The moral high ground has always been female territory.
Men, after all, lie and cheat and rob and pollute the environment and disproportionately populate the prisons, while women do their best to appreciate their good qualities. (Some women, at least ...)
But with the rise of feminism, the assaults on men's moral probity have become more frequent, and the belief in their arrogance and lack of concern for anything but their own selfish ends has become a truism. It's the men who are greedy. It's the men who are disloyal. It's the men who will do anything for money. It's the men who are immature.
In the world of sport, pouty male athletes are the whipping boys of talk radio. They have graced the cover of Sports Illustrated, and on the inside have been vilified for a litany of sins, among them greed, disdain for the fans who pay their exorbitant salaries, and a lack of respect for the game that the fans love and that has made them rich.
Female athletes, on the other hand, have been placed on a pedestal -- but it's been a pretty easy one to climb. For one thing, there hasn't been enough money to get greedy about. For another, there haven't been any fans. And for a third, those who didn't love the game (whether it be basketball or badminton) had absolutely no reason to keep playing.
But the competing women's basketball leagues will finally give women a chance to demonstrate the moral superiority so often ascribed to them. As they are wooed by the ABL and WNBA, they can show the men how it's done by not being greedy, by respecting their fans and by respecting the game.
And, at the same time, women can prove that if they are given power in other areas (politics, say) that they will be different than men, that they will use that power with more wisdom and less self-interest.
(Right now, it's time for a disclaimer. Obviously, there are greedy females and altruistic males, but what I'm talking about is the gender as a whole. The received wisdom in many places is that this world is as screwed up as it is because men have been running it for too long, and that the patriarchal culture we live in has oppressed women and the values they would bring to society's table. Yes, people are people, but I think it is true that there are some fundamental differences between men and women (aside from the obvious). But the question is what those differences actually are, and how much they vary from one gender to the other.)
So far, we really don't have enough evidence to decide whether women are handling fame and fortune any better than men. Yes, Katrina McClain played in Turkey for $500,000 rather than play in America -- but a lot of athletes took less money to stay home. Yes, Pam McGee can pout as well as Derrick Coleman -- but so far, the ABL and WNBA have been mercifully free of `play me or trade me' demands, or whining about the coaches. And of course, the players love the fans because it's such a novelty.
The real test, though, is just down the road. As the bidding wars escalate prior to the inevitable merger, female basketball players are going find themselves with unaccustomed power. They will be able to dictate where they play and how much they get paid. They will even be able to influence who coaches them, and more important, they will be the role models young female athletes emulate.
Is Pam McGee just a harbinger of things to come? Is Penny Toler's sour demeanor and public upbraiding of Jamila Wideman for a bad pass just a fluke, or is it the wave of the future? Or are the young women emerging into the public eye going to take sport in a different, softer direction, and keep the games in perspective?
And are female coaches going to be any more caring and any less abusive than their male counterparts? Will they create a better atmosphere for athletes than vein-popping taskmasters like Bobby Knight, or will they just do things the way they've always been done?
How these questions are answered will make for very interesting reading in the next few years. Thanks to the rise of women's basketball, female athletes are going to find themselves tempted by the same vanities that have seduced so many men -- and though we know some will give in, we don't know how many.
For women's basketball to become a major sport in America, as opposed to a profitable one like arena football, something is going to have be offered other than just pure skill. That something should be, and in fact will have to be, a different attitude, a purer sense of sport, than the men deliver. It may be asking too much of women to withstand the temptations that have sucked male athletes into prima donna poses, but then again it may be true that women have occupied the high moral ground for so long because they actually are more sensitive to what's important in the long run.
I honestly don't know how this drama will play out, but the process will tell us about more than just the fate of women's basketball. If women, who are steadily gaining more and more control in this world, can truly respond in a more reasoned way to the pull of power, then there is hope for the 21st century. But if women, as a gender, can do no better than men when given the chance, then in basketball as in life, we can only look ahead to more of the same.
7/24/97
