When I was growing up in the 1970s, my voracious reader of a mother had one book on her end table for a long time—so long, that I asked her why it was taking her so long to read. It was the feminist novel, Women’s Room. She said she had to read it in bits and pieces because if she read a lot at once, “it makes me too mad at Daddy.”
My dad, a World War II veteran, was a half-generation older than she was, and “feminist” wasn’t in his vocabulary. But he wasn’t anybody’s male chauvinist pig, either. He didn’t expect to have to cook dinner. But while his wife did, he would have a cocktail and say things like, “You know, I think women might make better company managers than men. They’re more nurturing.”
I’m sure she rolled her eyes as she lit another Barclay filter.
About a half-century later, I’m working on a book about being the father of a female soccer player, and I’ve had to examine some of my own sentimental attitudes about women—women athletes, in particular. Why am I brought to tears, seeing women compete as hard as men? Why am I brought to tears, seeing the way my daughter and her teammates love one another? Why do I have to listen to myself gassing lugubriously on over my own cocktails about how women’s sports are “beautiful,” while men’s sports are just more sports?
Why all the tears?
I don’t know, maybe, because sports seems to be one area where women seem to have made demonstrable and seemingly irreversible progress toward freedom, during my lifetime?
When I was young, the boys played for keeps, while women’s sports seemed like an activity to keep girls occupied. Those stooping field hockey players actually looked like they were sweeping the kitchen in their plaid skirts. With the occasional exception of women’s tennis and a lusty leer at Jan Stevenson, nobody I knew watched women’s sports on TV, or in person.
But as an adult, I’ve seen the incredible phenomenon of the 1999 Women’s World Cup.
A few years after that, golfer Annika Sörenstam played in a professional men’s tournament and acquitted herself well, just barely missing the cut and showing good-natured grit in the process.
Not long after that, I worked out as embedded journalist with our local professional women’s football team, the Chicago Force. For several years I chronicled that team and its dozens of wonderful characters for various publications and media outlets, happily celebrating women who were sacrificing a lot—including their bodies—to fulfill long-delayed football dreams. They were heroes of mine.
And at the same time, I was raising an athletic daughter of my own, who became a Division I soccer player. (She was very young when I was working out with the Force, and when she saw me in my uniform for the first time she said, “Dad! You look like a real girl!”) Of course, she also became a hero of mine—she, and many of her teammates, too.
I emerged from all of that with a feeling that sports was one area where women were stealing precious time and space from men, who would just as soon have the all the ESPN channels to themselves. And from male sports fans, who shrug arrogantly as they discount the value of the women’s sports “product.” And even from male coaches of women’s sports, who make their living off of women, but typically only watch the men on TV.
And by the time this Caitlin Clark phenomenon came along—a few years after the breaking of the unsustainably hot #metoo fever, in the middle of an epidemic of body-image issues and depression and anxiety among girls and young women, and right on the heels of the reversal of Roe—I guess I was starting to see sports as the only area where good things were happening for women and girls.
And I thought Caitlin Clark was worthy to take the ball from Mia Hamm and Annika Sörenstam—and Chicago Force quarterback Samantha Grisafe (who once advised her male journalist understudy to “stop throwing like a pussy”). The brilliant and intense and poised and supremely confident Clark had taken the next giant leap, and brought a lot of women athletes and fans along with her—just when her team needed her most!
Which is why I am so upset by what’s been happening in the WNBA and in the surrounding social media ecosystem since Clark arrived. Jealousy. Resentment. Racial animus in both directions. Pent-up hatred. Bullying, and piling on. And now violence.
So now women’s sports is the latest American social rock to be turned over to reveal foot-long talking centipedes? Now women athletes, who I’ve tearfully believed can compete just as hard as men but with less flopping, less whining, less pouting—and more class, more genuine love for one another, more joy and more valor all around—now they are systematically and publicly shitting on the boards of the stage that the Caitlin Clark phenomenon has built for them?
I want to be careful to say that no one owes a debt of gratitude to Clark; as she herself has been careful to say, repeatedly expressing her appreciation of the women basketball players who came before her and built the stage that she played on. But neither does she deserve anything like the treatment she’s getting from armchair ballers on X, many of whom are grown adults who should feel a sharp pang of conscience before saying a terrible thing about a 22-year old, online.
And no one deserves the treatment Clark is getting on the court—by opponents, and by insufficiently loyal teammates. Do women who have spent their young lives presumably building the character that team sports are supposed to develop really need to hear that, from the likes of me?
I do hope I’m not sounding like my old man, waxing on dreamily about kinder, gentler women business managers, 50 years ago.
Whatever I’ve allowed myself to hope over the years about what women’s sports can become, I guess I don’t really expect women athletes to be better than men.
But my God, I do expect them to be better than this. And us to be better than this, to them. Where are my cigarettes?
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