What A Week For Women’s Sports
The “fairer sex” (not my words) doesn’t get anywhere near the media coverage it deserves. Yet there have been three major stories relating to women’s sports in the past week.
1: The Minnesota Gophers women’s hockey team won their first NCAA title, 6-2, over Harvard. Finding the link on ESPN’s webpage proved to be much more difficult than it should have been.
2: The Minnesota Gophers women’s basketball team advanced to the Final Four, where they will play Connecticut, one of the perennial powers in both men’s and women’s college basketball. What I don’t understand is why everyone treats this Final Four run as a surprise. Yes, the Gophers were a 7 seed, but they were an underseeded 7 seed. They lost the best player in school history (Lindsay Whalen) a couple months ago, lost some games without her, and she didn’t play again until the tournament began. With Whalen, the Gophers would have been a 2 or 3 seed in the tourney. And reaching the Final Four from that level is no schock to me at all. Of course, now that they’re up against UConn, I predict their streak will end.
3: Most importantly, 17-year-old Candace Parker won the McDonald’s High School All-America Slam Dunk Contest–competing against all boys. The ESPN page I linked to calls her SheBron, and while LeBron James won the contest last year (other winners include Carmelo Anthony, Jerry Stackhouse, and Vince Carter), I think Parker deserves her own nickname, not one she has to piggyback off another guy for.
Even more amazing is the dearth of dunks in the women’s game. There have been 5 in NCAA women’s basketball history (by three players), and only 1 in WNBA history. For a girl to come out and win a slam dunk contest is not only heartening, but unexpected in the extreme.
People always quote the Billy Jean King/Bobby Riggs “battle of the sexes” tennis match as this watershed moment in women’s sports. But although King won in straight sets, she was at the prime of her career, while Riggs was pretty much done. In addition, she got to use the doubles areas, whereas he didn’t. I’m not taking away from the importance of the event, but it wasn’t exactly played with both players on equal footing. Speaking of which, I’d like to see the Williams sisters take on some men’s players. I bet they could wipe the floor with a bunch of them.
Parker, meanwhile, beat the boys at their own game. She played by the same rules, just as Annika Sorenstam did when she failed to make the cut at a PGA event last year, but she won.
Unlike LeBron, Parker plans to go to college (Tennessee) next year. Also unlike LeBron, she won’t even make six figures in salary if/when she turns pro.