Henrietta Hay's Column

Members of my favorite sports team are back to cramming for finals and getting their exercise walking across campus, or whatever they do when the season is over. The Colorado University women's basketball team made it to the N.C.A.A. Sweet Sixteen again, before losing to Tennessee. It was a great game, though and a fitting end to a winning season.

For the past several years this women's team coached by Ceal Barry has been winning games and championships while the men's team lost consistently. My favorite T-shirt from two years ago reads, "C. U. - Where men are men and women are champions." Unfortunately, I don't own one, because when they appeared on campus they were banned in Boulder: offended the guys, I guess. I have a friend in Boulder trying to buy one for me on the black market.

This year, however, the men's' team has won a few games, a lot of games, actually, and suddenly the women are on the back page again, and appearing in 15 second sound bytes on TV if they make it at all. Back to second-class athletic citizenship!

I should be used to it by now. I was there -- not as a top athlete of course, but as a part of a watered down female athletic program at C. U. back in the dark ages. While Whizzer White was becoming famous lugging a football, I was playing three-zone basketball and lettering in tennis, the only sport deemed appropriate for a co-ed. Field hockey was as raucous as we got.

Steve Marantz, writing in Sporting News, brings a man's viewpoint to the issue of women's sports. He says, "Women athletes were stigmatized as unfeminine and possibly gay. Aside from a few high-profile Olympians, golfers and tennis players, most women athletes occupied a dim nether world."

It took the women's movement and Title IX to open up women's athletic programs. Marantz goes on to point out that at long last men are beginning to appreciate women's athletic abilities. "Men love women athletes...We love their grit, courage, savvy, finesse, strength, discipline and determination . . . Sport is a meritocracy. Women athletes appeal to men because they work hard. They combine form with function . . . Toughness isn't gender specific. The toughness of the male athlete may start with cultural expectations. The toughness of women athletes must come from within." Sounds as though we just got off a space ship from Venus. We knew that all the time.

Michael Jordan did not wake up one morning suddenly knowing how to slam-dunk a basketball. He spent years developing his strength and skills. Most women don't have that background yet. According to society's rules, little boys start active games and team sports when they can scarcely walk. Only in recent years have little girls been encouraged to do the same thing. It will take a generation or two for great numbers of them to develop their full athletic abilities.

Marantz makes another very true if somewhat condescending point. "Money hasn't corrupted women's sports. ABL (women's pro basketball) salaries average $70,000 . . . Absence of money has as a corollary the absence of jerks. Women's team sports have not produced counterparts to Dennis Rodman."

This year Ceal Barry with 14 successful years of coaching at C. U., and new men's coach, Ricardo Patton, received the same $110,000 base salary, although his total package totaled $205,000 to her $120,000. Patton's package for next year has gone up to more than $325,000. A comparable adjustment to Barry's financial package has not been announced. But Pat Summit at the University of Tennessee earns $325,000, with a base salary higher than that of either the football coach or the men's basketball coach. One of her perks is a Mercedes-Benz SL 500 sports car. Go, Pat!

There is one bright hope for prestige and money in women's sports: fatherhood. Just wait until today's soccer dads become women's pro basketball dads. A recent column by the Sentinel's Managing Editor, Dennis Herzog, bemoans the lack of publicity that middle school girl basketball players get. We will make real progress when those dads are not only in the cheering section, but are expecting the same recognition and financial opportunity for their adult daughters as they get for their sons.

Maybe Aretha Franklin is thinking of female athletes when she sings, -- "R-E-S-P-E-C-T Find out what it means to me."