Women fans not solely responsible for success/failure of women's sports leagues

The failure or success of female sports leagues in the United States rests primarily with female sports fans, Frank Deford said in a piece for National Public Radio titled “Ladies, Want Women's Sports To Get More Attention? Pony Up.”

Unfortunately, Deford missed the point entirely. Women’s sports should not appeal to uniquely to females because women are playing. Women’s sports should appeal to all sports fans because elite athletes are competing. Men do not feel mandated to watch LeBron James because he is a man. Men and women watch LeBron James because he is the best men’s basketball player in the world.

Note that I said James is the best men’s basketball player. This distinction is critical to understanding the problems facing women’s sports leagues. There is a tendency in mainstream media to deem male athletes or male sports as the unquestioned best or standard. For example, Deford mentions a new women’s soccer league is forming. Just saying women’s soccer league delegitimizes the athletes in that league because there is a qualifier to their prowess—their gender. Why can’t Major League Soccer be called Men’s Major League Soccer? By having their sports leagues gender marked, women athletes are already placed at a disadvantage because there is a latent implication that their leagues are inferior to men.

The second issue I have with Deford comes from the written summary of his piece. An excerpt states: “Still, I think the sisterhood has to look more into the mirror. In the post-Title IX era, as girls have flooded into athletics, there has been no comparable explosion by female spectators. It's all very comforting to blame media men for a lack of coverage, but if more women buy tickets to watch female athletes play, then more coverage will follow.

“This may be only anecdotal, but I have noticed that in small-town newspapers and on community websites, female high school and college sports seem to get a commensurate amount of attention with their male jocks. The imbalance of coverage is so much more at the top, where commerce matters.”

This argument is misguided. Women make up about 40 percent of fans in major North American sports leagues, according to 2009 research by Scarborough Sports Marketing published in Sports Business Daily. Male sports leagues need female fans to help fuel their billion-dollar industries. By extension, female sports leagues need male fans for their leagues to thrive.

And since the “sisterhood” of sports fans is markedly smaller than the “brotherhood”, it would be most appropriate to question why male fans are exempt from Deford’s critique of the struggles of women’s sports leagues.

-- Steve Bien-Aimé

French Open coverage provides window into coverage of men's, women's sports

Print news coverage of the recently completed French Open offers an interesting look at how men’s and women’s can be covered. An Associated Press article said that women’s singles winner Maria Sharapova became the 10^th female to win all four major tournaments. Another Associated Press report mentioned both how men’s singles champion Rafael Nadal stopped tournament runner-up Novak Djokovic from becoming the first man to win four consecutive Grand Slams since 1969 and that Nadal won his record seventh French Open singles title.

The reference to men in describing Djokovic’s attempt at his fourth straight major victory is important because it pays respect to the fact that women players have accomplished that feat. Often accomplishments of male athletes are never restricted to their own sex. For example, Landon Donovan is called the leading goal scorer in the history of U.S. soccer. However women’s national team players Michelle Akers, Mia Hamm and Abby Wambach have all scored more goals competing for the United States than Donovan. This is written not to disparage Donovan but to call attention to the fact that the achievements of women athletes should not be given short shrift.

This brings us back to Nadal’s record seventh French Open title. The Associated Press and many other news outlets did not mention that Chris Evert won seven French Open titles. (The Los Angeles Times did mention Evert as a seven-time winner.) Nadal’s accomplishment could be written as a “men’s record seventh title” or even “record-tying” with a nod given to Evert.

With this in mind, it is time for journalism stylebooks to be updated. The change proposed is that for sports where both men and women play that the sex of the sport is mentioned for both (i.e., men’s lacrosse and women’s basketball) and that the accomplishments for athletes of each sport are placed in more nuanced context (i.e., calling Landon Donovan the leading scorer in U.S. men’s soccer history).

-- Steve Bien-Aime