Female sports stars continue uphill battle for respect

As Mia Hamm has proven, female athletes can make just as big of an impact as men. Scott Barbour/Getty Images

One by one they stepped up to the 15-foot-long megaphone, 18 women looking like Jack in the Giant's lair. Only they're Jills. And they're done trying to fit in the Giant-sized world. Their message was simple: we're done being judged as female athletes and are ready to drop kick the female qualifier.

Nike launched a new ad campaign last week, on the eve of the WNBA finals, and just before the Women's World Cup. It is absolutely brilliant.

In every aspect -- the selling, the pitching, the marketing -- women's sports have forever been girls playing a lesser version of men's games. Candace Parker's dunks aren't quite like Kobe's, Venus Williams' serve isn't as hard as Andy Roddick's, Lauryn Williams' 100 isn't as fast as Justin Gatlin's. It's like one version's real, the other's a valiant attempt and it's why the most thrilling, heart-wrenching playoffs in WNBA history aren't drawing television viewers.

Quick: who's in the WNBA Finals?

See?

San Antonio, a city whose residents drive around with Spurs flags on their antennas and whose sportscasters talk about "Timmy" Duncan, couldn't draw 5,800 fans for a first round Silver Stars-Monarchs game. Tamika Catchings, one of the 18 women in the Nike ad, had her team, the Indiana Fever, locked in a playoff-opening, triple-overtime stunner that no one saw the first hour and 50 minutes of because... the Little League World Series pre-empted it.

In women's sports, playing up the female part hasn't worked. About the only women's efforts that have consistently drawn interest are those where women compete against men. Annika Sorenstam participation at a men's PGA Tour event, the Colonial four years ago, producted the highest PGA ratings on USA. Before Michelle Wie disappeared on us, her PGA forays drew mega-crowds, and the grand dame of them all, Billie Jean King, entertained what was then the largest-ever live audience in the Battle of the Sexes. But those were all stunts. It's not what's going to make us fans.

The WNBA doesn't need to be the NBA. Women play basketball and men play basketball. They don't have to play the same way and their games doesn't have to be gauged against the men. "I am an athlete," Mia Hamm says in the ad, because she is, in her own right, in her own game, producing her very own brand of excitement.

Judge us on what we can do, the women say, not what we can do compared to men.

That's what mountains do, snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler says when she steps up to the megaphone and promises, "The halfpipe doesn't care that I'm a girl."

Female athletes are amazing and dynamic and enthralling all on their own. And there are more of them than ever before -- in 1971, one in 27 high school girls played on a sports team. Today, that number is one in two. Those girls aren't trying to be boys and they won't fail if they're not as strong as boys. They have their own plane to compete on, one that's not derivative and one that's definitely not lesser.

Right after radio host Don Imus measured a group of female athletes by their looks and gender, Nike took out a full-page newspaper ad thanking "ignorance." There were a list of thank yous, from a "thank you for moving women's sports forward" to a closing "thank you for making us realize we have a long way to go."

With the latest campaign, it's a good first step.