This is not about Title IX. It's not about scholarships for female athletes, and it's not about creating professional sports leagues for women.
This is about addressing the complaints of those--such as Sports Illustrated's Rick Reilly--who feel that female athletes are being unjustly denied the attention that they supposedly deserve.
Reilly notes a number of female athletic accomplishments that he feels the national media has given little notice. The Connecticut women's basketball team's record-setting winning streak, Tennessee women's basketball coach Pat Summitt's 800th career victory and Serena Williams' "Serena Slam" all make the list, as does the fact that PGA great Tiger Woods racked up $60 million in endorsements last year, while LPGA superstar Annika Sorenstam pulled in only $2.5 million.
Reilly's argument also mentions Duke, where the women's basketball team has never sold out a home game, while the men have never had a ticket available for over a decade.
Reilly's points are all accurate, but they beg a simple question: Why? Why do male athletes make more in endorsements, sell more tickets and garner more media attention? The answer is not that complex. As a whole, men's sports, when compared to women's, are simply a better product.
Reilly's argument can be paralleled with one that wonders why a minor league baseball player who hits 80 home runs doesn't get more attention than Barry Bonds, or why whoever leads the NBDL in scoring doesn't pull in the same endorsement dollars that Allan Iverson does. Fans who watch Bonds and Iverson know that they are achieving their respective feats against the best players in the world, while one wonders if the NBDL player would even see any game action in the NBA.
It's not being sexist to point out that the UConn women would not have won 55 straight against male opponents, or that a Serena-Agassi match wouldn't even be close. Those who watch Tiger win a tournament know that they are watching the best golfer on the planet; the same cannot be said for those in attendance when Sorenstam captures another tournament title.
I can think of a few exceptions to this rule: billiards, darts and curling come to mind. But there is a reason why sports like basketball, tennis and golf all segregate along gender lines. The disparity in ability--usually resulting from a difference in physical strength--is just too great.
Reilly is accurate in noting that those female athletes who do garner attention often do so for reasons that have nothing to do with their athletic ability, but rather their sex appeal. But this has little bearing on the publicity of women's sports as a whole, for media attention is hardly a zero-sum entity. For example, if Anna Kournikova did not exist, would Serena Williams be the focus of more media attention? Unlikely, at best.
The real shame in the men's sports vs. women's sports debate is that the debate itself exists at all. Separating men's and women's sports into two different entities would undoubtedly alleviate most of the tension--Sports Illustrated itself took this initial step when it developed SI for Women. But one of the unintended consequences of Title IX was that it did pit the sports of one gender against another, and 30 years later this result lingers on.
Women athletes should be appreciated for what they are. But perhaps more importantly, they should be examined separately from what they are not: men.
Evan Davis is a Trinity senior and senior associate sports editor. His column appears every Wednesday.
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