For this they could thank, among others, Richard Nixon. In 1972 he signed into law Title IX of the Education Amendments Act, prohibiting gender discrimination in any educational programme or activity receiving federal aid. Sporting equality was hardly the focal point of the legislation, but its effects proved far-reaching. When universities - private and public alike, since both received government assistance - learned that spending on their sports teams had to be in proportion to the ratio of male and female athletes, what seemed a commonsense edict developed into perhaps the most contentious issue in the history of college sport.
Guidelines issued in 1993 further inflamed the controversy, requiring the male-female ratio of participants to mirror that of the university's total enrolment, not just those who played in teams. Though the intent of the legislation had been to expand opportunities for women, compliance could often be more easily achieved by reducing the options open to men. Of course, male-dominated athletic departments would not allow such developments to encroach on their most visible programmes, chiefly gridiron and basketball, which they sought to preserve in their bloated, quasi-professional guise. But lower-profile men's sports were not always as fortunate. Even the national pastime found itself under threat at institutions the size ofthe University of Wisconsin (undergraduate enrolment: nearly 30,000), which terminated its baseball programme in 1991.
Periodic legal challenges limited Title IX implementation for decades, yet between 1981 and 1999 the number of women engaged in intercollegiate sport grew by 81 per cent to 163,000, while the number of men increased just 5 per cent to 232,000. By 1999 there were more female teams than male ones - nearly 9,500 across the country - and the sport that benefited most was soccer, spreading from 80 schools in 1981 to 926 by 1999. The University of North Carolina soon emerged as the game's towering force and its manager, Anson Dorrance, a sort of coaching paragon. Born in Bombay, the son of an oil executive, Dorrance spent his childhood in a number of soccer-friendly countries, yet it was his experiences as a player at North Carolina in the early 1970s ('I had the touch of a goat and the creativity of a table') that converted him. In 1977 he took charge of the men's programme, a position he held for 12 seasons, but it was with the women's team that he became indelibly associated. Within two years of becoming the first head coach of the Lady Tar Heels* in 1979, he steered them to the first of 18 national championships in 23 years.
With much of the best talent in the country playing for him at UNC, Dorrance's appointment as part-time manager of the national team in 1986 came as no surprise. As far back as 1983 the US had put out a women's team of sorts, its players sewing jersey numbers onto hand-medown shirts and competing in rank anonymity, but their rise to international prominence came far more quickly than the men. FIFA organised the first women's World Cup in 1991, just as Title IX was beginning to leave its legacy. In their first qualifying match, the American women scored more goals against Mexico, 12, than the men had accumulated against the same country over 31 years.
Nearly half that team had played for Dorrance in college, including Mia Hamm, yet to turn 20, and captain April Heinrichs, who at the end of the decade would become the team's first female manager. Embarrassingly lopsided victories over Martinique (12-0), Trinidad & Tobago (10-0) and Haiti (10-0) underlined the yawning disparities of an emerging international competition.
The squad Dorrance took to China for the finals was anonymous to all but the keenest fan. Yet from the start Akers and her compatriots put the US on equal footing with the best in the world, however modest that world was. A 2-1 win over Norway in the final, in front of 65,000 in Guangzhou, earned them the trophy, but little else. The country was not yet ready to embrace a world championship-winning team in what was still a decidedly un-American and unfeminine pastime. The New York Times was one of the few newspapers to herald the team's accomplishments, observing that on the coach trip from the stadium `team members passed around the FIFA trophy to the theme music from the movie Working Girl, a story about a talented secretary who rises in the male-dominated business world'.
Dorrance stepped aside, to be replaced by a former ASL goalkeeper, Tony DiCicco, but few tears were shed at home when the Americans were beaten by Norway in the semi-final in Sweden four years later. The transformation of the women's game required a showcase event in their own country. In 1996 the Olympic Games came to Atlanta and, after fierce lobbying from the Americans, women's soccer made a hasty debut (with no time for a qualification phase, organisers merely drafted in the eight teams that had reached the previous summer's World Cup finals). Few eligibility restrictions were placed on the participants, meaning the US Olympic squad looked very similar to its World Cup equivalent.
As with the men, national duties were largely unencumbered by obligations to club teams, providing almost limitless opportunities for international call-ups. Midfielder Kristine Lilly received her 100th cap before she was 25. By the time of the Atlanta Games three others had reached the milestone as well, including the blossoming Hamm. Yet the player most likely to have surpassed them all, Akers - who had been among the first American women to play overseas, joining a club in Sweden - found herself struggling with a debilitating chronic fatigue virus. With the drugs that might have helped proscribed as performance-enhancing, she was pressed into a defensive midfield role, confining her game to short, energetic bursts ('It was an awful feeling, knowing before a game started that I'd be sick for the next two days'). In Atlanta Akers appeared in all five games, though her need for post-match intravenous feeding nearly caused her to miss the medal ceremony.
Uncertain how many tickets women's Olympic soccer was capable of selling - stadiums for the Sweden World Cup had often been embarrassingly empty - organisers decided to schedule many of the early-round matches as curtain-raisers to the men's tournament, making it difficult to judge the level of interest in each event. But by the time of the semifinals there was little doubt the women had established a substantial following. At the University of Georgia's gridiron stadium, its hallowed hedges pruned to accommodate more seats, the US tamed their semifinal nemesis of the previous summer, Norway, in front of more than 64,000. A few hours later at the same venue, 54,000 saw China beat Brazil in arguably the most dramatic match of the competition.
As with Los Angeles in 1984, television - NBC this time - ignored a momentous Olympic soccer story, preferring less alien disciplines which could more readily accommodate commercial breaks. Even the prospect of 76,481 filling a gridiron mecca for the gold medal match between the US and China - a crowd deemed by organisers to be the largest ever for a women's match - was shunned in favour of the latest incarnation of basketball's 'dream team' easing its way to a meaningless victory over Australia. Network executives made it clear they had no intention of letting soccer creep into their schedules, and so presented only the last minute of the match and the celebrations of the home team. 'Has NBC secretly discovered that women draw the line at their gender playing sweaty team sports that were once male preserves?' wondered the New York Times, noting that the network had also shunned the gold medalwinning performance of the women's softball team.
There were many, though, who had taken notice of women's soccer, and a few who even began to rally around it. By 1997 an amateur circuit called the W-League, formed after the 1994 men's World Cup, had expanded to 32 teams, and plans for a professional league, to be known as the National Soccer Association, were submitted to the USSF. Title IX seemed to be bearing fruit - two women's professional basketball leagues had formed a year earlier - but the federation was still nursing its infant MLS, whose own survival was far from certain, and had little appetite for what it regarded as an even more speculative venture. `People are not going to invest as a statement for women; in the end they want to make money,' noted the chairman of the committee examining the proposal.
The NSA never got off the ground, but America was due to host the next big women's tournament, and its legacy would prove more spectacular. The 1999 World Cup attracted
unprecedented interest and even turned a modest profit. Just as 1984 had opened FIFA's eyes to the drawing power of soccer in the US, 1999 convinced American entrepreneurs that the women's game carried commercial potential. One could sympathise with that point of view. The team might not have been household names like Venus and Serena Williams, but many were familiar faces, particularly the 27-year-old Hamm, playing in her third World Cup and extolled as the most prolific goalscorer American soccer had produced. The daughter of an air force colonel, Hamm was born in Selma, Alabama, but lived the nomadic childhood of an armed forces family in California, Italy, Virginia and Texas - all before she turned six. As a 17-year-old undergraduate at North Carolina she was entrusted to Anson Dorrance, who was made her legal guardian while her parents were stationed in Florence. In 1998 the USSF named Hamm its female player of the year for a fifth consecutive time. The commercial appeal of a white, middle-class, graciously humble Olympic heroine was not lost on corporate America: Nike claimed her as a client and even named one of its office blocks after her.
By the time of the World Cup Hamm had appeared in Nike's ubiquitous television commercials with Michael Jordan, written a book (subtitled A Champion's Guide to Winning in Soccer and Life) and may have been profiled in more of the nation's media than any soccer player of either gender. Not since Billie Jean King had a woman so personified her sport. Yet she was uneasy in the role, a reluctant superstar whose team-first ethos jarred with the look-at-me zeitgeist. Salon magazine said of her:
Hers is not the forced modesty of a media-savvy star. It is rooted in a relentless will to win coupled with an understanding that, at its heart, soccer is a team sport. On the field, she is a vocal and dominant competitor. Off the field, you get the sense that she would prefer to fade into the woodwork of the US squad, to just be an athlete.
Yet Hamm was inspiring millions of young players of both sexes, and her unpretentious demeanour was reassuring to a Middle America weary of the blustering pronouncements of sport's male brigade of millionaire egoists. National team matches thronged with pony-tailed young fans draped in 'Hamm 9' jerseys, desperate for autographs and a goal or two from their heroine. Hamm obliged with smiles and remarkable patience. In the countless features written about her before USA 99, it was virtually impossible to find a word against her, either as a footballer or a human being.
The irony of the media's Mia-obsession was that American success had far more to do with team dynamics than individual brilliance. Some of the names might have seemed more appropriate for romance novels than shin-guards - Tiffeny Milbrett, Brandi Chastain, Lorrie Fair - but they were anything but a collection of lovelorn damsels, and their desire to play as hard for each other as they did for themselves had instilled an impressive chemistry and an egalitarian team spirit.
The summer of 1999 proved even more memorable than the one five years earlier, and the country's appetite for hosting top-class soccer was again dramatically underestimated. Officials had targeted an aggregate attendance of 312,000 but sold half a million tickets a week before a ball had been kicked. Nearly 194,000 saw the three group matches in which the US outscored Denmark, Nigeria and North Korea 13-1 on aggregate, with eight different players registering goals.
A winning American team playing on its own soil to enormous crowds was too intoxicating a combination to pass unnoticed. The media's response was relentlessly favourable, typified by Christine Brennan, a USA Today columnist who admitted to not especially liking soccer:
The US women, the ones I had begun noticing in those ingenious TV commercials, took no time at all to grow on me. They looked so wholesome and all-American, they almost didn't seem real. I had heard that they were all collegeeducated. None, I believe, has a police record. In the sportsweary Nineties, could this really be possible? ... What was not to like about this team?
Millions were similarly captivated. In the quarter-final against Germany, played in front of nearly 55,000 in the home of the NFL's Washington Redskins, the US twice came from behind to win 3-2. Their semi-final victory over Brazil drew more than 73,000 to Stanford Stadium, where the American men had been knocked out by the same country in 1994. For the final against China - a repeat of the gold medal contest in Atlanta - the Rose Bowl was nearly as full as it had been for the men's equivalent five years earlier.
It, too, was decided on penalties, and suffered from a similar lack of open play and scoring opportunities. Indeed, the tournament as a whole was plagued with growing pains - particularly a rash of brutal tackles scarcely kept in check by referees seemingly overwhelmed by the intensity of play. In a 7-1 pasting of Nigeria, the US were awarded 29 freekicks to their opponents' three, and Hamm was substituted shortly after half-time, to a chorus of boos from a Chicago crowd unaware that their heroine was being hacked to pieces.
In the final, despite the flag-waving exhortations of a shrieking crowd, the Chinese came closest to scoring, with Kristine Lilly needing to head an extra-time effort off the line. Across the nation, nerves jangled; for the first time, millions of Americans found themselves completely absorbed by a soccer match that did not produce a goal, though it did offer a few surprises. In open play the outstanding US performer was not Hamm, who was kept quiet by tenacious Chinese marking, but Akers, who somehow kept her imposing medical condition at bay until she had to be taken off in extra time.
But her heroics were largely forgotten amid the drama of penalties. The US coolly converted each of theirs, all five takers - including a reluctant Hamm - veterans of the World Cup-winning team of eight years earlier. With goalkeeper Briana Scurry having pushed aside a Chinese kick, the chance to win the match fell to the feet of Brandi Chastain, the 30-yearold California full-back nicknamed 'Hollywood' because of her taste for melodrama.
Much, probably too much, has been made about the scenes that followed her left-footed strike: Chastain removing her shirt to reveal a black sports bra, then sinking to her knees in triumph. Some accused Chastain of indulging the exhibitionist traits that had earlier led her to be photographed for a men's magazine crouching behind a soccer ball, wearing nothing but her boots and a layer of body oil. Others sensed she had bowed to commercial opportunism. The bra happened to be a Nike prototype, and multinational behemoths looking for `product placement' had moved on from the days of Soccer Bowl 77, when, after scoring for the Cosmos, Steve Hunt removed his Pony brand boot and held it aloft (an image which appeared in several papers the following morning). As one New York Times columnist hypothesised, somewhat tongue-in-cheek:
Nike stood to gain millions if viewers detected the teensy blackon-black swoosh on Chastain's bra and made the obvious trek to Nike Town. And Chastain is a Nike endorser, as are five other teammates, including Hamm. All the pieces were in place that day for an ingenious Nike executive to leverage the power Nike already held by outfitting the team, to require all 20 players to wear its sports bra, mandate the shooting order of the United States penalty kickers, with Chastain last, figuring that anyone who would essentially pose nude for Gear magazine would act as if throwing off her shirt were a naturally exultant reaction to winning the World Cup.
Both player and outfitter denied any conspiracy, Chastain defending herself with a celebrated plea of 'momentary insanity'. But this was far from the only cloud hanging over what should have been a proud moment. Some African-American commentators castigated ABC for what they perceived as yet another example of white America turning to its own kind whenever the skin of the real hero happened to be the wrong colour. Why, they asked, had the cameras not focused on Scurry, the black Minnesotan whose save moments earlier was the turning point of the shoot-out?
Television's fixation with sexual imagery may have been a more likely rationale. Chastain's actions quickly provoked excited sociological discussion about stereotypes of the female athlete as sex object. Many women may have cringed to hear the bubbly co-captain Julie Foudy refer to her team as 'booters with hooters', but in an age when racy and often vulgar self-promotion - of men as well as women -
was largely perceived as a justifiable means of selling tickets, such epithets seemed relatively tame. Chastain ('For us, it doesn't matter what motivates them to come to the stadium, as long as they come') and Foudy seemed merely products of their time. The latter had posed with her husband for Sports Illustrated's swimsuit annual, yet her interest in 'gender issues' soon propelled her to the presidency of the Women's Sports Foundation. 'If we can make sure we're successful on the field,' she insisted, '1 think people will come for the product, rather than what the product looks like.'
The 'product' had in this case prompted a national celebration, and the inevitable trappings of celebrity followed: TV appearances and product endorsements, Disneyland parades and pro-am golf tournaments, even a White House audience with President Clinton (who, unlike in 1994, had attended the final). Chastain's sports-bra moment reached the cover of Sports Illustrated and Newsweek and the match made the front of Time and People.
Any remaining doubts that the 'Babes of Summer' had become the sporting sensation of the season disappeared once ABC revealed the size of its audience for the final: 40 million, a figure far in excess of any other soccer contest shown on American TV and nearly twice that of the 1994 men's World Cup final. Media analysts were stunned. 'These are NFL- type numbers,' exclaimed one. 'It's phenomenal.'
Inevitably, the frenzy of crystal-ball gazing that accompanied every significant American soccer match was revived. 'I think we're on the cutting edge of one of the most significant cultural revolutions in the world,' boasted a delirious USSF official. 'It states that in team sports, women are full partners of men, not subordinates.' Not everyone was so certain. 'Some of the white-heat attraction, undoubtedly, stems from America's fascination with the Big Event that comes around once in a lifetime,' wrote the Boston Globe. 'Some comes from the recent explosion of interest in female spectator sports, from figure skating to gymnastics to basketball to tennis to soccer. And some because the home team (unlike the US males in 1994) is supposed to win.'
Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America's Forgotten Game (Sporting) Page 39