I loved this book. Dowling describes the achievements of the first woman to play men’s pro baseball, the girls’ soccer team that beat all the boys’ teams in the 1993 Ohio games, a 10th-grader who made the all-state Georgia football team. Katherine Switzer dodged irate officials to compete in the all-male Boston Marathon. Bev Francis changed the face of women’s bodybuilding by refusing to limit the size of her muscles to appropriately feminine proportions. Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs. These stories are so inspirational that I would like to believe every word Dowling says — but some of her argument is just wishful thinking.

As anyone who has lately opened a fashion magazine knows, the social skeleton look is alive and well, and to her credit Dowling later tempers her joyous proclamation that we are a nation of happy mesomorphs with a section on the much-publicized crisis in adolescent body image. Also, as anyone who watched skater Tara Lipinski win the Olympics can see, tiny bodies still earn gold medals in the most visible of women’s sports. And as Joan Ryan attested in “Little Girls in Pretty Boxes” (and as Dowling later acknowledges), many competitive gymnasts and skaters suffer from severe eating disorders.

Dowling argues that by closing the strength gap women can gain social and political ground, and her central point is excellent and well-documented. However, I have two problems with her belief in the power of sports for women. First, many of the values of the current exercise boom are still very much in sync with the values of traditional femininity. And second, the sports we play are almost all designed for men.

When I arrived at college in 1985, the fitness craze was in full force. Jamie Lee Curtis flaunted her physique in the health club movie “Perfect.” Madonna flexed her muscles on MTV. Jane Fonda sold millions of books and workout videos, and sexy bodybuilder Rachel McLish strutted her stuff in commercials, reminding women: “Before you primp, you’ve got to pump.” Exercise was in — and to me, it seemed like a feminist revolution.

I signed up, did aerobics every day and miraculously became a jock when I had always been a feminine weakling.

Back in the schoolyard, I was a girls girl. At recess, I skipped rope and played house under a favorite tree. My friends and I braided one another’s hair. My mother, caught up in the rush of the emerging women’s movement, the sexual revolution and the dawn of the New Age, did not intentionally teach me this traditional role. Rather, I clung to it in response to a world that was quickly changing. Living with a single parent in a communal household, my life emphatically did not correspond to the ordered, clearly defined lives I was seeing on television and in storybooks. Being feminine was a way of normalizing my childhood.

Back then, I felt that boys were different from me — stronger and more physical. They seemed magically initiated into the use of their own bodies: They could throw, catch, run fast, fight duels. As a girl, it never occurred to me to play the way they did. I knew it was allowed, but I didn’t have the physical skills I needed to participate and couldn’t see how to go about acquiring them. Boys just seemed to know how to play ball, do karate or climb a tree. I did not.

In my imagination, though, I played those boys games all the time. I fought battles and ruled the land as king. I was the pitcher on the winning team. I ran races faster than anyone. And always, in these imaginative victories and achievements, I was male. Maleness, I felt, was the ticket to daring adventures, and also the ticket to the physical confidence one needed to embark on them.

I felt I was a member of the weaker sex. I did not strive for victory on the playing field. I cowered when it was my turn at bat in gym class. Unsure of the rules of the game, and the smallest kid in my class, I was always picked last for teams. “Bunt,” the teacher told me, noticing my panic. And so I did, never once trying for a home run.

Like so many other little girls, I took ballet. I was thrilled to get to use my body in a way that didn’t challenge the notions of femininity that were so central to my sense of self. Dancing, I could be graceful, small and flexible. I would not have to be powerful or strong to succeed. I could imitate the only female sports heroes I had ever heard of — ballerinas like Margot Fonteyn and Suzanne Farrell. I dreamed of performances, flowers and sparkling tutus. I would be a princess, and I forgot my dreams of being a king.

Aerobics — and the fitness movement in general — offered me a way out of what Dowling calls the “frailty myth”: the notion that women are inherently delicate and that, even if they aren’t, being a jock is inherently masculine. Whereas years of daily dance classes had taught me about my limitations, because my feet would never arch beautifully and my legs would never be long, cardiovascular exercise offered me a physical goal — endurance — that I could actually achieve. For me, this was a new concept. It promised to make me strong when I had always felt weak.

But being able to jump up and down in an aerobics class for two hours and execute a series of pushups didn’t completely solve the problem. Looking back, I recall myself — my “fit, athletic, liberated” self — cheering girlishly on the sidelines at softball games in which I had been invited to play. I remember going bowling in short skirts and laughing flirtatiously as my ball ran into the gutter. I remember feeling too awkward to play Frisbee or hackeysack on the campus lawn and watching my male friends’ pool games because I didn’t know how to shoot. I would cheer my lovers’ sports teams on to victory.

I was fit, true — and I felt a strength in my body that was undeniably liberating. But I was also still firmly entrenched in a number of embarrassingly typical feminine behaviors. (Another example of how self-empowerment through fitness fails to launch women out of traditional roles: Patti Davis, daughter of former President Reagan, overcame profound fears and childhood insecurities by learning to lift weights. Unlike dressing up and other kinds of body care, fitness did not remind Davis of her mother. She rhapsodized about exercise in a 1992 conversation with Gloria Steinem, saying she felt proud of new muscle in a body that used to be fragile; she no longer felt weak. But after more than nine years of exercising every day and weight training several times a week, where did Davis’ personal empowerment through exercise land her? On the cover of Playboy in June 1994.)

I’d venture to say that although sports have been a vehicle for women’s liberation in the past (the invention of the bicycle, for example, started women wearing pants), this end of the 20th century fitness craze developed alongside ’70s feminism not because it was part of it but because it was part of a backlash against it. That is why it gained massive popularity in the 1980s, when much of the women’s movement lost momentum. As other feminist critics have noted before me, the present economy is dependent on the continued underpayment of women. Fitness (as opposed to sport) helps perpetuate that inequality by reinforcing the notion that women should be noncompetitive — and very often unhappy with our bodies because so much value is still placed on appearance instead of accomplishment. Dowling’s failure to differentiate between in-line skating and ice hockey, jogging for health and running races, is a serious blank spot in her argument.

So it would seem that the solution is simply to get women into competitive sports. The problem is not physical weakness, it’s cultural conditioning. Take girls to soccer practice, watch Women’s National Basketball Association games with them on television, teach them they are just as good as men. Get them developing their physical skills from toddlerhood on through high school, abolish “girls rules” and enforce Title IX. Then watch what Dowling calls “learned weakness” disappear. This idea is the core thesis of “The Frailty Myth,” and it’s certainly a valuable one. As sports historian Mariah Burton Nelson writes, “baseball and other manly sports are more than games. They constitute a culture — the dominant culture in America today.” Learn to compete, girls, and the world is yours. Prove your body is just as strong as a man’s, and men will have no reason to think of you as inferior. Certainly, female sports participation can lead to vital personal and political changes.

But on the other hand — and this is something Dowling doesn’t address — this plan isn’t much good if women limit themselves to the sports based on skills at which men will always excel. Games that depend on upper-body strength will be dominated by the sex that has a stronger upper body, and as long as we are weight lifting, sprinting and high jumping, we are trying to do sports designed on a male model, sports that demand height and muscle that men tend to have more of than women do. Even in sports that are thought of as women’s — gymnastics and figure skating, for example — men do higher jumps and more rotations in the air. In one way or another, these are almost all men’s games.

And as much as I hate to say it, men also beat us at speed, height and lower-body strength. On average, they are 10 to 15 percent taller than we are. Their times are simply faster. Truth is, women’s bodies do not measure up in the primary ways we measure physical power in this society. Dowling asserts that we might indeed measure up if only given a real chance, and she may be right — but she is still measuring achievement against the male yardstick.

Women live longer, withstand cold better, sweat more efficiently, have a low center of gravity and float really well. But right now there are very few sports that stress these abilities. Distance sports do, and women have consistently excelled at them. (Shelley Taylor-Smith holds the record for swimming around Manhattan; Seana Hogan beat the men’s record by almost an hour cycling 400 miles.)

The problem is, these sports are not popular, and these superiorities are not ways we measure strength; they don’t hold much currency. The recent controversy over John McEnroe’s claim that he or any decent male player at the college level could beat either of the Williams sisters at tennis proves that sexism is alive and flourishing, even in sports where women have achieved unbelievable feats. What we need are new sports and more media coverage — not just of the sports that women excel in but of the ones in which we can actually beat men. Yes, it’ll be a long haul to get “Monday Night Football” fans to tune in to distance swimming, but people are watching the WNBA, the World Cup and all that tennis, so there’s certainly an audience for female athletes that no one would have believed 15 years ago. And many of these sports we so revere have only been around for 100 years. We can invent others; we can shift our attention; we can remake a cultural institution that was built on the basis of the male body.

It’s great to play with the big boys, but demoralizing if you always lose to them. Women’s physical equality will never be acknowledged until we change our sports — and our definition of strength itself.

Rocker gave it back as good as he got, spitting at them when they spat at him, and letting his body language tell them that they made him sick. The fans loosed a barrage of batteries, beer bottles and other objects at Rocker when he was on the bench, tossed Coke on his girlfriend and counted the ways in which his mother had sexual congress with strange men for money. He countered by heaving fastballs into the chain link fence separating players and fans, and laughed when they cringed behind it.

It had some of the weird symbiosis of Andy Kaufman’s running gag with wrestler Jerry Lawler — a complex act based on big gestures of mutual abuse that was fated to become something more than an act. Rocker was so into his crash-dummy conquest of New York, deriving power from the hatred of strangers and reveling in the spammed hate e-mail and the foaming-at-the-mouth letters to the editor, that he was bound to do something. (At one point in his fateful interview, he chortled over his discovery that merely by calling Mets fans the degenerates he had no doubt they were, he could “make them mad enough to go home and slap their moms.”)

Like the kid in the sixth grade who manages to say one funny thing and then spends the rest of the year desperately upping the ante in hopes of getting one more laugh, Rocker probably thought that he had capped them good when he gave his opinion in Sports Illustrated about the human contents of the No. 7 subway train to Shea. “Some kid with purple hair next to some queer with AIDS right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids.” Just for good measure, he added that it sucks to walk for an entire block through Times Square among a bunch of foreigners who can’t even speak English and that he had a black teammate who was a “fat monkey.”

It is easy to imagine him mentally pumping his fist in triumph after doing his shtick. He was Howard Stern with a 95-mph fastball.

Rocker was stupid in every respect — for dredging up such thoughts in the first place (although his picture of the demographics on the No. 7 train, some have claimed, is not far off), and especially for dredging them up in front of Sports Illustrated’s Jeff Pearlman, a writer who, given Rocker’s unhinged immaturity, entrapped him even by asking him to speak. Pearlman sat through a hyperventilated conversation of more than seven hours to get this good stuff. But is he Mark Fuhrman in cleats? Or is he merely an expression of the national id whose blurted-out comments represent the sinister opinions secretly held by all the rest of us?

The principal functionaries of the race industry — Al Gore and Bill Bradley in their tacky bidding war to become the next black president, the Atlanta NAACP, Hillary Clinton in her invisible Yankees hat kissing demagogue Al Sharpton’s ring, the Rev. Jesse “Hymietown” Jackson and even the rock group Twisted Sister, one of whose songs had been Rocker’s theme when he came in from the bullpen — have no doubts about Rocker’s guilt, or ours. When Twisted Sister seizes the moral high ground, you know that the auditorium you’re sitting in is a theater of the absurd.

These and other participants in the national monologue on race, whose guilt is passive aggressive, have shown time and again that they are willing for race to be not just a scar but a suppurating wound in this country. Scenting themselves with moral sanctimony and keeping blacks on the liberal plantation is their business as usual. What is surprising in this case is the degree to which the sports page of the nation’s press has become their echo chamber.

In the good old days, sportswriting was a fan’s notes — who’s about to be traded, who’s not throwing well and who’s getting ready to make a move late in the season, with a bit of purple prose injected before the big game. But the Rocker affair showed how complete is the woeful politicization of sports that began when John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised the fist of black power from the medal stand at the Olympic Games in Mexico City. Sportswriters were gradually infected with the desire for relevance characteristic of that era, a desire made all the more feverish by their awareness that their life’s work was the toy section in the department store of life.

The politics of the sports page is for the most part lazy and unsystematic, missing or dismissing much that is truly political, especially if it conflicts with the smelly orthodoxies of race/class/gender. Thus sportswriters for the most part ignored one of the significant political stories of the last decade — the feminists’ twisting of Title IX from an equity measure able to increase female athletic participation into a mean-minded affirmative action measure that has achieved “balance” by killing off the UCLA swim team, wrestling at Princeton and other historic men’s programs.

In Rocker’s case, the majority of sportswriters were so busy proving that they were righteous by charging, trying and convicting the Braves pitcher that they shrugged off the implications of Commissioner Bud Selig’s order to the pitcher to undergo psychological testing. Even though Selig’s move smells of the auto-da-fi, the gulag, the torture chambers of Chinese political reeducation (and, for that matter, the sensitivity training forced on college freshmen every fall by America’s colleges), it didn’t show up on the radar screen. Rocker was placed in a classic double bind from which there was no exit: If he “passed,” he was a racist; if he “failed,” he was nuts.

The idea that Rocker was being punished for thought crimes made little impression. In fact, instead of criticizing the hysterical assumption that words do worse than break your bones — a notion that should have been dispelled forever by Lenny Bruce — most of them criticized Selig for not going further and urged Ted Turner to bring the political enlightenment he shows in other realms to bear on his baseball team by getting rid of Rocker.

Writers who can be understanding about the pressures faced by professional athletes when a wide receiver commits grand theft or murders his pregnant girlfriend pounced on Rocker’s comments with fierce piety. Writing in the prose of someone who has just stepped out of a seminar on “Heart of Darkness” in the Duke English department, George Vecsey of the New York Times said that Rocker’s words reflected “a deep seated hatred of the other”; that Rocker’s racism is the result of “a vicious sense of displacement” coming from “deep in the heart of the national schism”; and that the rest of us should search our souls and wonder “if Rocker acted alone.”

If the tone was overripe, the sentiments were widely shared. The stance adopted on sports pages across the country was similar to that of Laventri Beria, Stalin’s chief of secret police, whose motto was, “You bring me the man, I’ll find you the crime.” When Rocker said that he had been speaking for effect, people who probably smile when Chris Rock says he loves black people and hates niggers refused to consider this possibility. When the pitcher admitted he was a fool in a muddled post-Sports Illustrated interview with ESPN’s Peter Gammons, the sports establishment pronounced him insincere because he failed to admit that he was a sick bigot.

The fact that Rocker had lived with Braves’ star Andruw Jones and other black and Hispanic teammates, in his own family house, for several years counted for little. And neither did the day Rocker and his father spent visiting with former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young who concluded wisely that “nobody’s perfect” and offered the pitcher advice for surviving the next season. Afterward Rocker went to see Hank Aaron, who knows something firsthand about racism, having experienced it in a virulent form during his pursuit of Babe Ruth’s lifetime home run record. Initially angry at the Sports Illustrated interview, Aaron said that Rocker was “convincing.”

But the sportswriting establishment wouldn’t take yes for an answer. Rocker had merely apologized instead of abjectly abasing himself and crying (tears being a sign of grace for contemporary pop culture as for the readers of 18th century literature) and agreeing to shed his raunchy joie de vivre and spend the rest of his life as a pilgrim walking the rocky road of racial reconciliation. They could see only one moral in this story — that racism, to paraphrase the old communist line, was 21st century Americanism.

The writers didn’t pick up on one of the asides in Rocker’s “confession” — when he says, after being given a chance to compare himself to Latrell Sprewell, that he wonders what would happen if a white basketball player like Keith Van Horn had tried to choke his coach to death. The question of double standards is worth raising. The provision in the standard contract that Selig used to justify sentencing Rocker to psychological inquisition demands a pledge from every player “to conform to high standards of personal conduct.”

What about Roberto Alomar spitting in the face of an umpire or Darryl Strawberry’s endless escapades with drugs and other vices? What about Albert Belle, who is a living rebuttal to the personal conduct clause? Why haven’t they been sentenced to the shrink? Why has the advent of gangsta hoops in the NBA not been a bigger story? Why didn’t we hear more about the story a few years ago in which the warring “crews” attached to two players for the Philadelphia 76ers exchanged gunshots in a turf feud?

William Rhoden, another New York Times sportswriter, said that the whole Braves team should get therapy, not because of the infamous tomahawk chop that is alleged to be so hurtful to Native Americans, but because John Rockerism was rampant in baseball, and baseball has always been a metaphor for American life. Such a view was echoed by black psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint, who also weighed in on this case. Poussaint has long been an advocate of “medicalizing” racism and listing it as a disease in the profession’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. But he has never gotten very far, attributing his failure to the fact that only 3 percent of the American Psychiatric Association is black. If black psychiatrists were in control, Poussaint believes, racism would be classified and treated as a sickness.

Behind such a view is the Marxoid notion that reality is socially constructed by people with power and prejudice. The Rocker case may seem like a thin reed to hold such a heavy concept, but in fact it has become a summary moment, containing all those concepts of the past decade — hostile environment, speech codes, race/class/gender, critical race theory, the idea that only those with power can be prejudiced — that have made the transition from the PC academy into PC popular culture and now into the PC sports page. This was the iceberg John Rocker sailed into when he performed a drive-by shooting on himself in Sports Illustrated. And in the aftermath of the collision we can see that all the talk the case has generated about race in America is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

But I use the term “voluptuous” loosely here. Despite weighing what some consider to be her ideal body weight, Rebecca
Scott is still a lean woman. Furthermore, it is abundantly
clear that despite her other “curves,” her breasts are indeed augmented.
So, still she meets the general requirements of a Playboy centerfold
fantasy, as she is lean with a disproportionate bust. She is still airbrushed and
computer-altered. She is without substance and reality — as are all the
other women Playboy would like to make us believe is the ideal.

Whatever advancement in similarity to real American women she represents,
she does not look like the rest of us — nor, for that matter, does she even
look like herself.

– Melissa Ramirez Naasko

So if Rebecca Scott is “average,” then why use words/phrases like
“round,” “thick,” “unusual size,” “fatty” and “heft”? Make your point, or don’t.
My 4-year-old daughter, who is beautiful, can easily be reduced
to tears if someone calls her chubby. I think I’ll buy this
Playboy issue for my family, to show my son and daughter what
Barbie should look like, glorious hooters and all.

– Tricia Paker

Stay-home economics
BY PHAEDRA HISE
(07/13/99)

As the host of a nationally syndicated talk radio show, “Work & Family From
the Wall Street Journal,” I often hear the argument that a mother’s income
only goes for luxuries and that a great deal of money will be saved if mom
(and it’s always mom) stopped working. I have even had callers say that I
was a bad mother because I was on the air rather than at home with my
daughter. These calculations never seemed to take into consideration that a
woman might be making a decent wage and, in fact, might be making more than
her husband. As someone whose income has helped us buy a new home, and
contributes markedly to my family’s bottom line, I’m glad Phaedra Hise
further explored the costs associated with one parent’s unemployment, as
well as the costs that come from having one parent in the home. She is
right when she tells readers to do it because they want to, not because it
is to their financial benefit.

– Jan Wilson

Host/executive producer

“Work & Family From the Wall Street Journal”

New York

Please do not waste your precious space with
any more of the Great Debate of stay-at-home vs. working mothers. I’ve been
listening to it for the 10 years that I have been a parent and have had
enough. Parents who are honest enough with themselves realize it is
an extremely personal choice reflecting the best situation for their family
at any given moment. Either way it is not an easy choice or lifestyle.
Reducing such a choice to the analysis of a financial
balance sheet is insulting to your readers.

– Deborah Blair

Where does this Phaedra Hise get off? A person’s spouse does not have to
make a lot of money for him or her to stay home, whether it’s mom or dad. Since when do you always have
to wear brand-new clothes, sign your kids up for Gymboree or
take the kids out as often as Hise suggests? Has she ever heard of
sewing? Taking the kids to the park? Entertaining her kids herself
rather than missing out on their lives by having someone else do it?
It’s sad that people have to have so much money that they shove their kids in day care and miss out on
those small moments that stick with you forever.

– Blythe Miller

Don’t you know that it’s different for girls?
BY RACHEL LEHMANN-HAUPT
(07/09/99)

As a parent of a son and a daughter, I was heartened to read about someone
making a film about how girls experience sex, and our need to feel good about
it. I’ve spoken openly with my son about the need to please a girl — about how, if he figured
that out first, he would be a better lover.

Stereotypes die hard, and the promotion of sexual stereotypes in film in this country is nauseating. Remember how pissed off and uncomfortable men got over “Thelma and
Louise”? Can’t wait to see this film, no matter what the rating.

– Sara Kiesel

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt and her interviewee rant and
rave about the MPAA board, stating that according to current standards, it’s OK to show
men being sexually promiscuous, but not women. If something bad slips through the filter, however, you don’t let every other bad thing through as
well; you filter out all the garbage.

– Jon Hartman

Dallas

Where the boys are
BY CATHY YOUNG
(07/10/99)

People aren’t really fascinated with women’s sports
because — wow! — women, too, can be violent, skilled, tough. Women’s sports has something that men’s no
longer has, and that it needs badly. Simply put, it’s feeling. The more women’s sports “rises” to
the professional level, however, the more it looks like the men’s game — and the
more boring it becomes.

– George Beinhorn

Cathy Young fails to recognize
that in the United States, with few exceptions, both male and female
professional athletes are sold to the public in the same manner as
presidents, movie stars and most public figures packaged as heroes: in
sanitized, protective wrapping that is pleasing to the eye and devoid of any
complicating reality. In this packaging system, women are married to or
dating men, men are married to or dating women, and there is no such thing as
an out-of-wedlock birth.

The packaging of professional athletes on
television is about making money, not making social progress. Women playing
sports is not new; what’s new is that television advertisers have finally
realized that female athletes are an untapped source of revenue. If social
progress were the goal here, marketing decisions would not be made as they
currently are, mostly by men or by a few women operating in a realm
where so-called traditional definitions of
women go largely unchallenged and a tight lid is kept on the personal lives
of female athletes who don’t fit the heterosexual norm. Advertisers rake in
the dollars in this climate by minimally expanding images of women, cleverly
offending none of them while simultaneously homogenizing all of them. Young
states that women’s “sports have been normalized as a part of mainstream
American culture,” and that this is “truly revolutionary.” This event was
not revolutionary, but inevitable.

– Jana Panarites

Brooklyn, N.Y.

Run, Hillary, run
BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
(07/12/99)
I wonder whether Christopher Hitchens should,
instead, point out that the leftist movement in the entire country has for
quite some time been in dire straits? I understand he is writing
specifically about the New York race for the U.S. Senate. But what about the
big picture, about how the dynamic duo got to the White House in the first
place? A movement that puts the Clintons in office as a liberal backlash to the horrors of the
right-wing Republicanism of the previous decade deserved what it got. And now
we will suffer the consequences, with the distinct possibility of frat-boy
Bush being swept into the Oval Office on the basis of his fund-raising
machine. I can only pray the backlash to that will be
some serious liberal soul-searching in the first years of the new millennium.

– Angelo Young

Tepic, Mexico

Hitchens is a grumpy old thing. More cogent questions this political
season could be addressed to Gov. George Bush.
Shouldn’t we all be horrified at how easily he drums up multimillions, and
at his utter lack of substance or even a position on any issue?
He has not “governed” Texas in any way, since this is a “weak governor” state, a result
of reconstruction in the last century. His sole successful
business, a major-league baseball team, only achieved the financial heights
it reached because of a deal cut with the local city government to condemn
land for a stadium which the taxpayers then paid for. If I
were Hitchens, I’d have a lot more questions to ask Bush
than I could ever think of for Hillary Clinton.

– Jennifer J. Mattingly

Austin, Texas

Digital divide is growing
ASSOCIATED PRESS
(07/08/99)

As a single mother living in rural California (where some of us are still waiting for electricity), I contend that the issue here is not one of income or race, culture or locale. The critical factor in Internet usage is literacy. Of secondary importance, but still a significant factor, is the discipline to think sequentially and retentively. And, oh yes, let us not omit something as mundane as the ability to type. It’s reading, writing, arithmetic.

– Allena Hansen

Caliente, Calif.

Then suddenly an opportunity arrived. A ball was played in the air deep to the right side of Denmark’s penalty box. With her back to the goal, striker Mia Hamm brought it down with her foot, deftly turned inward past a defender and rocketed the first goal of the tournament high into the net.

Giants Stadium went berserk. Hamm high-step sprinted in utter ecstasy 50 yards back to her own half of the field, screaming and wildly pumping her fists until finally she was mauled by overjoyed teammates.

It was as raw an expression of joy as you will see in sports. But a palpable sense of relief was there as well. After enduring months of media appearances to promote everything from a sports drink to a soccer Barbie doll to the World Cup itself, Mia Hamm had returned to what she loves most: playing the game.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
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Until recently, you could be forgiven for having no idea who Mia Hamm is.

But over the last couple months, the women’s soccer star has graced the front page of the New York Times, been a guest on “Good Morning America” and karate-flipped Michael Jordan in Gatorade TV ads. She has released an autobiography and christened an enormous new office building named in her honor at Nike’s corporate campus in Oregon. And she has broken the record for the most career international goals ever scored by any soccer player, woman or man: 110 as of last Saturday.

Hamm is just 27, but the media have already conferred upon her the status of living legend. By tournament’s end, she could be more recognizable than any American man ever to play soccer, including (what’s-his-name?) the guy with long red hair and goofy goatee (Alexi Lalas). Moreover, she could become the most recognizable woman athlete on Earth.

As the largest team sporting event for females ever held, the Women’s World Cup may prove a watershed for women’s sports in the U.S. and worldwide. And as the fresh face that media and corporate sponsors have chosen to personify the event, Hamm has challenges far beyond the soccer field. Everyone — from Nike executives to 13-year-old daughters of soccer moms — will be counting on her to lead the United States to victory and score plenty of goals along the way.

As soccer’s best female player, Hamm is being asked to expand the game’s appeal to millions of Americans, many of whom enjoy watching their kids play each Sunday but would never consider attending a professional match. There is even talk of creating a women’s professional league in the United States, contingent on the success of the Women’s World Cup.

Beyond soccer, Hamm has been thrust into the role of ambassador for all female team sports. As the most scrutinized player in this summer’s tournament, she is under intense pressure to prove that female athletes are every bit as entertaining to watch as men — not just in Olympic gymnasiums or ice rinks, but in the great coliseums such as Giants Stadium.

It’s a tall order for a private and intense young woman who has happily toiled in relative obscurity for years. But, as her opponents have repeatedly learned, Mia Hamm should never be underestimated.

There’s a reason why your daughter, your sister, your niece, your granddaughter or your mother loves to play soccer.

Unlike virtually any other team sport, soccer embraces players of all shapes and skill sets. For those fleet of foot, the sport offers the position of striker. Slower, stronger athletes can be put to work at the back as defenders. Those with titanium lungs and exceptional vision are best in the midfield. Nerves of steel and hands of leather are prerequisites for the role of goalkeeper.

With relatively few rules and a clock that never stops, “the beautiful game” thrives on individuality and expression, its field offering acres of canvas upon which masterpieces can be created by players of various styles.

To non-soccer fanatics, that may sound like hyperbole. But there can be little doubt that the game served as an outlet of expression for a gangly 13-year-old from north Texas named Mia Hamm. At the awkward arrival of adolescence, soccer was a refuge for the quiet teenager.

Her recently published “Go for the Goal: A Champion’s Guide to Winning in Soccer and Life” consists of memoirs, words of advice to young female athletes and a regimen of soccer training drills. Hamm describes how as a teen she would spend hours alone on the practice field honing her skills long after others had called it a day. Amid the media maelstrom of recent weeks, Hamm says she still finds “a haven and security inside the lines.” She recently told ESPN, “the field is where I express myself.”

By age 15, Hamm had been competing on boys teams for years, even leading them in scoring at times. Already focused on the long term, she dreamed of playing for the University of North Carolina’s legendary Tar Heels, and then landing a spot on the U.S. Women’s National Team. Both goals were achieved in short, but reverse order. That year, she became the youngest woman ever to play for the United States and traveled with the team to Taiwan. A couple of seasons later, she set off for Chapel Hill to join the Tar Heels.

At the time, both squads were led by coach Anson Dorrance, whom Hamm calls “the driving force behind my growth as a person and a player.” Known for his intense and even controversial motivational tactics, Dorrance took her aside several months after she had joined the national team. In her memoirs, Hamm recalls him saying, “You can become the best soccer player in the world.” Whether these words were sincere or merely meant to bolster the confidence of a young player coming into her own, they proved prophetic.

Like many female athletes who came of age in the 1980s, Hamm had few female predecessors in her sport on which to model her game. Not surprisingly, men served as her primary athletic mentors. Years before she met Dorrance, it was her older brother Garrett who served as soccer sparring partner, motivator and idol. Hamm credits him for being the single most influential person in her career.

Garrett was plagued for years by the blood disease aplastic anemia, and died of complications related to bone-marrow transplants shortly after the United States won the Olympic Gold Medal in 1996. Hamm was devastated and has since devoted herself to raising awareness of the disease through a charitable foundation that bears her name. The U.S. team has played several benefit matches to raise money for the foundation. As another tribute, every pair of the Nike soccer shoes she endorses has Garrett’s initials on the bottom.

The relative lack of female soccer superstars of the past may also help explain the close-knit nature of the U.S. Women’s National Team. Lacking idols to emulate and, until now, lacking public interest, its players have been forced to look inward and to one another for inspiration. Hamm is no exception. In her book, she lavishes pages of praise on teammates Kristine Lilly and Michelle Akers who are clearly her soccer heroes.

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At just 5 feet 5 inches tall, Hamm is an offensive force of nature. With an explosive first step, she blows by defenders with the ball seemingly tied to her feet on a short string. In the open field, she can be unstoppable, zigging and zagging, cutting and slashing past the opposition. Often, opponents are reduced to grabbing her jersey or jamming a foot in her wheels as she flies by.

In addition to her grass-singeing speed, Hamm possesses impeccable “touch,” as it is known in soccer. Try catching a 40-yard touchdown pass with your foot and you’ll understand the term. As she showed Saturday, Hamm can pull down a ball traveling through the air at high speed with her insole, settle it on the ground and pound it toward the goal, all in an instant.

Finally, Hamm has that intangible quality that defines great strikers: the ability to capitalize on even the slightest opportunity to score. Soccer matches last 90 minutes and are often decided by no more than a single goal. Moments when the ball can be deposited in the back of the net come and go in a split second, at which time the 24-foot-wide goal can seem to shrink drastically even for many experienced players.

At such moments, exceptional scorers like Hamm enter a zone where time slows and the goal beckons. On a breakaway with the goalkeeper flying toward her at top speed, Hamm can calmly chip the ball over her opponent’s head into the net beyond, not just because it’s a move she has practiced 1,000 times before but because of an innate belief in herself.

“Mia is a very unique person, not just an exceptional player,” coach Tony DiCicco of the U.S. National Team recently told me following a pre-tournament press conference. “Because of that she’s become a media darling. It has accelerated as people have learned about her as a person.”

Hamm remains humble despite the hype. She uses media appearances to deflect attention from her personal achievements to those of the team. In a conference call with reporters after shattering the record for most international goals scored, Hamm described the historic play as “very reflective of our team, with lots of one-touch plays. I was fortunate to be at the end of it and knock it in.” If ever there was a time to bask in personal glory, this was it. Yet Hamm declined.

Hers is not the forced modesty of a media-savvy star. It is rooted in a relentless will to win coupled with an understanding that, at its heart, soccer is a team sport. On the field, she is a vocal and dominant competitor. Off the field, you get the sense that she would prefer to fade into the woodwork of the U.S. squad, to just be an athlete.

But the sport’s rising popularity and her status as an idol to girls and women across the country has made that impossible. “She’s kind of become an entertainment icon,” said DiCicco. “I think it’s a role that she embraces because she knows it’s a job the team and the sport need.”

Is DiCicco concerned that the hoopla surrounding the tournament will distract Hamm from the task at hand? “I’m not sure it has helped her,” he admits, laughing a little nervously. He acknowledges that in the past he has seen a busy media schedule “hinder her because of the demands physically” but contends that this recent, heavier spate of attention does not affect her mental discipline.

Still, Hamm has not shown herself to be immune from the effects of pressure. As World Cup media attention ratcheted up earlier this year, she endured an eight-game goal drought — an eternity for a player who, on average, has scored in two out of every three games she has played.

Furthermore, she has never been known as a big-game overachiever. Her play throughout the last Women’s World Cup in 1995 could hardly have been described as dominant. In a significant setback to American women’s soccer, the United States was eliminated from the tournament that year by Norway, which went on to win the championship.

With her extraordinary intensity, Hamm can be her own worst enemy. She can allow small errors in her game to blossom into larger ones by being overly critical of herself. There is concern that the heightened attention of the past few months might compound that tendency.

Saturday’s victory for the Americans offered a storybook kickoff to the Women’s World Cup. But whether that momentum will carry forward and allow them to win the tournament remains to be seen. The Norwegians still look strong, and just a few months ago the Chinese, another possible contender, beat the United States 2-1 in a warm-up at the Meadowlands.

Inevitably, success or failure will depend on the collective effort of all 20 young women on the U.S. team. But, fair or not, Hamm will suffer the lion’s share of the blame should the team fall short of its goals. Whether she flourishes or flounders in the glare of the media spotlight promises to be one of the great subplots of World Cup ’99. If last Saturday’s game is any indication, she should be more than up to the task.

“Wait, here’s a nice older male who wrote to the [Boston] Globe,”
Daly offers, reading aloud from the newspaper. “Thank you. How can I help support your cause?”

Heekin and her roommate, Megan Niziol, are wearing navy blue T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Where’s Mary Daly?!” in white type.

“When we picked them up,” says Heekin, referring to the shirts, “the guy
working behind the desk said, ‘Oh, just so you know, the dean of student
development called us about these shirts to see if you guys are going to
protest or something, so you might get a call. It’s just a warning.’”

The T-shirts are a problem?

“Everything’s a problem. You know, feminism. Period.”

At the cusp of the millennium, Boston College theology professor Mary Daly,
a world-renowned feminist academic, finds herself at the age of 70 in a
’90s style fight: trying to preserve female-only classes in the face of opposition from a right-wing group and her own college.

In early December, on the last day of class for the fall semester, Daly
received a telephone call from Boston College Theology Department Chairman
Donald Dietrich. He told Daly that senior Duane Naquin was registered for
one of her spring courses, “Introduction to Feminist Ethics,” even though
Naquin had never taken a women’s studies course, a prerequisite for the
class.

Daly didn’t flinch. She had told Naquin in September what she’s been
telling male students for the last 30 years: that she would teach him
separately. Daly had been through similar flare-ups before, most recently
in 1989, when she opted for a semester’s leave rather than teach two male
students. The flames eventually died down.

But this time Daly wasn’t merely engaged in a tête-à-tête with her employer,
Boston College. Dietrich informed Daly that this time she had no choice but to accept the male student. Daly also says it was during this call that she first learned that this student was being represented by the Center for Individual Rights, a public interest law firm in Washington. In an Oct. 16 letter sent to Boston College President William P. Leahy, the center threatened to sue the Jesuit college for violating Title IX, the federal
statute banning discrimination in higher education on the basis of sex. Boston College ordered Daly to accept Naquin into her class.

“You can’t just see Boston College here in isolation. It’s what’s motivating
them,” says Daly, who has since taken a leave of absence. “It’s the CIR which
is against radical feminism and particularly against women. Boston College
is getting rid of the CIR by getting rid of me.”

In the month following Dietrich’s telephone call, Daly sought the advice of some of her colleagues and decided to take a leave of absence to think things over, effective in January. After fruitless meetings with Boston College, she learned that the school had offered her a retirement package — a nice way of easing her out of a job. She rejected the offer and in February hired attorney Gretchen Van Ness.

“Professor Daly is deserving of respect and support by this university and
they have failed to provide that,” Van Ness says, noting that her client
has overlapping rights to fair treatment under state and federal statutes,
anti-discrimination laws and university policy. “She is unique and a
treasure and she has not received the treatment that her stature deserves.”

A prolific writer, Daly holds three doctorates and has authored seven
books, most recently “Quintessence … Realizing the Archaic Future: A
Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto.” She’s been called the first modern
feminist philosopher and counts among her friends anti-pornography
“spinster” Andrea Dworkin and actress Roseanne. She has also indulged in a brand of academic wordplay that has made her notorious even among less radical feminist circles, coining such phrases as “stag/nation” and “the/rapist,” not to mention the title of her cross-cultural survey of brutality against women’s bodies: “Gyn/ecology.”

As a stalwart icon of more fiery feminist days, Daly is an ideal target for the Center for Individual Rights, a group that has made eradicating what CIR calls “the feminist worldview” part of its mission.

In a Nov. 24 fund-raising letter, Michael S. Greve, the center’s
executive director, set out the goals for 1999. Under a section titled
“Against Radical Feminism,” Greve explains that the center’s “most important cases
are attacks on two of feminism’s sacred cows — the Violence Against Women
Act of 1994 and Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments.”

“We are attacking extreme views of what the law requires that are being
promoted by feminist groups,” offers CIR senior counsel Terry Pell. “We are
attacking what we believe is an overextension of Congress’ power.”

Yet when asked about the Boston College case, Pell does an about-face. “We support Title IX,” he says. “We are arguing that it ought to be enforced. If there was a case that was attacking Title IX, this wouldn’t be it.”

In fact, CIR is fighting such a case: Neal vs. Cal State Bakersfield. In August 1997, Cal State’s wrestling team was dropped after the National Organization for Women sued the school for illegally favoring male students, which NOW said was a violation of Title IX’s proportionality rule.

In the suit, CIR, which represents wrestler Stephen Neal, argues that the
provision conflicts with Title IX’s broader aim of banning sex
discrimination in higher education because it excludes male wrestlers on the basis
of sex. Last month, U.S. District Court Judge Robert E. Coyle barred Cal
State from capping the number of males allowed to participate on its
wrestling team.

Boston College maintains that CIR’s agenda is irrelevant.

“It’s an issue to Mary Daly but it’s not an issue to us. They haven’t sued
us,” said Boston College spokesman Jack Dunn, adding that Daly is on the
wrong side of the law. “We insist that she stop discriminating against
students, that she abide by federal policy and by the same rules as
everyone else.”

For a woman who begrudges the “monoculture” of the patriarchy and laments the “horrible deadening of spirit” sweeping through American universities, abiding by “federal policy” and “the same rules as everyone else” is not easy.

“I hear words like ‘separate’ and ‘equal.’ I don’t care about those words,”
she says. “I want there to be women’s space, where there can be explosions
of thought.”

“That’s what Mary Daly’s classes offer. A place and a time to make
the connections with each other, to generate the strength and the
willingness to go out and reach out to other people,” says senior Christine
Safriet. “We don’t have a lot of places to do that for women.”

Yet not all feminists agree with Daly’s pedagogical approach. Radcliffe’s Wendy Kaminer doesn’t see the logic in setting aside all-woman classes at a coed college.

“When I went to law school in 1972, it was common for the men to tell the
women that having us there was too much of a distraction. It’s hypocritical
for women to be making those arguments,” she said.

Kaminer continues: “A classroom is not group therapy. There’s nothing wrong
with having your own community but don’t expect a college classroom to do
that for you. It’s governed by public policy on discrimination.” Kaminer
adds that while “B.C. may have a lot of work to do to make itself an
egalitarian place for men and women,” the remedy isn’t to set up an
all-women class.

Indeed, Boston College isn’t known for being particularly woman-friendly. Aside from a couple of sports clubs, the cheerleaders and the Academy for Women in Management, there’s only one women’s group on B.C.’s list of 174 student clubs and organizations: the Women’s Resource Center. The masthead of the Heights, Boston College’s student newspaper, is top-heavy with names like Tim, Nicholas and Michael.

“In our last student government elections, there were 12 candidates in
the initial running and they were all men. It’s sort of an indication of
who’s supported here,” says Safriet, a geophysics major.

There was a time during Daly’s early days at Boston College when she taught
male-only classes. That was in 1969, the year before the College of Arts
and Sciences admitted women. In fact, it was a group of men, 1,500 of them,
who fought for Daly, convincing the university to grant her tenure.

Daly says that soon after she started teaching gender-mixed classes, she
saw her female students falling behind, losing luster and being wiped out
creatively.

“Very frankly, we’re held back in our discussion,” Daly told Emily Rooney,
the host of “Greater Boston,” a local public television news program. “Some
women will always try to please the men and they don’t even mean to do it
consciously.”

This is what led to Daly’s decision to conduct female-only classes. It
didn’t cross her mind that a federal law designed to ensure better
educational opportunities for women would haunt her nearly 30 years
later.

Passed as part of the 1972 Education Amendments, Title IX says, “No
person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from
participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to
discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal
financial assistance.”

According to the American Association of University Women, in 1972, many
universities were not yet coed. Medical and law schools often limited the
number of women admitted to 15. Women applicants were often required to
have higher test scores and better grades than their male counterparts.

“It’s worse than some of the things in ’1984.’ It’s an example of
doublethink,” Daly says about being accused of violating Title IX. “What’s
most disturbing is that many people don’t use their brains and don’t see
that it’s bizarre. It’s frightening.”

Harvey Silverglate, a partner with the Boston law firm Silverglate &
Good and author of “The Shadow University: The Portrayal of Liberty on
America’s Campuses,” says that using Title IX to prevent Daly from
conducting female-only classes is overkill.

“At a private school I think it’s OK if the faculty member can convince
the school that there’s a practical pedagogical purpose, especially in Mary
Daly’s case because she has been willing to teach men separately,” says
Silverglate. “This is an example of Title IX gone crazy.”

According to National Woman’s Law Center Co-president Marcia Greenberger,
Title IX is not a knee-jerk statute.

“B.C. can’t stand behind Title IX if there’s a compelling reason for keeping
the classes the way they’ve been,” she says. “But they have to have a compelling reason for those classes to continue also.”

With the Center for Individual Rights looming in the foreground, it’s not surprising that Boston College would have chosen to avoid a court battle on behalf of Mary Daly. Instead, it seems, it opted for a court battle against her.

Back at Daly’s apartment, Megan Niziol continues reading Daly’s mail, a
letter of support here, a profane diatribe there.

“When you talk about deadening, you really see how it works, how it
functions, [how people are] focused on nothing; consumed every day with
petty little things. No one really gets the big picture,” says Niziol.

Adds Heekin: “Where do you go for this inspiration, for this spark?”

At Boston College, if you’re a woman, you once could enroll in a class with Mary Daly. But all that may be herstory.