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Solving the Title IX problem Making football a separate entity would benefit both sexesPosted: Wednesday June 19, 2002 12:53 PM
No question about equality is more nettlesome than Title IX's application to athletics. The law says, indisputably, that equally proportionate amounts of athletic department money must be spent on both sexes. Because of that, in the years since the law started to be rigorously enforced, the number of girls playing sports in high school is up almost tenfold and the number of young women playing sports in college is up five times. But this great advance in female participation has come at a price for male athletes. College wrestling has been emasculated: 170 teams cut. Collegiate male gymnastics is headed for extinction, and the elimination of men's tennis, track and swimming -- even baseball -- continues apace. Critics of Title IX -- which is 30 years old this week -- call it reverse discrimination and "affirmative androgyny." Look, goes the men's argument, more boys than girls care about sports. To demand matching amounts of athletic funding for females is a tortured distortion of fairness. Would it make any sense to require equal funding for males in, say, dress making? But then the counter argument: The reason fewer girls want to play sports is that they never had the opportunity before. Give them the same chances as boys, and just as many of them will want to play. For me, that's a more persuasive case. In this professed land of opportunity, where discrimination against women in sports was overwhelming for so long, it's simply dog-in-the-manger to deny females the option of organized athletics because they haven't had the chance to find out if they'd like it. Anyway, all this obscures the elephant in the room: football. It is that rare male sport that has no female analogue. It also uses far more bodies and gobbles up far more money than any other sport. No schools would have to eliminate wrestling and gymnastics if they'd just trim some of the fat off football. But football is a favored sport and politically powerful. Alumni love it and old-boy athletic directors protect it. Football is a banner that schools wave at the beginning of the educational year to rally the troops, students and alumni alike. It identifies and unifies and helps fund-raise ... if for all the wrong reasons. So, even if school football is indefensibly expensive as a sport, it is a distinct part of our American culture that serves various non-athletic purposes. Not even basketball fulfills those, and, anyway, basketball requires fewer players and there are women's teams as well as men's. No, football is the cheese that stands alone, and it would make sense for it to be separated from all other sports. Football is primarily a spectator sport. It's show biz. It has nothing to do with wrestling, men's or women's track, tennis, gymnastics or all other sports, which are intended primarily to be played by students, not watched by ticket buyers. Call football what it is: either an arm of annual giving or a form of institutional advertising. But get it out of the athletic department. Then, for both men and women, Title IX would have what it doesn't have now: a level playing field. Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. His new novel, The Other Adonis (Sourcebooks Landmark), is available now at bookstores everywhere. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer |
