Ms.PopularityVictorious U.S. women's teams made friends and influenced peopleby Peter King
IN 1972 a Little League coach in Orlando told 10-year-old Dorothy Richardson that if she would cut her hair, dress like a boy and call herself Bob, he would put her on his baseball team. On Tuesday, after her home run gave the U.S. women the first softball gold medal in Olympic history, 34-year-old Dot Richardson savored a scene she'll never forget. Approximately 200 impassioned softball fans—women, men, girls and boys—pressed against a chain-link fence near the American team's locker room at Golden Park in Columbus, Ga., all trying to touch her or get her to sign their ticket stubs, their clothing, anything.
You've come a long way, Dot. In fact, these Olympics may go down in history as the Gender-Equity Games. Softball and soccer were new sports added for women, but events for female athletes also were added to eight sports that were already part of the Summer Games: cycling (mountain biking, points and time-trial races), fencing (individual and team épée), rhythmic gymnastics (team competition), rowing (lightweight double sculls), shooting (double trap), swimming (4¥200 freestyle relay), track and field (5,000
meters, triple jump) and volleyball (beach). A thousand more women competed in Atlanta than at the 1992 Barcelona Games.
The basketball players already had a loyal following.
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Equally as impressive, the U.S. built women's national teams that were every bit the fan-favorite equals of their male counterparts. There wasn't an unsold ticket to any of the nine U.S. softball games at 8,753-seat Golden Park, including the 3-1 gold medal victory over China. In the women's soccer final Thursday night in Athens, Ga., 76,481 watched the U.S. beat China 2-1. Tonight, at the Georgia Dome, the women's basketball final between the U.S. and Brazil will draw a capacity crowd of 34,890, the same number the men drew last night.
Until now, America's most marketable female Olympic heroes were petite gymnasts and elegant ice skaters and fresh-scrubbed swimmers. But tens of thousands of Olympic ticket buyers voted with their wallets: They love quality, hard-fought women's sports contests. And the fans may get more of them—lots more.
"What's happening here," U.S. soccer defender Brandi Chastain says, "is that the young girls of America are getting a message. They're seeing that it's all right to sweat and play hard and get dirty. We don't have to be confined to certain sports. We can excel wherever we want."
"Now the world is poised to accept women's professional sports," Women's Sports Foundation executive director Donna Lopiano says. "That's the next step."
The U.S. women's teams were victorious.
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Two professional women's basketball leagues are already scheduled to begin play in the U.S. within the next year. Also, next June, Women's Professional Fastpitch (WPF), a modified version of the Olympic softball game, will launch a six-team league. But the most startling
by-product of the recent rise in women's sports is still on the corporate drawing board, and its development could reverberate from Wall Street to Munich.
It has been learned that a U.S. women's pro soccer league is in the works, with a possible fall 1997 starting date. A source close to the negotiations says that adidas, Nike, Reebok and Umbro would each have a 25% stake in the league and commit to sharing all expenses for five years. Nike married to Reebok? Adidas to Umbro? It's like Coke and Pepsi getting in bed to make a better root beer.
"It's time to put our competitive differences aside," says Tom Kain, director of soccer in the U.S. for the Germany-based
adidas. "If we work together, we build a better game of soccer in the United States, a game young girls can grow up striving for. At the same time, it can grow the market for all of us."
With the gold medal performances by the U.S. women in soccer and softball, and with the basketball team favored to win gold today, there may be no better time to market these team sports to the American public. Here's a quick look at what's currently in the works.
Basketball. Two leagues are fighting for the country's premier players, who previously had to play overseas if they wanted to make decent money. The eight-team American Basketball League (ABL) is expected to tip off a six-month season in October and pay its star players $125,000 a season. Nine of the 12 women on the U.S. Olympic team have already signed two-year contracts.
Forward Rebecca Lobo, the NCAA's 1995 player of the year, is one of three Olympians still weighing other options, which include the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA), an eight-team league that will have a three-month season and is backed by the NBA. That league plans to start next June and already has contracts with NBC, ESPN and Lifetime, giving it an early advantage over the ABL in terms of exposure. "It's a tough decision," says Lobo. "The WNBA says we can play in both leagues if we want. The ABL says if we sign there we can't play in the WNBA. I'm hoping the ABL relaxes that rule. But then the question comes up: Do I want to play year-round or do I want a life outside of basketball?"
Men paid homage to the star-spangled soccer team.
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Softball. This U.S. Olympic team may not be as marketable as its basketball or soccer counterparts, because NBC devoted less coverage time to softball than the other two women's sports. "The coverage was so disheartening," says Ray Vandermay, a New Jersey softball camp director and the winningest high school coach in state softball history. "The kids at our camp would have gotten much more excited had they been able to see the games—at least part of them—on TV."
That's not the only reason softball will have a tough road sustaining a pro league in six U.S. cities, including Akron and Sacramento. The biggest Olympic softball hero, Richardson, is a full-time doctor in Southern California. She won't turn pro. And pitcher Lisa Fernandez, the Nolan Ryan of her sport, doesn't like some of the rules of the new league. The pitching rubber will be moved back from the 40 feet used in the Olympics to 49 feet to increase offense, and WPF will play with a smaller, harder ball designed to travel faster and farther than the slightly pliable model used in the amateur game.
"We think we have a very strong chance of getting Lisa," WPF vice president Rayla Allison says. "The college game pitches from 43 feet, and every sport goes through transition like this, trying to find its niche. When we test-marketed these changes at some exhibitions last summer, 64% of the people we interviewed said they would be
very interested in buying season tickets."
The gritty, exuberant play of women like Tyler sent a strong message to young American girl athletes.
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"We have a great game that created great excitement here," Fernandez says. "I'd like to see a compromise on the pitching distance, maybe back to 43 feet. And I'm not sure I want to play anyway, because I'd be giving up my amateur status, and I may want to play in the Olympics in 2000." That's a big if, too. The International Olympic Committee has yet to decide if it will add softball to the menu permanently.
Soccer. The U.S. Soccer Federation spent between $3.6 million and $4 million in training expenses to prepare the team for the Olympics, and it paid off in gold. But now, with no international events of consequence until the U.S. hosts the World Cup in 1999, the players will scatter to families, jobs and pro leagues overseas. The U.S. players who scored in the gold medal game, Shannon MacMillan and Tiffeny Milbrett, leave next week for Japan, where they will play for the Shiroki Serena pro team.
At least MacMillan and Milbrett will be playing. Their teammates have few similar options, unless they go to pro leagues in Sweden or Norway. "Who wants to go overseas when your husbands and families are back here?" U.S. midfielder Julie Foudy says. As U.S. coach Tony DiCicco says, inactivity will doom U.S. as a world power in the women's game. "We've seen it the last few years," he says. "We win the World Cup in 1991 and everybody starts catching up. I can assure you this: We will not stay on top of the world unless we have an elite or professional league in the very near future."
The four shoe and apparel manufacturers, with DiCicco and respected University of North Carolina coach Anson Dorrance as consultants, have tentatively planned a nine-team league that will play at stadiums with between 4,000 and 8,000 seats. The players are definitely interested. "We're like every player in every sport," Chastain says. "We just want a place to play."
Chastain is wrong in one respect: She and her basketball and softball contemporaries aren't like every player—and that's good. For sports fans tired of baseball players who don't run out ground balls, it's refreshing to see softball players who trot back to the dugout after striking out. It's nice to see someone like guard Dawn Staley, who runs every fast break as if it may be her last. It's refreshing to see a Michelle Akers, who leads the U.S. soccer attack for 90 minutes a game despite the draining effects of Epstein-Barr virus.
"One of the best things to come out of this is that we can give American girls some heroes, some women they can admire—on and off the field," U.S. softball player Dani Tyler says. "We didn't have those when we were growing up."
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