WOMEN, ABILITY AND THE THING CALLED BEAUTY
AN INTERVIEW WITH JOE O’CONNOR FOR A STORY ON WOMEN AND SPORT IN THE “NATIONAL POST” ON SEPTEMBER 15, WHICH FOLLOWS. HOPE ALL OF YOU HAD A SPECTACULAR SUMMER. MORE TO COME HERE, AS WE EASE BACK IN TO FALL MODE…….
JOE O’CONNOR WAS A MASTER’S STUDENT OF MINE SOME TIME AGO….
CIAO, G
Pretty Good…
For female athletes, it’s not enough to simply be talented. You have to be attractive, too
Joe O’connor, National Post
Published: Saturday, September 15, 2007
She walked out into the warm New York City night in a little red dress decorated with crystals that sparkled beneath the bright lights and the camera flashes.
Her blonde hair was pulled back from her face, and her long legs and lithe arms tanned a deep brown from the summer sun. She could have been a supermodel, or maybe even a movie star, strutting down a red carpet to the delight of her fans.
Only this red carpet was a tennis court and, somewhere along the way, Maria Sharapova produced a racquet from her black shoulder bag and proceeded to obliterate Roberta Vinci.
Sharapova’s first match of the 2007 U.S. Open took less than an hour to complete, and when it was over she blew kisses to the crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium.
In the aftermath of the massacre, the media — and the woman in red — made scant mention of the 30 winners she had struck, the shoulder problems she had been battling for several months and the name of the player she would meet in the next round.
On this night the focus was fashion. And the conversation skin deep.
“When you feel good about what you’re wearing? you know what that’s like, put on a nice outfit and some makeup and you’re the bomb,” Sharapova said.
The bomb that is a global brand.
Sharapova has endorsement deals with Nike, Colgate-Palmolive, Canon, Motorola, Land Rover and more. Her annual income is estimated at US$20-million, and her name a fixture on Forbes magazine’s Top 100 celebrity list.
Sharapova is the American Dream: young, rich and beautiful. But the little red dress she wore at the U.S. Open is a candy-apple coloured distress signal, a reminder that the path to stardom for the female athlete often begins with a pretty face.
“Sharapova epitomizes the feminine athlete as a commodity,” said Geoff Smith, a retired history professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont. “She is, in effect, what every little girl wants to be. She is Barbie.
“She is also one hell of a tennis player, but not everybody gives her credit for the amount of good things she does on the court. And the unfortunate thing is that she was born pretty, and she became prettier.
“And that’s what sells.” The Sharapova syndrome, the notion that a female athlete has to have the added dimension of attractiveness to be a breakout star — and that women’s sports can’t sell to men without playing up their sexuality –has been around a lot longer than the 21-year-old tennis player.
Suzanne Lenglen, a Frenchwoman, titillated the aristocrats at the All England Club in 1919 by appearing on Wimbledon’s centre court with her white silk stockings rolled down to the knee.
Thirty years later, Gertrude (Gorgeous Gussie) Moran teased a new generation with her lace-trim panties. Moran was at once a scandal and an international media sensation — an object of desire for men and fashion designers alike.
Even Mildred (Babe) Didrikson, the famous American tomboy of the first half of the 20th century, understood the power of pretty. Didrikson played every sport there is: basketball, baseball, boxing, track and field, golf, skating. Everything. The Babe had a muscular body. She was the antithesis of the curvy Mae West picture of the feminine ideal.
Sportswriters, all of them men, invariably described Didrikson as “manly.” One even opined that it would be “better if she and her ilk stayed at home, got themselves prettied up and waited for the phone to ring.”
Didrikson also had close relationships with other “manly” women. But then she married a famous wrestler, George Zaharias. Together they founded the LPGA in 1949. And thereafter, Didrikson started wearing skirts and makeup, while her hips and breasts became more pronounced as she strode the fairways trying to sell advertisers on the idea of women’s professional golf.
Carling Bassett-Seguso is a tomboy from more recent times. The Toronto native was 17 years old when she lost to Chris Evert in the semi-finals of the 1984 U.S. Open. The media called her “Darling Carling.” The Ford modelling agency signed her to a contract. And the blond-haired tomboy with the pretty face was transformed.
“Of course there is pressure to look good,” Bassett-Seguso says today. “But I don’t really think I understood that until later on.”
On the court, Bassett-Seguso had to be strong. To model, she had to look like a skeleton. Tugged between opposite body types, and grief-stricken by the death of her father, Bassett-Seguso developed an eating
disorder. Her promising tennis career was basically over before her 19th birthday.
“I don’t think we’ll ever move beyond looks,” Bassett-Seguso says. “Unfortunately, more people want to watch [an Anna] Kournikova than a Svetlana Kuznetsova.
“Do I think that’s fair? Absolutely not. Is it ever going to change? Well, are you going to marry the 400-pound woman, who is really very nice and warm and wonderful, or are you going to marry the gorgeous blonde who’s kind of nasty and spends a lot of money? How often do you see that? Sport is no different.
“What you are seeing on television is what’s going on in real life.”
Alas, for women with athletic ambitions, what you don’t see much of on television — outside of golf, the Grand Slam tennis events, the Olympics and the odd
WNBA game — are women playing sports?
Since 1989, the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles has produced a quadrennial report titled, Gender in Televised Sports: News and Highlights Shows. It examines the amount of airtime devoted to women’s sports stories on the nightly newscasts at the major broadcast networks and on the cable sports networks, such as ESPN.
Researchers found that 92% of the sports news coverage was devoted to male sports stories in 1989. Fifteen years later, the number was 91.4%.
It’s not that women aren’t playing sports and that there are not highlights to show. It’s that the sports they are playing, in ever-increasing numbers — softball, soccer, volleyball and hockey — are a tough sell to advertisers, and the highlights that do happen occur where the cameras aren’t rolling.
“You need sponsors. You need corporate America to have a tournament,” said Susan Cahn, a history professor at the University at Buffalo . “You can get in a vicious cycle where the argument against showing women’s softball or soccer, for example, is that there is no audience for women’s softball or soccer.
“Well, there is no audience because it is never on TV. The sponsors say then, well, we’re not going to televise something unless there is an existing audience.
“And what is proven to sell is the sexualized female athlete.”
Women’s soccer was said to have “arrived” with the 1999 World Cup. The tournament was held in the United States, and the American public — thanks to mass exposure and aggressive marketing — fell in love with its players: Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, Kristine Lilly and the rest.
But most of all, they fell in love with Brandi Chastain, or at least the image of Chastain celebrating her World Cup-winning goal by dropping to her knees and peeling off her top to reveal a Nike sports bra.
Chastain’s flash dance was raw, and feminine. It was, ‘I am woman, hear me roar.’ It was also sexy. And it started a revolution. Within two years, women’s soccer had an eight-team league of its own, the Women’s United Soccer Association. Hyundai and Johnson & Johnson signed on as major sponsors.
Three years later, the WUSA died, unable to sustain itself financially. League chairman John Hendricks cited “a shortfall in sponsorship revenue.” The average attendance was just 4,500 per game.
There have been whispers out of Southern California that the league will be resurrected, in partnership with men’s Major League Soccer. It is a model that has kept the WNBA alive for 11 years, making it the longest-surviving women’s professional sports league in the United States.
But the WNBA continues to operate at a deficit, while its television numbers continue to drop on ESPN2, from about 280,000 per game in 2005 to around 240,000 in 2006. Average attendance is steady at around 7,500.
The WNBA’s detractors say that it’s basketball beneath the rim. There are no monster dunks. There are no LeBrons, no Shaqs, no Kobes, and why bother watching something when you can watch the men do it better?
“If someone has a prejudice against, quote, what they call girl-ball, then don’t come,” says Carla Christofferson, a lawyer who led a group that bought the Los Angeles Sparks franchise from Lakers owner Jerry Buss for a reported US$10-million. “Women’s basketball isn’t one-on-five. I watch the NBA because I just, in general, like basketball. But I like the women’s game more, largely because you can’t have a team with just Kobe Bryant.”
Christofferson markets the Sparks as a fan-friendly, reasonably priced entertainment option in a crowded L.A. market. The players are accessible, extraordinary female athletes, and they are presented as role models.
“One third of our fans are bringing their daughters to the games to show them role models,” Christofferson says. “They want their daughters to grow up wanting to be a WNBA player, not a Laker Girl.
“We don’t play the sex card, we play basketball.”
The LPGA Tour plays the sex card. More than 60% of the tour’s television audience is male. (The breakdown for the WNBA is about 50-50). Natalie Gulbis is among the most popular players, and she looks like a beauty queen. Three years ago, Gulbis became the first female player to be featured in Tiger Woods’ PGA Tour video game. At the time, she didn’t have a career victory. She has one now — the prestigious Evian Masters in Europe from earlier this year, but still, just the one — plus a reality show on the Golf Channel, an advice column in a racy men’s magazine and an annual calendar that is sold at LPGA events and depicts her in various states of undress. (Sales for the 2007 edition are expected to crack 100,000.)
“Some of the pressure to be feminine comes internally, like in the LPGA and the WTA,” Cahn says. “But it’s not because women are poorer athletes that they are driven to sell themselves as sex objects. It is because of a long history of sexism against women athletes, and just how important and identified male culture is with sports.”
Not every male pays attention to sport, but within the broad and boyish crowd that does, it is a common and holy ground, and a favourite topic of conversation at the water cooler and the corner pub.
And within these happy, all-male spaces, female athletes don’t stand a chance.
“In theory,” Cahn says, “when men get together, you could be having a conversation about what an amazing shooter Deanna Nolan is for the [WNBA] Detroit Shock. In practice, male athletes are the heterosexual idols of the culture.”
Indeed, we may all want to be like Mike, but there is only one Jordan — or Gretzky or Tiger — and the little boy inside of every man looks upon their athletic feats with a sense of wonder. They are the modern-day Greek gods, come to play among us. When an Aphrodite does appear, she often looks good in a tennis skirt — on a billboard — or in a bra commercial.
The extreme example of selling sex over substance was Anna Kournikova. She never won a
singles title, although she did win two Grand Slam doubles titles with Martina Hingis and was ranked as high as No. 8 in the world. But it didn’t really matter that Anna didn’t win. Not to Adidas, Microsoft, Multi-way sports bras, Omega watches and all the other companies that signed her up to sell their merchandise.
At the height of the Kournikova craze in 2000, her name — and various misspellings of it — was among the most searched items on the Internet. She is still out there today. Type Kournikova into YouTube and we see Anna on the beach in a bikini, Anna at the gym, Anna Kournikova– the “upskirt [sic] compilation,” and Anna on a tennis court, walking in slow motion to the ZZ Top song “Legs”.
Kournikova also lives on as a convenient catch-all descriptive for every attractive female athlete. Heather Mitts is the “Anna Kournikova” of soccer. Danica Patrick is the Anna of motor sports, and Jennie Finch is the Anna of women’s softball.
Even the cerebral realm of international chess has an Anna. In fact, two of them: Australian Arianne Caoili and Russia’s Alexandra Kosteniuk.
Naturally, with her long blonde tresses — and Russian birth certificate — Sharapova was hailed as the “next Anna Kournikova of women’s tennis.” It was a comparison she didn’t like, and one she banished for good by winning Wimbledon in 2004. Sharapova added a U.S. Open title to her Grand Slam resume in 2006.
The woman in the red dress was unable to defend her crown this year, losing in the third round. But Sharapova never really left the stage in New York. Her 30-second commercials for Canon PowerShot aired throughout the tournament.
On the final day, Roger Federer met Novak Djokovic in the men’s final, beating him in straight sets. Djokovic took a bow afterwards, and the fans at Arthur Ashe Stadium began chanting his name. The CBS cameras cut away from the court and panned the crowd, zooming in on a familiar figure.
Her blonde hair was pulled back from her face.
Maria Sharapova was smiling.
© National Post 2007