Tigerbelle

by Wyomia Tyus

  And that has also changed—it’s not perfect, but it’s different.[29] Look at the 2016 Olympics gymnastics team: there were two Black women and a Latina.[Footnote TK]And then you look at swimming—who would have thought we would have a Simone in gymnastics and a Simone in swimming, both Black? Isn’t that something? You’re seeing women of color in sports that they just wouldn’t have been in at the time I was competing. It had to happen, that progress; you just can’t stop it. It shows that people are in a different frame of mind, that Black women and girls are getting more opportunities. The more Black girls are encouraged to compete, the more they succeed; the more they succeed, the more role models there are, and that starts raising the expectations of young women of color when it comes to what they can do and who they can be.

  Another sign that things are moving forward is the opening up of opportunities for women as sports commentators. When I did the commentary at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, it was pretty much unheard of in track for any woman, let alone a Black woman, to be doing that kind of thing. You think back on the time when I was running—who was doing it? Nobody—except maybe in gymnastics. Now they have women commentators not just in track and field but in almost all the sports. They don’t use a wide variety of people, but they do have women, and I think it’s because society is demanding it, asking, “If women can do these things, why can’t they talk about them?” I also think there is less tolerance for some of the more antiquated ways men have of talking about female athletes—as was shown by people’s responses to some of the reporting on the Rio Olympics.[30]

  First off, though, I have to say that the female athletes in Rio did a magnificent job—they did such a magnificent job that the press could not do anything but report on them—and I think that’s going to mean a really big boost for women’s sports in general. It shows the world that it’s okay for women to be strong, to be competitive, to be the best. It also shows that the more you put into women’s sports—the more encouragement women are given, the more opportunities they have—the more you get out of them, not just for the women or their countries but for the world.

  Even so, there were things said that didn’t need to be said—like calling the women’s judo final a “catfight” or giving a man credit for his wife’s medal. And in general, it seems like they always have to say something about the woman being beautiful rather than just saying that she is good. That’s the tone that comes through most of the time with reporters as well as some male athletes. Either women are good-looking, or if they’re really good, then they’re like men.[31] I don’t know if these guys simply don’t know how to do better or if they are actively trying to keep women down—keep them convinced of the idea that men are always going to be better, so they might as well not even try. Despite all that, what the women did was great, and the publicity they got was better than nothing, better than the teeny-weeny bits they have gotten in years past.

  But don’t get me wrong: women athletes still need more publicity and they need better publicity.[32] To me, that’s the biggest issue, and it’s an issue with a lot of different aspects. For one thing, there needs to be an attitude change around strong teams. I remember listening to a sports commentary program as recently as 2016, and they were talking about the UConn women’s basketball team and how—because they’re so dominant—they’re hurting the sport. And I thought, What are you talking about?! They kept saying things like, “Oh God, they are dominant. Nobody can win because they’re just that good,” like it was a problem—a problem for UConn! They would never say that about a men’s team. When UCLA’s basketball team had that string of victories during Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s era, or when Duke had a winning streak more recently, it was just so wonderful, and it helped the sport so much. And they said nothing about football getting ruined when the Cowboys were always winning, or anyone hurting the sport when certain teams dominated baseball for years. If a men’s team were to be as dominant as the UConn women’s basketball team, the sporting news would be all about how the rest of the league needs to step up: how everybody else has to play better, how they have to recruit better, how they need better coaches, all those kinds of things.

  It was the same when I was running with the Tigerbelles; people were always saying, “Why do you guys have to win all the time? We’re so tired of you winning.” And now they’re pulling this again with women’s basketball? I feel like I’m back in the sixties. You would think that in the twenty-first century, it wouldn’t be this way anymore, but there it is. And that is no way to get the public invested in a sport—to act like the dominant team can never be beaten—and it’s not even true! UConn did get beaten not a year later. But that’s beside the point. You need to get people thinking about what other players and other coaches and other teams could be doing. To make the competition better. To make the sport more exciting. Once you get the public involved in looking at a sport, and they see that all different groups and ethnicities can be a part of it, and they see that everyone is invested in being the best, that’s when the stereotypes start to come down—and that’s when more people will get excited about women’s sports, all kinds of women’s sports.

  Publicity also plays into questions around money. At Tennessee State, one of the problems we had to contend with was that the women’s track team didn’t bring in the revenue; we didn’t bring in “the crowds” was the way it was put. Because of that, the administration only gave us two, maybe three new scholarships a year—and this was work aid, which is not really a scholarship at all. Still, even with that very little support, Tigerbelles would go to the Olympics every four years and bring back gold medals for their country and all that recognition for the school. But we didn’t bring in any money, so the football team got the scholarships. For the people in charge, it’s a very simple equation—they bring in the money, so they get the money. That’s all there is to it.

  Maybe it’s the good-ol’-boys thing. I don’t know. But this was happening in the fifties and sixties, and you would think that people would change in thought and mind—all these so-called brilliant people we have now, how could they still think that way? How could they not figure out that the people who get the crowds are the people who are marketed and promoted? That if they were as committed to promoting women’s sports as they are to promoting men’s, the numbers would look very different? Apparently, they are not going to reach those conclusions by themselves. We have to make them see. Look at tennis. That same thing was happening with tennis until women started fighting it back in the seventies, and now they get equal pay—at least in most of the bigger tournaments.[33] It’s so simple, and it would cost them nothing to think about it and come to the conclusion that, hey, they could make more money if they marketed women’s sports alongside men’s sports. And it’s not like all the men’s teams draw giant crowds or are even any good at what they do. But no one with the power to just go ahead and make things equal is looking to do so. Which means the athletes need to fight.

  Even fighting won’t get you too far too fast, though. It takes years—it may be ten, it may be twenty, but nothing happens right away. You have to think about that, and you have to persevere. If you look at soccer, in 2016, women players sued the league for equal pay, but they haven’t won yet, even though, to me, they have the league pretty much where they want them. You have to do something noticeable, and the US Women’s National Soccer Team has done that—the same way the female tennis players did. The women were outshining the men, and they were winning, and you had these great matches, and everybody was coming out to see the women play and cheering on the individual athletes.[34] That’s another difference between when I was competing and now: people are more into not just looking at the athletes on the field but also what they’re doing with their lives outside of sports. They still like a winner, though, and the US Women’s National Soccer Team has been dominant for years. What has the men’s team done? They keep trying to bring people in to boost them up and all of that, but they certainly aren’t winning an
y championships.[35] And they still deserve to be paid more? Where is the sense in that?

  So the issue of publicity and the issue of money are all tied up together. And it’s not just whether women’s sports are promoted, it’s also which sports get publicity and what that publicity looks like. There are some sports in which women have had an easier time getting their accolades, maybe because people think of them as “feminine,” like gymnastics and figure skating—those same sports that were mostly dominated by white women—although I don’t mean to pick on figure skaters or gymnasts, just the press. So if you were good at figure skating, and you were white, you got all the recognition in the world; your choice of sport dictated your chances for acknowledgment. And not only the sport—the world dictated what it wanted to see. So every time they talked about figure skating, it was all about “the queen of figure skating,” something the public and all the little girls who might want to figure skate could understand and feel good about. The same thing is true with gymnastics: when gymnastics started to change, and the girls were not so prim and so dainty but began to be more athletic, with more muscles and more power and showing, This is what it takes to be the best, the press didn’t lose interest in them because they were “too masculine” or whatever, so people looked at them quite differently than they did women in other sports, like track. Even when we had someone like Florence Griffith Joyner with the nails and the outfits and the long, flowing hair—and they gave her a lot of attention because of all that—they still didn’t call her “the queen of track.” How they publicize the different sports, and how they portray the people participating in those sports, has to change if women are ever going to get all the opportunities we deserve.

  I feel that it is still the case that women athletes have to be a certain type to get attention. Being fast or being the best doesn’t hurt—of course, people want you to be the best—but they also want you to have that dainty side, that “feminine” side. I am not faulting the athletes; sometimes the athletes themselves have the personality and style that the press wants, and if they were like that before they came onto the field, then that’s just who they are. But if they come onto the field and feel they have to change, then that’s a different story. Even then I don’t blame them; why shouldn’t they try to get noticed? But why can’t the press just notice women athletes for being great athletes?

  This is one of the things that hasn’t changed very much from my days traveling with the Tigerbelles. Mr. Temple wanted us to be what society said ladies were supposed to be, to the point that we had to fly in high-heeled shoes and stockings. And that worked for some of the Tigerbelles—Wilma, for example; that was just right for her. It fit her charisma, her attitude, who she was. But then you had Earlene Brown, the shot putter—the one they wouldn’t let have a men’s sweat suit at the Tokyo Olympics. She was a big woman, and I remember people saying, “You need to make her look a little more feminine.” But Earlene couldn’t have cared less about any of that; she was part of the whole roller derby thing after the Olympics. And she was fine with who she was: “This is me!” she was always saying, with her actions and her words. Yet society didn’t want that, and if you ask me, it still doesn’t.

  There’s more freedom now, of course. The women in track and field nowadays are different than we were in a lot of ways. For one thing, the Tigerbelles didn’t do weight training—the closest thing we did to that was to run a lot of hills, do high knee drills, and run cross-country with weights in our shoes. That looked like weight training to me, at the time, even though I know it was not. I’m glad I ran when I did because doing what they do in this day and time—weight training and being in major competitions every week when the season is on—does not seem like something I would enjoy. But it does mean that female runners are a lot more muscular now, which also means that the whole ladylike thing is not what it was. Still, I think there’s pressure to be something other than just an athlete. Otherwise, why would women running track be made up to the hilt? It’s fine, of course; they should do what they want, but they shouldn’t feel like they have to. And the shorts they have now? We thought our shorts were short, but they weren’t really; I mean, they had the rubber in the legs, and you could pull them up as high as you wanted to, but our shirts were so durn big that when you were running you’d get this big puff of air in the back. Maybe you do run faster in more aerodynamic clothing. Maybe it cuts down the wind resistance, kind of like in swimming, but the opposite: male Olympic swimmers used to wear tiny little swimsuits and now their suits cover more. So maybe there’s a similar but opposite argument about track clothes. I don’t know. But I do know that the men’s track shorts are still almost to their knees. So I have to wonder: is it about aerodynamics or is it about something else?

  And it’s not just the outfits. Lots of people still have a problem with women being strong. Depending on what part of the country you’re from, you still have people who can’t get over Michelle Obama’s arms. I was in Georgia for a month, and I was with some people talking about our former first lady, and one of them said, “Did you see her? Her arms are so—” And then she just stopped, like there was something about her arms that is unspeakable.

  So I said, “Yeah, I’ve seen her arms. They look good.”

  “No. That’s just not a good look for a woman. And not only that, she doesn’t wear stockings!”

  I wanted to scream, And what’s wrong with that?!

  But they went on and on: “I mean, her legs were just . . . There’s nothing like a nice pair of stockings! She would look so much better.” And when they finally got the message that that’s not how I think, that they should not even be talking to me about that, that the conversation just needed to end, one of them said, “Well, that’s just because you’ve been on that West Coast for so long.”

  No. That’s not why. It’s because I’m okay with women being strong. Women should be strong. Women need to be strong. Like I said, that was one of the life lessons I learned growing up. Also that no one could tell me what to do, that I had a mind of my own. But there are still a lot of people in our society who don’t want to see women that way: strong for themselves and thinking for themselves. If they can’t have women dainty and proper, they want them to be sexy.

  To me, that’s society. That’s what some people want to see, and if you don’t give them what they want, then you’re not going to get seen. That’s not going to change in sports until it changes in the rest of society. And for that kind of change to happen, there needs to be a movement—not just for equity in women’s sports but equity for women in general. What women want—and we want it now, because it has not only not been given to us but actively taken away—is equity. That’s all. All these years, we’ve been fighting for what we should have had anyway. You could look at the situation and say, “Well, why are we even here? We should be on another step.” But that’s not how it works, that’s not where society is, that’s not where the powers-that-be are or where they want to go. For them to move, we have to make them move, and when they move, they move at a snail’s pace. You might like for the pace to be picked up and feel we shouldn’t have to start from where we are, but too often we don’t get to choose.

  So we need a movement, and to make a movement, there have to be people in the trenches working, people speaking out and saying the things that need to be said, and those people need to be constantly refreshed—you can’t expect the same people down in the trenches to keep doing all the work. You’ve got to bring in more people, to help them, to relieve them, but also to build numbers. I don’t know exactly how you do that in this day and time, but I know that this is what is very much needed.

  In any type of movement, you’ve got to have people continuously supporting each other and feeding their spirits and trying to change other people’s minds so that they want to join the movement too. And to convince the people whose minds are not wanting to change, you have to show them how your movement helps not only women but society as a whole. Because some p
eople don’t care whether women get help or not; at least, they don’t care about women as women. But maybe they care about their daughters or their granddaughters or their great-aunt who always wanted to run a marathon and is now ninety years old. We have to figure out how to appeal to those people and show them that what’s good for women is good for people—for all people.

  But that also means that the society has to care more about people in general. Because what I said earlier about the football players being used until they’re all used up—that’s not just true about football players. That’s true about pretty much everyone who works. We need to care more about people. We just do. And that’s not what we’re all about right now. Right now, it’s more like, Hey, I’m on top, and you’re down there, and I’m going to try to make sure you stay there. Not everybody, of course. But that’s the mood. The country is going through a whole lot of changes, and it will always go through changes, and when you have an attitude like the one I’m describing, there’s always going to be a response to it, from the movements that were happening when I was growing up and the Olympic Project for Human Rights to the professional athletes who are using their positions to remind people that Black lives matter.

  When I look at the football players taking a knee or linking arms and getting all that attention, positive and negative, I sometimes wonder what it will take for women to be in a position to have that effect. What woman do they ever publicize anyway, when it comes to a sport or when it comes to a movement—unless that woman started the movement? I think about when we started the Women’s Sports Foundation. The only reason we got any attention at first was because Billie Jean King had enough money to do the promotion herself. Then she had enough women who were well known to be a part of it—you’re talking about eight of us who people knew and could say, “They’re the greatest female athletes on earth at this time.” That moment was key because when the whole concept of promoting women in sports came about, there was also a movement saying we needed a change for women in general. We need a movement like that today.