Women's Sports and Working Brains

The male American sports watcher is of two minds regarding athletic performance: he enjoys the certainty that during each game, by rote, there will be a homerun, a flashy dunk or three (or twenty), or a kickoff-return for touchdown. But, he also celebrates innovation and craftiness, either in the form of some player or coach who shouldn't be able to survive at the level of competition but does, or in the form of unique systems and strategies for play. Thus, the American male sports fan holds simultaneous, contradictory opinions about what is most desirable in the genre. To be blunt, viewers seem to love LeBron James for his nightly impression of Michael Jordan--whose acrobatics were interesting 20 years ago and have now become commonplace in the NBA to the point that even benchwarmers can replicate them exactly--and yet also can wax rhapsodic about Dean Smith, whose last-ditch effort to make North Carolina competitive in college basketball entailed standing still and holding the ball until the other team literally got tired of guarding the basket and gave up an easy score. By the way, the game most associated with the Four Corners offense ended with a score of 21-20.

Most people will say that, while they admire Smith, they hate slow basketball. They like dunks. This is like saying, "rather than eating a steak, I'd like something fast and mundane, like Buddig pressed ham lunchmeat. Do we have any pressed ham lunchmeat?" There's no skill involved; you just tear open the package and eat the salty byproduct of indifferent production.

But those same people like Bill Belichick because he coaches a cerebral, planned football game. Many people will watch interminable chess matches (but only when men are playing), because they claim to enjoy the strategy, mind-cramping iterations of moves, and so forth. Fans will watch "slow" baseball pitchers and accept that when you throw a pitch is as important as what you throw. Sports enthusiasts will watch European, Asian, African, and South American "versions" of "American" sports and analyze different styles of play without automatically judging them inferior to the US norm. Look at golf, boxing, soccer, hockey, baseball for examples. Now, the fact that the United States has recently been beaten at "its own" games (our grabby sports culture has adopted all athletic pursuits as somehow reflective of us more than others) by people from other countries probably has a lot to do with this willingness to let variant styles of play live alongside the American "right way to play."

Which brings us to American women's sports. Everybody hates them. They aren't welcome on TV, radio, in print, or in public conversation. Women don't dunk. They run slow. The can't hit a baseball 450 feet or throw one 96 mph. Women are not entertaining or fun to watch, you won't learn anything by doing so, and they take up valuable brain cell power we could be using to watch the bajillionth homerun in the Yankees game. Case closed.

Except, if anybody ever actually sat down and watched women's sports, an interesting thing might happen. That other half of American sports consciousness, the part that is intrigued by cleverness, strategy, and creativity, might wake up and become cognizant of the fact that women's sports aren't like men's sports and that's a good thing. To put it plainly, men's sports in general just aren't that fun to watch. Most of the time, you see the same thing repeated over and over again; when everyone in the NBA can dunk, then perhaps nobody should dunk. 514 major league players out of 1200 hit HR in 2007. Most of those without a HR are relief pitchers. Is there anything less interesting than the longball at this point?

If you ask a man, he'd say yes: women's sports.

I've seen a lot of women's basketball in the last year or so and the thing about it is that everyone's right that it is vastly worse than the men's game--you know, if the measuring stick you're using is a men's game. If you're going to use your brain, though, you'll notice that women's basketball is nothing at all like men's. For one thing, it's played as a game. There are plans of attack, defensive gambits to test the opponent, evolving strategies over the course of the contest. It isn't a highlight reel. It isn't about finding the same open shot each time, or having one dominant inside player. The disparity between top women's teams and lower-tier teams is so great that for a lesser team to compete it has to think its way through the game. When have you ever seen a men's game that wasn't either an evenly-matched war of attrition or a mismatch where each team only played one way throughout?

What you'll realize, if you care to take a chance on women's sports, is that it's a completely different game where the very laws of motion are changed and the game develops over a longer time frame. For a nation of self-styled "intelligent" sports fans, who will sit through a postgame show where morons attempt to dress up the act of tackling to make it look like a fine art, it's a goddamn shame men won't think about women's sports as parallel universes or variations on a theme.

Of course, I guess this could all be misogyny, plain and simple. Silly me?