Game, Set, Match

by Susan Ware

  IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to tell either the story of Title IX or the broader history of women in sports without confronting the persistent—and pernicious—pattern of homophobia, that is, the irrational fear or intolerance of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered people. The labeling of women athletes as “dykes” is a time-tested way of discrediting them and their athletic accomplishments by implying that they are not “real” women; in this view sexual deviance goes hand in hand with female athletic prowess, suggesting that there is something wrong or transgressive about women's desire or ability to play sports. Women who are interested in team sports such as softball and basketball are especially suspect, although individual sports such as golf and tennis are also popularly assumed to harbor large numbers of lesbians. (This perception is often referred to euphemistically by sports promoters as “the image problem.”65) Whether there are in fact more lesbians in the world of sport than other areas of American life is an open question, but there is no doubt that those who are gay often choose the strategy of “play it, don't say it” as a way of deflecting public scrutiny. Billie Jean King is a prime example: for years she dodged rumors about her personal life and probably would have stayed in the closet indefinitely if she had not been so brutally and publicly outed by a former lover in 1981.66

  The issue of homosexuality plays out very differently in men’s and women's sports. As sports scholar Pat Griffin points out, “While women athletes must constantly prove their heterosexuality, most people assume that male athletes are heterosexual unless they provide evidence that they are not.” The ethos of male athletics is one of aggressive, combative, often violent masculinity, where catchphrases like “playing hurt,” “never let them see you sweat,” or “game face” prevail, especially in sports such as football. In such a context the worst thing a male athlete can be called is the antithesis: pussy, wuss, fag, or faggot, to name a few of the most derogatory epithets. The idea of a gay man who is just as strong and competitive as his straight teammates undermines the core value structure of much of contemporary male sports culture. To provide cover for any suspicion of homosexuality, heterosexuality is enforced and homophobia rampant. As one sports agent said, “Frankly, it would be easier for someone convicted of bank robbery to get a job in the NFL than an overtly gay player.”67

  The widespread association of lesbianism with sports affects all women, gay and straight. Women athletes are encouraged to play up their hetero-sexuality and femininity through grooming, makeup, and other ploys such as ponytails and hair ribbons; boyfriends, husbands, and other heterosexual credentials are paraded in public. As early as 1974, Jan Felshin labeled this strategy the feminine “apologetic.” Such dodges can have severe personal and psychological consequences for women athletes who basically are forced to pretend they are something they are not in order to participate in the sports and competition they love. Pat Griffin coined the phrase “strong women/deep closets” to capture “the apparent contradiction of physically strong and competent women who feel compelled to hide their deepest personal commitments, families, and love relationships in order to be members of the women's sports world.”68

  Despite these deep closets, lesbians have often found a safe and supportive haven in the world of women's sports. Because women's sports were generally not highly valued, they provided a welcoming environment for girls and women not interested in traditional gender roles; they also offered an alternative vision of athleticism that was focused less on competition, more on participation. Even if players never talked about lesbianism specifically, it was an “open” secret that there were lesbians in sport. Lesbians new to town often joked that if they found the local women's softball league, they would find a ready introduction to the gay community.69

  Yet often this space was safe and welcoming only if lesbians stayed quiet and closeted. If they didn't, the repercussions could be quite real. College athletes feared losing playing time, or even worse, their athletic scholarships, if they were too open about their sexual orientation, by joining campus gay pride groups or participating in public events with their partners, for example. Unfortunately this hostile environment was sometimes abetted by closeted lesbian athletes and coaches themselves who participated in putting other gays down as a mode of self-protection.70

  Much of the fear around this issue was driven by parents and administrators who were unwilling to face the fact that there were lesbians in sport, as players as well as coaches, departmental administrators, and teachers. Pat Griffin is especially critical of “the hypocrisy of championing equality for women's sports yet tolerating discrimination and prejudice against lesbian athletes and coaches.” One of the most pernicious tactics was the use of negative recruiting—where a coach, when talking to prospects and their parents, casually let slip that a rival team was known to harbor lesbian players or possibly even a lesbian coach. Pennsylvania State University women's basketball coach Rene Portland took this one step further, running her team on a “no alcohol, no drugs, no lesbians” basis until she was publicly confronted in 1991 and forced to rescind the policy. Alas, this is the same Rene Muth who helped lead the Immaculata Mighty Macs to three national championships in the 1970s.71

  These rumors built on the longstanding if misleading image of the predatory lesbian out to seduce your daughter in the locker room or on the field. In fact, the fear of lesbian coaches may be one reason behind the trend toward more men coaching female sports, one of the most dramatic changes in the more than thirty-five years of Title IX’s existence. While there are isolated examples of female coaches who enter into improper relationships with their players, a far greater problem is sexual harassment of female players by their male coaches. This phenomenon, which has been widely documented in academic studies as well as memoirs by former athletes such as Mariah Burton Nelson and Leslie Heywood, happens both in educational settings and professional sports but has yet to cause the kind of widespread outrage or fear that lesbianism has.72 As a result, the number of openly gay women coaches remains small, and they tend to congregate in smaller schools and minor sports. At the top of the female coaching hierarchy, the trappings of femininity are very much on display. Case in point: basketball coaches stalking the sidelines in skirts and high heels.73

  Why weren't women physical education leaders more in the forefront of making sports welcoming to gay and straight players alike? Various factors conspired to limit their ability to provide leadership. The world of athletics in general is a fairly conservative one, and women athletic administrators within this “near-total institution” function in an unsupportive climate for activism or social change. Many of these women had originally gravitated toward sports and coaching long before feminism or gay liberation, and they were still securely in the closet in the 1970s. Already marginalized by their involvement with women's sports and under attack as athletic departments aggressively merged formerly separate men’s and women's programs after the passage of Title IX, they feared added disapproval if not outright dismissal from their jobs if their sexual orientations were known.74

  Over the years, as sports have become a more acceptable outlet for girls and women, in large part because of Title IX, the threat of being labeled a lesbian has lost some of its force, although homophobia still causes many female athletes to hide or be less than open about their sexual orientation. The biggest change is that the pre-Title IX jock subculture that nurtured many lesbians—and nontraditional girls who weren't afraid to be called lesbians—has increasingly been replaced by a more generic athletic culture where all girls are encouraged, indeed expected, to participate and play. In the words of Lucy Jane Bledsoe, “Wouldn't it be ironic if, by complying with Title IX, schools ruined sports for young lesbians?” Like other unintended consequences of the law, Title IX brought progress for many, but at the cost of diluting what had been a special haven for some.75

  WITH THE EXCEPTION of the women's tennis tour, the 1970s proved much less hospitable to the take-off of women's professional sports than to the op
ening of opportunities to women athletes at the high school, collegiate, and recreational levels. Alas, no Title IX legislation required that women get an equal shot at making it as professional athletes. In fact, women's professional sports have struggled ever since to get a toehold in an increasingly crowded field, held back by the lateness of their arrival on the sports scene and the difficulty of attracting corporate and financial backing. These efforts were also hurt by lingering attitudes that once the curiosity factor wore off, women's sports just weren't as interesting or exciting to watch as men’s.76

  The attempts to set up a professional basketball league in the 1970s offer an instructive—and cautionary—tale. Hoping to capitalize on the popularity of the debut of women's basketball at the 1976 Olympics, a group called the women's Basketball Association (WBA) announced the formation of a league that year. Unfortunately its ambitious marketing plan failed to win support either from the players or, more important, the financial backers it would have needed to pick up the individual franchises. It folded before it ever played a game. In 1978 UCLA star Ann Meyers forged a new path when she was invited to try out for the Indiana Pacers. She earned a contract, but was cut from the team after several months. Soon Ann Meyers was back playing with the girls when the women's Professional Basketball League (WPBL) got off the ground in 1979.77

  The WPBL was better financed and conceived than the earlier WBA, but still a hard sell. The league began with eight teams and quickly expanded to fourteen; all of its owners and coaches were men. Women players were paid salaries in the $15,000-20,000 range, sometimes lower; then as now, the women's salaries were far below their male National Basketball Association counterparts. Nor did NBA players have to sleep three to four players to a room to save money, or change in their hotel rooms before games, which on a good day might draw 1,000 spectators, often less. By 1982 the league had folded.78

  Explanations for the failure of the WPBL ranged from the lack of depth of talent in women's collegiate ball to poor fiscal decisions to lack of television exposure to increased competition for the discretionary sports dollar. Mainly, it was just premature, as events since then have confirmed. After an attempt to set up a small, six-team league in the 1980s, nothing happened on the professional front until the late 1990s when the NBA-sponsored women's National Basketball Association started up in 1997, crowding out the rival American Basketball League which had started in 1996 but folded in 1998. While the WNBA draws loyal crowds, no one would ever confuse it with the NBA.79

  women's softball fared no better in its attempt to sustain a professional league. In 1975 Billie Jean King aggressively recruited other women athletes, including golfers Jane Blalock and Sandra Haynie and tennis player Martina Navratilova, to put up money for the women's Professional Softball League, proudly announcing with a nod to the upcoming bicentennial: “Women supporting women in a new professional sport is a revolutionary idea.” Realizing the need for a sound management plan, King recruited promoter Dennis Murphy, who had been involved in starting up the American Basketball Association, the World Hockey Association, and World Team Tennis. The league’s organizers hoped to draw on the deep talent that already existed in softball to build fan loyalty and support. Joan Joyce, for example, was an amazing athlete and dominant pitcher; if she had been a man, she could have made millions in professional baseball. Instead she played for the league for four years until it folded in 1979, the victim of inflated expectations and lackluster support, both financial and from fans. Disappointed but not defeated, Joyce returned to playing on the amateur Raybestos Brakettes.80

  Basketball and softball were both team sports, which helps explain their fates. The history of women's sports since the 1970s has confirmed again and again that it is much harder to build professional franchises in team sports than in individual sports. “Until team sports are accepted the same way they are for men,” argued Billie Jean King in 1981, “we haven't arrived. Everyone talks about our success; all I can think about is, we haven't even started.”81

  Women did in fact fare better in individual sports in the 1970s, although only slightly. Figure skaters such as Peggy Fleming and Dorothy Hamill were able to parlay Olympic medals into careers with the Ice Capades. Women also competed in professional bowling, skiing, and track and field, while the running boom offered women a supportive climate to run races and earn prize money alongside men. Once again, the biggest success story, practically the exception that proves the rule, was professional tennis, aided by the tennis boom of the decade, which provided the fast-growing and popular sport with a large fan base, augmented by consistent (if controversial) corporate support from Virginia Slims. In other words, if Billie Jean King had been a crack softball player, bowler, or skier, she would have had a much harder time creating a persona as a national sports celebrity in those years. Once again, tennis proved the perfect platform for her ambitions on and off the court.82

  After tennis, the women's golf tour was probably the most attractive opportunity for women professional athletes. The women's pro tour dated to the late 1940s with the establishment of the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA), dominated by the phenomenal golfer and all-around athlete Babe Didrikson Zaharias, as well as stellar players such as Betty Hicks, Louise Suggs, and Patty Berg. After Zaharias’s premature death in 1956, Mickey Wright emerged as a tour leader, and the LPGA grew in terms of television exposure, increasing purses, and corporate sponsorship. When Wright abruptly retired in 1965, the growth of the tour stalled until Colgate Palmolive stepped in as the main sponsor in 1972. In addition to the infusion of corporate cash and celebrity support, especially from Dinah Shore, whose name became practically synonymous with women's golf, the game profited from the promotion of new stars such as Nancy Lopez. As golfer Carole Mann noted in 1978, “Five years ago little girls never walked up to tell me that they wanted to be a professional golfer. Now it happens all the time.”83

  Things were also changing in the previously all-male world of NASCAR racing, thanks to Janet Guthrie. Always very much of an individualist (her background was in aeronautical engineering and physics), Guthrie had been racing cars since the 1960s, gaining experience that allowed her to be the first woman to qualify for the Indy 500 in 1977. She qualified again the next year, finishing ninth overall. Overcoming lingering—and often overt—prejudice that women couldn't drive as fast or as well as men, Guthrie put her success in wider perspective: “It was the women's movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s that made it possible for a woman to drive at Indianapolis and Daytona. I was simply the woman at the right place at the right time with the right background, and an overwhelming passion for the sport.” In Billie Jean King’s opinion, “Brave women like Janet Guthrie made it more acceptable for women to be elite athletes. She dared—no, demanded—to compete at the highest level of her sport in an era when entry and acceptance were a much greater challenge.” Access and the right to compete were the watchwords of women's sports in the 1970s; acceptance, respect, and professional viability would take much, much longer.84

  THIS CHAPTER BEGAN WITH the image of Brandi Chastain in her black Nike sports bra, so it seems appropriate to end this survey of the history of women's sports by returning to that piece of underwear, which, like so much else in this history, had its birth in the 1970s. Even as women's sports participation opportunities exploded in that decade, there was not yet a comparable explosion in gear and equipment for women. In the meantime female athletes were forced to make do with men’s shoes in smaller sizes, uniforms that were cut for men’s bodies, and a range of compromises and adaptations that reinforced that the norm in sports was male and women were still interlopers. A prime example: Kathrine Switzer ran the 1974 New York City marathon in a tennis dress.85

  One of the most vexing problems was bras, which were designed for fashion and everyday wear but not for serious athletic activity. For all but the most flat-chested women, going without a bra (the image of feminists as bra burners notwithstanding) was not really an option, for
reasons of both comfort and modesty. In 1977 marathoner Lisa Lindahl grew tired of bouncing breasts while she ran. “Why isn't there a jockstrap for women?” she asked herself. The next year she teamed up with Hinda Miller, a professional costume designer, to develop such a product. Their ingenious solution? Sew two jockstraps together. All they needed was softer fabric and better elastic, and the basic concept behind today’s sports bra was born. At first they called the product Jock Bras, but when the sporting good stores where they planned to market the product (note: not in women's lingerie departments) objected to the name, it became Jogbra.86

  Marathoner Ellen Wessel had a similar “eureka” moment in 1977 when she grew frustrated by the ill-fitting and poorly designed clothing available to active women like herself: “You go through a period of time thinking you’re too fat, too thin, too this or that instead of realizing the clothing is really the problem.” With a $7,000 loan, she and Elizabeth Goeke founded Moving Comfort, based in Springfield, Virginia, to design and market running clothing specifically geared to women. Unlike most start-up businesses, they had no cash flow problems at first because, Wessel later joked, they were too stupid to know they should give credit: everything was cash on delivery. With very little initial competition, they developed their product line and refined their business plan. The company doubled in size each year and by 1983 had gross sales of more than $4 million.87