Scorecard

WOMEN'S WORTH

Whether or not women athletes will follow men into the big-business hoopla of college sport was the topic of long debate at last week's meeting in Memphis of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. The AIAW worried, for example, about Nancy Lieberman of Far Rockaway, N.Y., a high school basketball star who played on the U.S. team at the Olympics and who last spring was courted by more than 70 colleges. Coaches sat on her doorstep; one offered her a free car and an apartment if she would accept a scholarship.

The AIAW finally decided that, beginning in August 1978, scholarships will be limited to tuition and fees (no room and board and so on). It also forbids schools from paying coaches for recruiting-trip expenses. Some who object to these rules protest that limiting aid to women penalizes Jane while John breezes through college on a full ride.

"Denying young women what is given to men is not only illegal, it is immoral," says Linda Estes, women's athletic director at the University of New Mexico. On the other hand, Christine Grant of Iowa, head of an AIAW committee that analyzed the proposals, warns that liberalized recruiting and broader scholarship aid "would lead us down a path where we would think of the student as a property who performs prescribed tasks."

Others opposed to the AIAW restrictions feel that bigtime sport for women is here already. Horace McCool, athletic director at Delta State, which has won the women's national basketball championship twice in a row, says, "Our whole region is in favor of recruiting. I don't care what they're talking about. When we play the game we play to win, and therefore we want to go look for the finer high school athletes. Our young ladies this year will play 12 home ball games and eight of them will be sellouts."

The question, of course, is whether women's athletics should continue to be part of the educational process or drift into the sports-entertainment business. It's not an easy question to answer.

TWO EASY PIECES

In the old days, the Big Ten used to prosper in the Rose Bowl—when it was the Big Ten instead of the Big Two. From 1947 through 1968, the first 22 years of the pact that brings the Pacific Coast and the Midwest together in Pasadena on New Year's Day, the Big Ten had a 16-6 edge, and every school in the conference made at least one trip to the Rose Bowl. Since 1969, when Michigan and Ohio State took over, only those two overinflated powerhouses have gone to Pasadena. And they have lost seven of the nine games they've played there.

The obvious conclusion seems to be that the Big Ten was far more effective when it was a competitive conference, when playing talent was more evenly distributed, when its eventual champion had to win more than a two-team race.

EDWIN MOSES