of Team USA and emerged from the sidelines just seven weeks after delivering her son, Jackson. As other high-profile professional athletes return to play only a few months after giving birth, childbirth might come to be seen as a more natural event, not a catastrophic and incapacitating one. And who knows? A perception shift of that magnitude just might help improve women's position in the workplace.

ONE SATURDAY in early April, I trekked to Hartford, Connecticut, to try out for the New England Storm, a team in the Women's Professional Football League. I had signed up online a month before, for purposes of this story, and felt that familiar I-don't-throw-like-a-girl confidence welling up in my chest. I can run pretty fast, I thought to myself. I am fit. I can catch things. My tryout became a running joke in my family. My father wanted to be my agent; my 94-year-old grandfather thought I'd be playing with men.

I was among 40 women, approximately, and we came in a surprisingly wide range of sizes, ages, professions, and home situations: I saw soccer and basketball players, students, professionals, mothers, middle-aged wives who threw perfect spirals while frumpy husbands stood on the sidelines, assessing. Football, it seems, is something many, many girls felt left out of, and the size and diversity of these tryouts -- indeed, the very arrival of three small, hopeful football leagues -- point to the enthusiasm for women's professional sports.

But of course, my family's amusement was probably typical of what the general public thinks of women playing football, let alone professional football. As we ran and jumped and caught things and fell down on the sunny Trinity College fields that day, and the male coach yelled things like "There's no `I' in team," a few gawkers paused at the fences, puzzled, before moving on to the women's lacrosse game (also a Title IX bonus) one field over, where college girls were running around in short kilts. Times may be changing, but change is neither certain nor quick.

Kathleen Hughes can be reached at khughes[a]phx.com.