Columnist Melissa Schorr: Scoring the women’s sports craze

Melissa Schorr

Monday, March 22, 1999 | 11:30 a.m.

Nowadays, it's popular to be a cheerleader -- for women's sports.

The WNBA and this summer's Women's World Cup soccer tournament are both hot tickets. HBO is airing an enlightening -- and inspiring -- film, "Dare To Compete: The Struggle of Women in Sports," highlighting women who weren't scared to sweat before it became sexy.

And Sports Illustrated For Women debuted this month, following last year's debuts of Conde Nast's Sports for Women (now Women's Sports & Fitness), Women Outside and a dozen other fitness mags.

But are there really that many devotees of women's sports? Or are the publications doomed to the same fate of the already defunct ladies' American Basketball League?

After flipping through this month's issue of the new SI, I just couldn't muster up much enthusiasm for its earnest features on the NCAA and Olympic up-and-comers. For one thing, the magazine is clearly aimed at the teen market -- I doubt SI Senior would ever offer its readers a "sports horoscope" or a quiz to test whether they are "team players."

But my sports apathy is mainly my own fault, not the magazine's. Title IX and I may have been born the same year, but I was never a "Title IX baby" -- what female athletes like to call themselves after the 1972 law that mandated athletic equity in schools.

Back when I was in junior high, girls still got stuck playing field hockey while fun sports, like football and wrestling, were reserved for the boys.

Elementary school was worse: I'm traumatized to this day by my introduction to organized athletics, a Darwinian survivalist sport better known in some circles as "Dodge Ball."

This so-called "game" of legalized terrorization involved assailing your opponents with a large red rubber ball until only one side was left standing.

In theory, anyway. In practice, the boys played while the girls cowered in the far corner of the court. Eventually, when one team had eliminated its male opponents, the game was swiftly concluded by pelting the remaining girls into oblivion, akin to shooting fish in a barrel.

What lessons did I take away from gym class? None of the concepts touted by ex-coaches on the speaking circuit, such as sportsmanship or teamwork. Mostly, I learned that girls didn't have a place on the court.

Is it any wonder I avoided organized sports for half a decade? Or that today, I'm functionally sports illiterate?

But half a generation later, girls' soccer is all the rage and high school wrestling bouts have gone coed.

And many athletically inclined women somehow managed to dodge my pitfall. Several thousand of them ran in this weekend's Race for the Cure, Las Vegas' fourth annual 5K run, which is expected to raise more than $160,000 for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Judy Pickett, 35, a physical education teacher and a breast cancer survivor, plans to spend the next few years running in every one of the group's 99 races nationwide to raise awareness of how the disease can strike even those who are physically fit.

"When you have a goal," she explains, "it helps you survive. You can't give up, life goes on. I hope to convey that to other people."

Runners like Pickett are today's true sports heroines, using athletics not just for their own gratification, but for the greater good.