Sat, Dec 6/03
Jackie Robinson is a girl's name

Veteran forward Shayne Corson quit the Toronto Maple Leafs in the middle of the first round of last spring's Stanley Cup playoffs, pulling the plug on whatever plaintive life signs still emanated from his somewhat distinguished career. He was pilloried in the media, and quite rightly. Here was a player, a self-styled "leader", paid several millions of dollars during his final season to skate slowly, take dozens of ill-timed penalties and bait referees at every turn. I think the least the Leafs' fans and management expected from him in the playoffs was some all-star benchwarming, and he couldn't even give them that.

Fast forward six months, and Hayley Wickenheiser quits HC Salamat, the Finnish club team that gave her a chance to be the first woman to play in a professional men's hockey league. Coach Matti Hagman didn't trust her in key situations, she said. She missed her family. Fair enough, says I. Walking out on whatever measly stipend of Euros and smoked fish Salamat offered her is not nearly as dishonourable as the stunt Corson pulled, and one woman going up against 23 men — even gentle, Finnish men — represents a situation unlike any a male hockey player has ever faced.

But should her reputation escape entirely unscathed? Wickenheiser is a role model to thousands of young hockey players, and though she was paid far less, played in a far less "important" league and left at a far less crucial time in the season, she quit on her teammates just as Corson did. NHL players have families too, after all. To somehow assume that they miss theirs less than Wickenheiser missed hers is a little unfair.

The difference between Wickenheiser being an effective player and a borderline one was, it seems, the difference between the third and second divisions of the Finnish league. (Salamat was promoted, thanks in no small part to Wickenheiser's solid play in the 2002-2003 season.) Salamat's current roster features only one player who has ever played outside Scandinavia, and, if Jesse Welling's not-so-productive season with the Rockford IceHogs is a fair guide, then the Finnish second division is just slightly tougher going than the United Hockey League, widely regarded as the ass end of North American pro hockey. 

Wickenheiser proved that the finest female hockey player in the world is good enough to play with the first through third percentiles of professional male hockey players. That's not insignificant. People cheer her on as they would any underdog, but for the most part her importance is viewed as it should be. She is not held up as evidence that female hockey players are as good as male ones, or that men and women should play together in all circumstances. In the case of team sports, the battle of the sexes has its trenches dug.

If only the pundits showed any of the same restraint with golf. Annika Sorenstam's appearance in last May's Bank of America Colonial Tournament was newsworthy as a spectacle, but it was rather out of place on the editorial pages. Here was the universally acclaimed best female golfer in the world accepting a sponsor's invitation to play in a single PGA tournament, and not a very good PGA tournament at that. I admired Vijay Singh's concern for the sunburnt rube out of LSU who would no doubt have otherwise received that spot, but where on earth was the foul? In the case of golf, it seems obvious that certain of the women can, on any given day, play with certain of the men. Sorenstam has done nothing to disprove that idea.

This makes the case of Suzy Whaley, the other "women's golf pioneer", all the more bizarre. Whaley is the club pro from Avon, Connecticut who "qualified" to play in the 2003 Greater Hartford Open, again prompting a huge outpouring of cheering and editorializing. BellaOnline, a pretty lame website that calls itself "The Voice of Women," wrote that "while Annika Sorenstam had a sponsor's exemption which allowed her to play in the May 2003 Colonial game [hee hee — "game"], Suzy Whaley earned her spot the old fashioned way. She became the first woman to do so since 1945, when Babe Didrikson Zaharias qualified for a spot."

The "old fashioned way" is better known as "cheating": Whaley hit from the ladies' tees! But even TarHeelBlue, the official athletics website of UNC, where Whaley played her collegiate golf, glossed over the fact that she qualified for the tournament on a different course than the rest of the field. And they echoed the implication that Sorenstam was taking some kind of charity from The Man:

• Qualified for spot by winning the Connecticut PGA Section Championship, Sept. 17, 2002, three-round tournament played at Ellington Ridge Country Club in Ellington, Conn.

• First female to qualify for a spot in a PGA event since 1945. Annika Sorenstam played in a PGA tournament earlier this year, but she was given a sponsor's exemption — she did not qualify for a spot.

You would hope that people not provided with the whole story would wonder how a golfer not even good enough to win a dime on the LPGA tour could possibly have accomplished something so remarkable — but when people are looking for heroes, they see what they want to see.

Then, on the extremes of the issue, there are people like Justine Blainey-Broker. The Globe and Mail has a small stable of feminist sportswriters, chief among them Laura Robinson, whom the Globe hauls out of her lair every time a professional male athlete does something bad, at which point she re-works her previous four columns about what rotten people male professional athletes are. Blainey-Broker, with whom I initially confused Robinson, is nevertheless a fine protégé: "Someone's gaining on you, boys," went her headline of October 7, 2002.

I wonder what Jackie Robinson felt in 1947 when he became the first black in major league baseball — and how he would feel today, 55 years later, seeing fully integrated baseball teams where colour is not worth mentioning. Weight, height, batting averages — skills — count. Not colour.

So why is it that sex still counts? Suzy Whaley recently qualified to become the first woman to play in a Professional Golf Association Tour event. …

In The Frailty Myth: Women Approaching Physical Equality, Collette Dowling cites physiological studies that show remarkable similarities between male and female strength, once height and weight are factored in — the same variables that get taken into account when men box, or wrestle, or lift weights.

Her argument that non-team sports should separate competitors only by variables like height and weight is a fine one, but golf does not separate its competitors by anything except how many strokes it takes them to get a ball into 18 different holes. Singh, top of the PGA money list, has a 301.9-yard average drive; Loren Roberts, 52nd on the money list, hits his drives an average 36 yards shorter, but he does so from the same tees. So why did Suzy Whaley hit from the ladies' tees? Not because she's shorter or lighter, but because she's a lady. (The disingenuousness of Blainey-Broker's argument makes her invocation of Jackie Robinson all the more repugnant.)

Look, I'm all for equality. If "tennis star Venus Williams's serves have been clocked at around 190 kilometres per hour, about the same as Andre Agassi's," then by all means let's allow Venus Williams to try to work her way up the men's rankings (or perhaps she can start a World Tennis Serving Association, to play to her obvious strength). The idea of a "men's league" in any sport is clearly outdated — no one should be prohibited from playing on a hockey team or a lacrosse team or a football team, whether it's professional or amateur, for any reason other than insufficient skill.

So here's what I propose: give the top three players on the LPGA tour a PGA tour card for the following season, and give the next ten full exemption on the Nationwide Tour, and see how they do.

But I already know how they'll do — badly. Driving distance and sand saves (the ability to save par from a bunker) are the only remotely gender-neutral statistics kept by all the tours. The top ten money winners on the LPGA tour had a combined average drive of 258 yards and won a total of $11,009,866. The top ten money winners on the Nationwide Tour, meanwhile, took home well less than a third of that — $3,198,390 — while hitting the ball an average 55 yards longer off the tee. Those same men got up and down from the bunker an average of 52.6 percent of the time, while the top ten ladies, playing on easier courses, managed just 43.8 percent.

If only skills counted, in other words, the lady golfers of the world would be out an awful lot of money. But that only seems fair: how can women argue for equal pay for equal work in the office buildings of the world but not on its golf courses or tennis courts?

"In 1987, I was a child crying out in the wilderness: "I can play but may I?" writes Blainey-Broker of her ostensibly Jackie Robinson-esque Supreme Court battle to play on a boys' team. Fuck, where did I put my crucifixion nails? Of course little girls should be allowed to play hockey with little boys; and of course little girls, should they choose to play with other little girls, should be given as much ice time as the little boys. Every child should have the opportunity to become the best he or she can be. That's not what this is about.

This is about the decision those little girls have to make when they grow up. Are they going to push for integration, risking the already tenuous financial viability of professional women's sports, but giving themselves the sort of challenge on which elite athletes thrive? Or are they going to take the easy road favoured by Blainey-Broker and her ilk: claiming equality but never testing it, claiming oppression while making more money than they empirically deserve, drawing fake inspiration from people like Suzy Whaley, and taking cheap shots at the guys?