It was a heist, and Katie Couric was one of the thieves. Two days after the U.S. women’s soccer team defeated China and won the World Cup, Couric interviewed several players on the Today show. She had other things on her mind besides soccer and the stirring victory over the Chinese. Couric wanted to know why Brandi Chastain, the player who kicked the winning goal and then tore off her shirt, had posed nude for Gear magazine. (The photo was so tame, with a soccer ball hiding Chastain’s vital parts, that NBC flashed it on the screen.) “I’m wondering about some of the mixed signals that little girls may be getting,” Couric said. “Do you feel completely comfortable with that, or should you tell me to lighten up?” Chastain chuckled, but Couric didn’t lighten up.
The next question didn’t have anything to do with soccer or the game with China either. Chastain’s teammate Julie Foudy, Couric noted, had worn a bikini for a photo in Sports Illustrated of her running along the beach with her husband. Yes, the picture was “completely innocent,” Couric said. “But I’m sure some hard-core feminists are gonna say, ‘Wait a second. What’s going on here?'” Foudy responded that the picture merely showed you could be both a woman and a strong athlete.
So what was stolen here? Only the game. It was a heart-pounding drama won by the American women on the very last kick, a magnificent victory by skillful, disciplined athletes. But Couric and the mainstream media became ideological ax-grinders and treated it as a political event — with political winners and losers. The winners, according to the pundits, were feminists, the feminist agenda, Title IX, the women’s movement, women with corporate ambitions, androgynous women, and little girls who will now be emboldened to give up their Barbies and play soccer. The losers were men.
Even the 1973 tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King, the famous gender grudge duel, was less politicized than the U.S. women’s soccer triumph. The writers and commentators and chatterers were agreed: This was more than just a soccer game. On Nightline, Kevin Newman of ABC News insisted much more was involved than “simply soccer.” And the players weren’t just players. Cynthia McFadden, also of ABC News, called them “the heiresses of the women’s movement.” Jonathan Alter of Newsweek said the team represents “a new comfortable place for the women’s movement.”
The players were expected to be just like men, whether they liked it or not. Displaying femininity, as Chastain and Foudy had, was frowned upon. What thrilled the press was Chastain’s act of tearing off her jersey once victory was sealed. She had done exactly what men do. It was a riveting moment, and it put Chastain, in her black sports bra, on the cover of Newsweek and Sports Illustrated. More important to the media, she met the androgynous ideal of women as men who can have babies: muscular, irreverent, aggressive. She was even entrepreneurial, having signed a contract with Nike. So it was Chastain and not Mia Hamm, who is married to a Marine, or Michelle Akers, a born-again Christian, who became the icon of the World Cup. Her lapse in posing for a men’s magazine was overlooked.
During the penalty kicks, one ABC-TV announcer stumbled into political incorrectness. She said penalty kicks in women’s soccer are all about placement because the women goalkeepers aren’t athletic enough to stop a well-placed ball. In other words, they can’t do what guy goalies sometimes can. The comment was followed by stony silence, as if someone had broken wind and everyone wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened. Of course, an average male college team could beat the U.S. women. No one uttered that blasphemous fact. The preferred tack was captured by the oft-aired Nike ad with Hamm competing with Michael Jordan to the song (from Annie Get Your Gun) “Anything You Can Do.”
In fact, the impression was left that women soccer players are better than men, at least as team players and perhaps morally as well. They “taught the rest of us lessons,” according to Newsweek. “In an era when the egos of male athletes are dwarfed only by their pay-checks, the World Cup women, minimum wagers by pro-sports standards, reminded the country that sports superstars can be gracious and grateful.” They “showed us leadership and teamwork — and they kicked butt.” Which the U.S. men’s soccer team didn’t in the 1998 World Cup. But, again, an inconvenient fact was not mentioned. The American women’s team faced weaker opponents. Women’s soccer, unlike men’s, is largely underdeveloped around the world.
In a way, the media dissed the American players. By stressing the “lessons” they supposedly taught and freighting them with a feminist agenda, reporters and commentators deemphasized their athletic skills and how they had honed them. Akers got attention for having bravely overcome a dozen knee operations, chronic fatigue syndrome, and other ailments, but other players got far less. How had veteran Kristine Lilly, who saved the final game by heading a Chinese shot out of the goal, stayed so good at soccer for so long? If this was analyzed, I missed it.
The players were also diminished by the proselytizing for Title IX, the law requiring equal opportunity for women at schools that take federal funds. The media made it sound as if Title IX, not hard work and good coaching, had created the team and made it successful. Time labeled the players “daughters of Title IX.” After the victory over China, Aaron Brown asserted on ABC’s World News Tonight, “This is Title IX come of age.” The next evening on ABC, Judy Muller claimed the U.S. team had sent a message to those who want to revise Title IX: “Not so fast, buddy.”
The incessant rap about Title IX was only one example of the mixture of ignorance and make-believe that dominated the coverage of the World Cup. The truth is, Title IX did not create the soccer mania that has gripped American girls. At most, it has given them a few more college soccer teams to play for. American women have been great at soccer for decades now, emerging as world-class players during the 1970s and 1980s, when those who now credit Title IX for producing the 1999 champs were complaining that Title IX was not being enforced at all. The United States won the first women’s World Cup, after all, in 1991. That team, ignored by the media, and even more obviously not the offspring of Title IX, was more dominant than this year’s squad.
Yet, somehow, the media came to the conclusion the victory in 1999 constituted a sudden, meaningful breakthrough for women’s sports and women in general. ABC’s Judy Muller proclaimed: “This team on this day in this place forever changed the way we think about women in sports.” Well, maybe it changed the way she thinks. Former congress-woman Patricia Schroeder, writing in the Los Angeles Times, said the women’s soccer team had exploded the conventional wisdom that women can play individual sports (tennis, golf) but not team sports. Frankly, I’d never heard of this conventional wisdom before. In any case, my question is, where have these people been? Certainly not hanging around playgrounds all over the country, where the break-through in girls’ sports, especially soccer, occurred a long time ago. The enthusiasm for the 1999 women’s team is the crest of a wave that has been building for many years.
I know. I’ve seen soccer mania at my own house. One of my daughters began playing soccer in 1983 at age 8, another in 1988 at age 6. They joined teams set up by the local soccer association in Arlington, Virginia, a private group not subject to Title IX. Then they went on to play on select teams that competed around the Washington, D.C., area. Finally, they played on high school varsity teams. The only games they saw on TV were tapes I acquired, with considerable difficulty, of the 1991 women’s team’s drive to the World Cup. They never heard of Title IX. The rise of women’s soccer isn’t new, it simply happened outside the media’s field of vision.
One of the favorite tropes of the media was that “little girls” were galvanized by the American team’s triumphant run in 1999. This was at least a fresh angle, basically a claim that not only was the women’s team rising to new heights, but that millions of fans were having a life-changing experience. How could anyone know this? No one could. Nevertheless, ABC flashed frequently to girls in the stands during the China game, and announcer Robin Roberts kept citing the alleged effect all of this was having on young girls across America. Newsweek predicted “a Mary Lou Retton Effect” after the gymnast who won gold medals in the 1984 Olympics and prompted many girls to try gymnastics. But what we have in soccer is a reverse Retton effect. The rush of girls to soccer preceded, and helped prompt, the media’s discovery of the sport. More than 7 million women play soccer in America, most of them under 18.
By minimizing the importance of the U.S.-China game itself, the press missed the best story. My guess is the reporters and talking heads knew little about soccer and weren’t much interested in learning. That’s sad, because American women play soccer with amazing dexterity and panache. They’re much more exciting to watch than men, if only because their game is more wide-open and offense-oriented. Time noted this, but still got it only half right. “While professional women soccer players are no match for the men in skill levels,” the magazine said, “their game is great entertainment.”
Actually, it’s in mastering the skills of soccer that women do match men. Women play the game at a remarkable level of proficiency. They’re just not as big and strong and fast and aggressive as men, and thus do not play with as much power. They’re comparable to tennis stars Steffi Graf and Lindsay Davenport, who are marvelously talented players and fun to watch, but who wouldn’t stand a chance against Pete Sampras or any male on the pro tennis circuit. The inescapable (and happy) fact is that women are just not men. And no amount of media pretending can change that, even in the case of as wonderful a group of athletes as the American women’s soccer team.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
