Duke scandal aside, this sport is growing rapidly

	Major League Lacrosse's 10 franchises are located in the sport's hotbeds, such as Baltimore and Long Island, but also in Denver and L.A. Rick Stewart/ALLSPORT
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It's difficult for a sport to find a larger place in the crowded American sports calendar. Despite all the money thrown at soccer, it remains on the second tier. But while lacrosse has come under a dark cloud because of the scandal involving the Duke men's team, the sport itself -- the oldest game in North America -- is the new hot game.

The old Indian sport, named by a French missionary because the sticks resembled a bishop's crosier, has always had pockets of popularity. It's Canada's official summer sport. In the U.S., it was big on Long Island. But it was most in evidence in tony New England prep schools and in Baltimore, where Johns Hopkins was the perennial college champion. As prominent as it was in Baltimore, though, even there lacrosse remained mostly a private-school game. Ironically, as hard and grueling as this brutal old Indian game is, lacrosse retained a reputation as sort of polo without the ponies.

Here's a little poem from 1903 dedicated to the debutantes of Baltimore:

On stirring football days,
You give the Princeton cheer.

While rowing is the craze,
A Yale girl you appear;

But for lacrosse you find it pays
To hold the Hopkins dear.

Lacrosse was an extended Eastern family, run rather informally. The Iroquois hand-fashioned all the sticks out of wood, leather and cat gut -- you didn't carry the ball, you cradled it -- and the preppies took the game off to the few colleges that funded their rather expensive sport: sticks, pads and helmets. The young ladies who went out for field hockey in the fall played a more genteel women's version of lacrosse in the spring.

Suddenly, in the 1990s, all this began to change. Easterners who moved west took the game with them. Title IX made it more attractive for colleges to include the women's game. Schools across the nation began to add the sport. It's now the fastest-growing in the land -- participation up 300 percent in a decade.

Lacrosse got around to actually establishing a national governing body, just like grown-up sports. Two pro leagues -- one outdoor, one for arenas -- were established. Places like Toronto and Denver sell out crowds of 17,000 for their indoor teams. A franchise will go into Madison Square Garden next year. Only basketball draws larger crowds to its college championships. Last year, at Lincoln Financial Field, where the Eagles play in Philadelphia, 125,000 showed up for three days of the men's NCAA tournament.

So, can the sport keep growing? Well, like soccer, it's obviously good exercise for kids. We've already got, yes, lacrosse moms. The modern plastic molded sticks with nylon netting make it much easier to catch and cradle and throw. It's starting to attract minority athletes -- although it's a surprise bit of history that perhaps the greatest lacrosse player ever was Jim Brown. Yes, that Jim Brown, of Syracuse. He told me once that he thought he was even better at lacrosse than at football.

Some of the upper crust still lingers in lacrosse, though. The recent scandal at Duke brought out the information that, unlike other Duke athletic teams, the Blue Devils' lacrosse team was predominately made up of Northeastern preppies.

Lacrosse is compared mostly with hockey and soccer, but it offers much more scoring than either of those sports. That and its manual dexterity make it more appealing to American audiences than soccer. I've always thought, though, that in many respects lacrosse more resembles basketball, with its picks and back doors. In that vein, like basketball, Major League Lacrosse counts two points for a long goal and has a possession clock. The greatest drawback to the sport is that it's played on a large field with a little ball you can rarely see because it's usually being cradled in somebody's net.

But the sleepy old sport is wide awake: The pros are using orange balls. By any standard, it's a lacrosse la boom.