The spin on soccer
American women turn heads -- but will the magic last?
Posted: Wednesday July 07, 1999 09:07 PM
We grew up watching baseball on snowy TV screens, listening on the radio when the picture whited completely out. And playing it, of course, every day when we could sneak in a game, right there in our own backyard.
There was football, too, on crisp fall days when we were looking for something else to do. And basketball, always, one-on-one and two-on-two, on the packed-down dirt driveway across the street.
But this new soccer thing ... well, this soccer thing has us spinning.
| From the e-mailbag |
Some comments on An age-old question, July 3, 1999.
Who says that 20 years old is the right age? I feel that players should complete college and no underclassmen should be eligible. Give them time to see and experience what life is. I am an Australian but have always been interested in American sports and especially love college basketball. The excitement is unmatched in any sport that lasts for the entire season. It seems to be losing this charm as more and more kids are being drawn sooner to the NBA by the dollar. To be 18 years old and believe that $100 million contract is your birthright is just absolute greed. It's about time the NBA and also the NCAA get together and get tough and start making these kids get an education, mature and really earn their place.
-- Grant Abbott, Taipei, Taiwan.
This is America, and if an adult man chooses to make a living in a legal way, who are we to try to stop him? Many of those who are against young men entering the NBA early claim to be motivated by concern for the well being of these young men. I find this hard to believe. Some say that players that enter the NBA early are not as well polished and hence are less likely to succeed. I say, for the sake of his financial security, a player should leave whenever it is most likely that he will become a high draft pick. Equally puzzling to me are those who claim that there is something morally wrong with a 19 year old becoming a millionaire by playing a sport. This self-righteous objection only seems to come up when the 19 year old in question is a young black man. I know what you're going to say: "This debate has nothing to do with race." High schoolers have been going into baseball for decades: Was it wrong for Mickey Mantle to be a 19-year-old rookie for the New York Yankees? There are countless other examples: What colleges did J.T Snow, Anna Kournikova and Jaromir Jagr attend? Do you know? Do you even care? It seems to me that this debate is more about the resentment that most middle-aged white people feel at the thought of young black men coming into the league and making millions. I do not wish to appear divisive or even racist on this issue. I, like many other blacks in this country, simply wish to gain an insight into the infatuation of whites with this issue.
-- Kami Okusaga
Why all the hoopla about kids leaving college early or skipping it entirely to play NBA basketball? This is a common and accepted occurrence in many other major pro sports. If you think about it from a purely economic perspective, colleges are making a killing on these athletes. We live in a country that is supposedly based on intrinsic freedoms. Why then are we thinking about restricting the freedoms of our young people to pursue an honest and lucrative living? I wonder if this would be an issue if the majority of players getting drafted into the NBA were not young black males from lower-income families? Leave the kids alone, they are not the problem! The existing college athletic programs and the lack of a quality minor league NBA system are truly to blame.
-- Dwight Gibson
I have a problem with people criticizing underclassman for entering the draft. There is only one reason why they enter: They know for a fact that they will be drafted. If GMs and scouts wouldn't draft these kids then there would not be a discussion right now. If a kid knows that he will be drafted, why not declare? I'll take a seven-figure salary over classes and being regulated by the NCAA any day. The bottom line is the NBA has no one to blame but itself for the current situation, and should we blame the kids when the NBA is waving the money and has control over who is being drafted? There is a simple solution: If you don't want young players in the league, don't draft them.
-- Jamil Ramsey
Kids go to the NBA 'cause the can. The easiest way to keep kids under 20 out of the NBA is for general managers not to draft them. General managers are really to blame for the decline of the NBA, if there is such a decline. They're quick to roll the dice on potential over substance and the scary part is that sometimes they're right. The Timberwolves' management is universally applauded for choosing a 19-year-old kid from South Carolina with a shaky academic background over the consensus college player of the year. A college degree and a national championship did not make Ed O'Bannon an NBA player. The T'wolves were right to pick potential over substance. It is a crapshoot, a roll of the dice. Some win, some lose. That why the general managers won't stop. I'd bet you a six-pack on that.
-- Chad Saunders
| |
| |
The final game of the 1999 Women's World Cup will be held this weekend in Pasadena, Calif., and they've sold out the whole darn Rose Bowl for it. More than 85,000 people will be there, the biggest crowd for a women's-only sporting event ever. President Clinton will be there, too, and it will be televised to a worldwide audience of millions.
Little American girls have gone completely wild over the American women soccer players. There's a story circulating about a fan in Chicago who chased the team bus a good half-mile, screaming out her love for the Americans. They are this year's Spice Girls, only with more talent.
Mia Hamm is getting equal commercial billing with Michael Jordan, for Pete's sake.
Women's soccer is, seemingly, the real deal.
"I must say, we are frankly in awe of what has happened so far," Marla Messing, president of the Women's World Cup Organizing Committee, told The Washington Post. "We've tapped into something people didn't expect us to tap into. This whole teenage and young girl market ... it's taken on a life of its own."
Who could've figured?
And just what the heck is going on here?
Soccer, the biggest sport on Earth, still flounders here in America, even as millions of little kids run up and down green fields in their shin pads and Umbros. It doesn't have the TV exposure, the best athletes in the sport still aren't Americans and it still is seen too often as a largely boring affair -- cross-country with a ball. Major League Soccer, four years old now, is still a fringe league, continuing its fight for respectability where other pro soccer leagues have found little.
Yet here comes the Women's World Cup and the USA women's team, with a wonderful set of stories and an even better set of approachable, regular people -- the bus stopped for that girl in Chicago, by the way, and the players jumped off and gave her shoes and shin guards -- and soccer is in vogue like it never has been in this country.
There's even talk of forming a women's professional league, to start shortly after the 2000 Olympics. Maybe even playing some doubleheaders with MLS.
"The '94 World Cup was an unbelievable launching pad and springboard for our league," Mike Burns, a defender on the MLS' New England Revolution, said recently. "Women's sports have come a long way in the last 10 or 15 years. You look at the success of the WNBA and say, 'Why not?'"
There's a long way to go, of course, to build on the success of the Women's World Cup. And, really, no one knows if it can really be done. Anyone who has tried to push women's professional sports knows it is still a tough sell to those of us who grew up watching and playing baseball and football and basketball.
The WNBA is trying to shove women's professional sports back into the American sports consciousness. But doing that with soccer will be doubly difficult. Truth be told, the Women's World Cup on TV has been only a mild success, though there are big hopes for the title game Saturday.
Still, the way the Americans are going -- the success they've had at the Olympics and now here in the World Cup, the interest they're drawing from young fans, the attention they're generating through the media and their squeaky-clean image -- well, nothing seems impossible right now.
Soccer, women's soccer, as a viable professional sport in America. It's a head-spinning concept.
But maybe, just maybe, it will work.
John Donovan is senior writer for CNNSI.com.
Comments? To e-mail Donovan, click here.
| Related information |
| Multimedia |
 Click here for the latest audio and video
|
| Search our site |
Watch CNN/SI 24 hours a day |
|
|
Sports Illustrated and CNN have combined to form a 24 hour sports news and information channel. To receive CNN/SI at your home call your cable operator or DirecTV. |
|
