You might wonder why a bunch of women have to take lessons in caring from a man. But it shows how far women have come this year. They are a real force, and they know how to play hardball so well that-like men–they’ve got to worry about programming in their sensitive side. If Lee Atwater has an heir in Democratic politics, she’s wearing a skirt. Clinton adviser Mandy Grunwald, one of two women (along with Sherman) who is a full partner in a major media firm, is a master of jujitsu politics-turning an attack into a counterattack. Texas Gov. Ann Richards was sought out by everyone at the convention for her advice on how to take out the opposition. Women have run in numbers before, but never before with such a collective toughness and determination.
Women used to count on the equivalent of PTA bake sales to fund their campaigns. But that’s changed. “We’re in the middle of a revolution here,” says Richards. “Women know how to raise money now.” EMILY’s List (Early Money Is Like Yeast), which funds pro-choice Democratic women candidates, will have raised $5 million by November, making it the largest single funder of political campaigns in the country. (The National Association of Realtors is currently the big boy on the block.) The picture of the all-male Senate judiciary panel grilling Anita Hill has proved to be a lucrative direct-mail fund-raiser for women candidates. Women believe that if they can get to Washington in sufficient numbers, they can change the governing dynamic. They cite specific issues like reproductive choice, a family-leave policy and more money for breast-cancer research.
Still, women must be prepared to deal with potential backlash. One Democratic aide choreographing group shots of women at the convention made some of the more radical types angry. “If you have purple hair and are wearing cutoff shorts, stand in the back,” she said. “We’re trying to get elected.” Strategist Sherman advised women on how to get across their message in a way that is “nonthreatening” to men. She urged expanding the political dialogue beyond women’s issues with slogans like “pro-choice, pro-jobs” and using humor to attract members of the opposite sex, as in “This woman sure knows how to clean house.”
Some high-profile campaigns have already run into static. Pennsylvania’s Lynn Yeakel, a Senate candidate, is battling charges of racial insensitivity because she and her husband belong to an all-white country club. There are also whispers that Yeakel is anti-Semitic because of allegedly pro-Arab remarks made by the minister of her church. In Illinois, the campaign of Carol Moseley Braun, whose upset primary win could position her to become the first African-American woman in the Senate, has been stalled by internal feuding. And Colorado Senate candidate Josie Heath, a longtime environmentalist, has been criticized because her husband works for a firm that sold asbestos.
The publicity generated by history-making women candidates could benefit Clinton. This “bottom-up strategy” relies on women turning out in greater numbers in the battleground states of California, Pennsylvania, Illinois and possibly New York, where women are contesting Senate seats. California alone could double the number of women in the Senate (currently two) if Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer are elected. Women are also the Democratic standard-bearers in 16 of the state’s 52 districts. Clinton’s realization that he could get elected on women’s coattails was evident in his acceptance speech when he spoke of the next generation with a “she.” In this political year, a pronoun that once connoted the weaker sex has become a symbol of force.
title: “A League Of Their Own” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-23” author: “Tiffany Teague”
Basketball meets burlesque almost every night in the Continental Basketball Association, the small-city answer to the NBA. From Ft. Wayne to Topeka, from Grand Rapids to Cedar Rapids, the CBA is bringing impressive, if a bit improvisational, professional basketball to places whose only contact with the NBA is Skip Caray on TNT. This is the unofficial farm system of the NBA, a league that has sent scores of big-name players into The Show, including Michael Adams and Tony Campbell. Most of the CBA’s 17 teams have increased attendance dramatically in the last two seasons, with such upstarts as the Skyforce often pulling in 5,000 a night into un-Forumlike field houses and armories.
Like the booming NBA, the CBA has become a marketing phenomenon. The concept: out in the mighty heartland, things can get a teensy bit …uninspiring during those dark winter months. Quad City (Ill.) Thunder general manager Rick McCardle, the Jeffrey Katzenberg of minor-league hoops, prefers to think of a game against, say, the LaCrosse Catbirds as “the total entertainment experience.” Which explains why the team exhibits a man juggling chain saws above a guinea pig. (Ticket-buying animal-rights activists apparently are a minority near the Iowa border.) The fans, for their part, get pretty worked up by the spectacle. “For Sioux Falls,” exclaims Skyforce fan Mitch Evans, “this is the greatest thing ever.”
Well, maybe not. Still, there is an oddly addictive quality to this style of play, which at best is NBA caliber and at worst is an irresistible kind of speed-wrestling. Since, in any given month, two players might defect overseas, another to the NBA and a fourth simply hang up his sneaks, team chemistry isn’t always at a premium. Not so the talent. “The play is so much better now,” says NBA journeyman Petur Gudmundsson, now with the Skyforce. “Guys used to fight in the locker rooms. Now the fans see all the fights.” Indeed, spectators can count on a near-rabid intensity level, for every player is in a constant state of audition-whether for NBA scouts or some Belgian club with deep pockets. All of which adds up to lots of scoring, inelegant though it may be.
But what about the players, those former BMOCs and NBA first-rounders who now spend their days watching “Hogan’s Heroes” at the local Holiday Inn? (Contracts in this league rarely surpass $15,000 a season.) “You get very familiar with the clerks at the video store,” says Skyforce veteran John Smith, a Duke alum. And yet, undeniably, there is a certain cachet to being a CBA player in a CBA kind of locale. Skyforce team members, for instance, are world famous at the Empire Mall, the one near Denny’s. “The farther you get from NBA cities,” explains Skyforce forward Richard Rellford, “the more you get treated like God or Michael Jordan.”
Lest the NBA brass start losing sleep, the CBA still faces a few hurdles. For openers, it needs more TV exposure. It would also help if The Show started employing it as an official farm system, baseball style. Meantime, the league continues to win hearts. On this chill night in Sioux Falls, the atmosphere was so electric that, if you tapped your Pumps three times fast, you Could almost see the Spectrum. Unless, of course, you happened to catch the opening tip-off, when the participants cursed like longshoremen and generally underscored the singular charm of the CBA experience. “Hold everything,” said the ref, peering forlornly into the throng. “Who took the damn ball?”
title: “A League Of Their Own” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-22” author: “Robert Taylor”
Teams, after all, belong to fans in a special way. They induce the kind of sustaining, diehard passion unknown to individual competition. With time, Billie Jean’s stark insight has become even more a reality in the United States. In much of the world the only team sport is soccer, thus offering more room for individual sports to stake out a place for themselves. The U.S., though, with four popular team sports, the number of these franchises in triple figures and cities scuffling with each other to be ““major league,’’ is a honeyed land of box scores that women athletes have been shut out of.
A paradox has also developed that has served to damage the perception of female athletics even as they grow more fashionable. While Title IX, legally, and the changing of attitudes, culturally, have created an atmosphere where girls may enter into sports as naturally as boys, the very success of too-young girls in the most visible women’s sports–tennis, figure skating and gymnastics–has devalued the whole idea of ladies’ play.
We have had the Baby Snooks gymnasts for years, prompting this question from Barbara Wilder in Newsday: ““What good can come from a sport . . . in which young women are given hugs after every routine like fish thrown to performing seals?’’ Now there’s an elfin 14-year-old world skating champion, as well. ““Yes, it’s pass-the-sick-bag time again,’’ Simon Barnes, England’s finest sports columnist, wrote in The Times of London when Tara Lapinski triumphed earlier this year. ““This was a little girl, lisping around the ice . . . A system that penalizes competitors who have had the misfortune to reach puberty is simply absurd.’’ Now it is tennis that is utterly dominated by an adolescent, 16-year-old Martina Hingis. Obviously, when les enfants can excel so easily at these activities, then it is natural for us to eventually dismiss them–dismiss women’s sport as the mere child’s play it appears to be. So the putative success of the two new women’s basketball leagues is important, then, precisely because successful teams usually require a kind of talent that has more to do with maturity than prodigy. My gracious, women’s basketball threatens to become the first popular modern women’s sport that actually stars . . . women.
Certainly basketball is the logical lead team candidate for women. Far more schoolgirls play basketball than any other sport, and virtually every college in the nation fields a women’s hoops squad. Moreover, the team concept in any sport may be a vital missing link in the development of young women in this country. Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women’s Sports Foundation, reports that an inordinate extraordinary number of female business leaders played team sports growing up. In effect, they learned how to play the boys’ games, so now can play the big boys’. ““Men learn from playing on teams to look out for each other, even to protect some guy who’s dead wood,’’ Lopiano opines. ““The trouble with girls is they haven’t had that team experience, and they tend more to compete against each other for boys’ attention. They’re objects.''
Myself, I find this a rather starry-eyed vision of Guys in the Field of Play. Trust me, Donna, we can be rotten sports. Compete for the opposite sex? I was on teams with fellas who would snake their best buddy. Team spirit? Hey, a lot of boys play sports just to get neat uniforms and be sex objects themselves. But the larger Lopiano point obtains: learning teamwork–teamcare–is something that the girl, no less than the boy, can profit by in life.
Now, sorry WNBA, sorry ABL, but the question of whether enough people of either sex want to pay to watch women play sports together is one that has not been answered yet. No scheduled women’s league in any sport has ever made it, and women’s tennis and golf circuits pale before the popularity of the men’s. Still, we do know that the captious men who dismiss women’s sports as second rate simply because females are not as big and strong as males are looking at it in a very narrow way. Aficionados don’t see women in competition as cut-rate men. Rather, it’s more of a pound-for-pound appreciation, as with the celebration of fine middleweight boxers. In that regard, one distinct advantage that women’s basketball possesses is that men are so good so young now that much of team coordination has disappeared, as the game too often becomes little more than 10 players in search of a dunk. There have, in fact, been surveys that indicate that fans who like women’s basketball are also more inclined to like men’s baseball than men’s basketball. More grace and subtlety, more of a family experience.
Several years ago, David Stern, the paterfamilias of the NBA, told me (with just a bit of a smirk): ““We are exploitative purists.’’ Well, women’s basketball at its best exploits the purity of a team game that Stern’s solo showmen have egregiously sensationalized. Or, if hoops of any sort are not to your taste, be advised that not one but two women’s professional ice-hockey leagues are on the drawing boards. Call for a prospectus.
