The Tribune and New
York Times each ran stories last Friday that gauge the status of women in
sports. Taken together, they signal how
little has changed for how long.
The Trib’s story
concerned the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League’s 75th
anniversary. Yes, women have been
playing baseball for a long time, and at least one of them, Shirley Burkovich
of the Rockford Peaches, never wanted to stop playing. When the league folded in 1954, “It was
devastating,” Burkovich recalled. “I
thought baseball was going to be my career.
I figured I’d play forever.”
Maybelle Blair, another AAGPL veteran, hopes to live long enough to see
a female general manager or umpire break into major-league baseball. “Our eyes work the same as men, right?”
offered Blair.
It’s too bad Clare
wasn’t included in the story; she played baseball, too. She’s also applied for at least one MLB
front-office job; Kenny Williams must’ve misplaced her résumé. The one area of professional sports that
seems to be welcoming women more than ever is cheerleading, which happened to
be the subject of the Times’ story.
It seems that there are
two types of cheerleaders, those who dance and those who mingle with the
fans. Guess what? Both are subject to crappy pay and crappy
work conditions. Put women who aren’t
wearing a whole lot of clothes into a situation where they interact with young
male fans who are drinking, and you’re asking for trouble in the form of
harassment. Good luck trying to fix that
problem, as numerous NFL teams have promised to do.
Sorry, but
cheerleading based on females in tight costumes no longer has a role in
society, if it ever did. At least in
baseball, those ever-irritating “cheer teams” are integrated by gender, and the
young women are dressed no more provocatively than their male counterparts; I
just don’t need anyone tossing t-shirts my way.
As for the NBA, NFL and NHL, they need to move beyond the organized booty-shake
to sell their product.
No comments:
Post a Comment