By JUSTINE BLAINEY-BROKER 


Monday, October 7, 2002 – Print Edition, Page A19

In 1987, I was a child crying out in the wilderness: "I can play but may I?" I had earned a place on a boys' team in open tryouts but the Ontario hockey organization wouldn't let me play. A newly trained lawyer, J. Anna Fraser, heard me. Five court cases, and a Supreme Court decision later, I became the first girl to legally hit the ice with the boys. Today I am a doctor of chiropractic and a mother, and every day I yearn for the swish of the ice and the rough and tumble of top-level competitive hockey.

What is this door Anna and I helped open? It is small, accessible to very few women -- 5'10" and up, superdedicated, supertalented and thickskinned enough to withstand the sexist jibes and isolating spotlight sure to follow.

"That one is a girl! Look! Where does she dress?" "Did she sleep with her coach? Does she sleep with her teammates?" "Is she any good? Is she the token female?"

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 women to play in a Professional Golf Association Tour event. Tennis star Venus Williams's serves have been clocked at around 190 kilometres per hour, about the same as Andre Agassi's. And women can match men in long-distance running and swimming marathons. In 1995, Australian champion Shelley Taylor-Smith swam around Manhattan and set the record for both men and women, a feat she repeated in 1998.

In The Frailty Myth: Women Approaching Physical Equality, Colette 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.

Female soldiers, female police officers, female athletes have to fight antiquated rules, rigid organizational structures, ridicule and anger. Haley Wickenheiser, the Wayne Gretzky of the Canadian Women's Olympic Hockey team, is going to Europe to get competitive play with male hockey players. Go for it, Haley! But develop a thick skin.

Because you'll have to dress in hallways and bathrooms. You'll find tampons in your water bottle and propositions in your skates. You'll have to be better than most of them to even make the team and you can never let up. Any mistake you make will be pointed out as the place the game was lost -- because you are a woman in a man's game.

Fast forward a few years, and what if the best women golfers, or tennis players or hockey players end up playing with the men? Will that mean that fewer people will watch women's leagues? It should not -- if these are the leagues where exciting new players are coming from. But it may.

And what about boys playing on girls' teams?

Until female hockey is equal to male hockey in terms of funding, skills, number of games, ice time, media coverage, a whole host of categories, female hockey will continue to bar males.

Does this offend my egalitarian sensibilities? Not at all. In sport, it is honourable to play up, demeaning to play down. If a lightweight boxer can win the middleweight world championship, he is a hero, but the heavyweight is not allowed to challenge him. In Ontario today, male sport is the arena of more talent, opportunity, funding and remuneration. To play up is an honour; to play down should be disallowed until female sport has caught up.

Equal opportunity means more funding for female sport. We're not there yet but facilities for women are getting better and better. Equal opportunity means that schools can no longer give 80 per cent of their sport funding to the boys, and arenas have to give part of their precious ice time to female teams. Our high schools should no longer have big boys' gyms and small girls' gyms. And girls should get some of that precious after-school field time previously the sole domain of male teams.

I played several glorious years of top-level women's hockey until, one day, I found myself unexpectedly pregnant and hesitant to tough it out in the corners. Coach Terry Richardson laughed. This was how his wife had retired from elite hockey -- pregnancy.

My two-year-old daughter is a tiny, perfect person. We play hockey in the driveway. She loves the game already. Will she be passionate, talented, driven, to be the best that she can be? Will she want to play male sport to hone her talents and challenge her horizons? I don't know, but her father and I will cheer her on. For now, she raises her little arms and yells: "She shoots! She scores! Goal!" And my heart hears the swish of the ice.
Justine Blainey-Broker, of the Justine Blainey Wellness Centre in Brampton, Ont., took her fight to play on male hockey teams all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. In 1987, she won.