Gender (Hoop) Dreams

When 17-year-old University of Tennessee basketball recruit Candace Parke won the McDonald's All-America slam dunk contest a few weeks ago, competing against some of the best of her male peers, it made national news. But Parker, the USA Today high school player of the year, didn't need a hyped-up contest sponsored by a fast food chain to prove herself. Nor, for that matter, does women's basketball need to prove anything next to the men's game.

Apparently, the game's growing legions of fans would agree. The 2004 NCAA Women's Championship match-up between the University of Connecticut and the University of Tennessee was the single most-viewed college basketball game -- men's or women's -- in ESPN's history of televised sports. The entire women's NCAA tournament this year had its highest ratings ever, rising dramatically from last year.

Of course, the level of play is largely extraordinary. To watch the chemistry in motion of the University of Minnesota's two All-Americans, Lindsay Whalen and Janel McCarville, was to understand why attendance at their games went from a couple hundred four years ago to nearly 10,000 this past season. Witness the staggering talent of Connecticut's Diana Taurasi and you will quickly comprehend why a generation of young girls now want to Be Like Dee.

It might sound strange, but I'm not into the men's games. Mostly, for the mundane reason that I can only afford to focus on so much of any sport. I've also spent most of my adulthood bored silly with televised sports anything! I am just not that interested in professional or college sports, which as a male I accept probably makes me something of a weirdo. But I am drawn to something special in the spirit of the women's game. You could say it's about the comparatively higher quotient of team play, next to a men's game that's evolved too much into a pass and a quick smash down the throat of the basket. The women rely more on passing, cutting, and ball-handling teamwork than the men. The women's games also just seem less egotistical, less a fist-pumping, slam-dunking exercise in brute power and more of a...well, basketball game.

There are voices from the men's game who echo similar sentiments. "'The best basketball being played now is by the higher echelon women's programs,'" remarked legendary UCLA coach John Wooden a few years ago. There's irony in the fact that 100 years ago concerns existed that women might not make good basketball players because of their "selfish" natures.

But you could also say I am drawn to the women's games for what some might consider a more esoteric reason. The accelerated evolution of women's basketball over the last couple of decades says something to all of us about how mired we humans can get in old, useless notions about what men and women, or any one of us, can or cannot-or should or should not-do. Before Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 outlawed discrimination in education on the basis of sex, girls' sports were largely a faint echo of the programs, resources and opportunities that existed for boys. In the Chicago area high school I attended in the early '70s, the pre-Title IX reality for girls was field hockey, "powder puff" football, and the Girls Athletic Association, the latter of which mostly functioned as a ladies auxiliary for the boy's sports. There was a long-standing girls' basketball program then existing in the Iowa schools, but it was largely perceived elsewhere as more an odd fact of rural life than anything significant, or the wave of the future.

There are ghosts hovering now in the air of women's basketball, and you will find them in the smallest grade school gymnasiums to the sports arenas of Division One colleges and the WNBA. They are the spirits of all the young women of previous eras who never had the chance to discover the full possibility and promise of their lives -- on or off the court. How many Diana Taurasi's or Lindsay Whalen's from decades past never even knew what stunning talents they might possess? It's as if all that bottled up, stifled energy from the generations when "proper" women didn't engage in "unladylike" activities like sweat and storm down gymnasium courts has now been let out of the proverbial genie's bottle. The resulting wizardry and spirit and talent of today's game is the result.