While I’m being asked why “no one cares,” the Women’s World Cup is getting ratings that would make the NBA or MLB weep with joy.
As I was gurgling joyously after following a
thrilling World Cup final, with the USA winning 5-2 over Japan on the strength
of “Big Game” Carli Lloyd’s hat trick, my e-mail dinged. I was asked to be on a
radio show tomorrow to discuss whether people really, actually care about
women’s sports. I typed back a rather rude “no,” because, frankly, I’m done
with the media-debate spectacle of “defending” women’s sports. It’s exhausting,
like debating with some ham-faced think-tank goon about whether global warming
is real or having to argue whether that name of the Washington football team is
honestly and truly racist.
It’s like any verbal dispute where fact and
opinion are used interchangeably by troglodytic axe grinders who seem to get an
erectile boost from the frustrated outrage of others. Every damn Women’s World
Cup, every NCAA women’s finals, every Olympics, women’s sports again go on a
media trial that would make the old judges of Salem blush. This last e-mail was
merely the latest. I have done too many radio shows in the past week where the
question was not about the chances of the US Women’s national team or which
teams could potentially topple them. They were about why “no one cares,” or
whether women’s sports are as good as men’s sports. It’s tired.
It’s also way behind where people actually are. Absolutely, it
is great to see Seth Myers and Amy
Poehler take up the fight, and it is always fun to see the look on
someone’s face when you tell them that John Wooden in his last years preferred
women’s NCAA basketball to the men’s game. But it’s also increasingly
irrelevant. While I’m being asked why “no one cares,” the Women’s World Cup is
getting ratings that would make the NBA or Major League Baseball weep with joy.
While ESPN Radio self-parody Colin Cowherd says that men are stronger and
better athletes and we appreciate greatness in America and that’s why men’s
sports is more fun to watch, his radio contractappears in peril because fewer and fewer people care
what he has to say. While academic reports are issued that show only 2 percent of SportsCenter’s coverageis devoted to
women’s sports, which is discussed there by anchors with the joy and flair of
kids forced to “eat their vegetables,” more and more people are choosing to get
their news from different sources if the current ones don’t meet their needs.
It’s a distorted marketplace: one where the financial value of American football, men’s basketball, and baseball has never been higher, as witnessed by the bacchanalia of max contracts being tossed around the NBA. Yet this value is not a function of their exploding popularity but of the fact that they have become the tentpole that keeps the bloated multibillion-dollar basic-cable television industry upright: the last programming in our streaming DVR’d universe that people will still endure commercials to watch.
The
desperation with which cable networks cling to these sports like life rafts and
aggressively market them under the rubric of “news” distorts how many people
demand this kind of coverage and how many are just force-fed what the
commercial imperatives are of the basic cable industry. Meanwhile, as the media
cling to the past and put women’s sports on trial with metronomic regularity,
female athletes are raising the bar throughout the sportsworld.
I
was recently asked to name the five individual jocks who comprise my must-see
television and, without thinking about it and without trying to make any kind
of grand point or bow to the winds of political correctness, three of my five
choices were women: joining Steph Curry and Bryce Harper were Serena Williams,
ultimate fighter Ronda Rousey, and NXT pro wrestler Sasha Banks (seriously).
Shockingly, pro wrestling, which for most of its existence has treated women
like the industry was just an extension of Hugh Hefner’s grotto, is writing a
script—literally—that says far more about where we are than the two-minutes-a-night
broccoli serving of women’s sports delivered onSportsCenter.
NXT is delivering a crew of empowering, genius women athletes like Banks,
Charlotte Flair, and Becky Lynch who are winning over crowds and changing the
expectations of what comprises greatness in the ring. It’s almost unreal to
write, but the ways that crowds respond to Banks, Flair, and Lynch speaks with
greater clarity about where consciousness is among sports fans than the tired
highlight shows that treat athletics like a “man cave.”
So I’m done “defending”
women’s sports. Frankly, it’s insulting to the athletes involved to even
conceive of it as if they need defending. It’s time to go on offense. It’s time
to write more about women’s sports and be part of the grassroots struggle to do
what the sports networks and sports-radio talking potatoes won’t do, and that’s
tell the stories of what is happening in women’s sports. It’s not broccoli.
It’s what we saw when Carli Lloyd lifted that shot over Japan’s goaltender
Ayumi Kaihori from midfield: pure fucking joy.
Please consider making a donation to keep this site going.