At the Half, Women’s Sports is Trailing in the Culture Game
Fifty Years After Title IX, We Play Token Roles in Sports Culture
**Warning, this story contains spoilers about the movie Hustle, though I would argue that if you have seen one sports movie, you probably know how they all end.**
This week, for the first time since I can remember, my husband and I watched a full movie on a weeknight. Recently, even when we have attempted this on the weekends, we have turned the movie off mid-stream for an unplanned 24-hour-or-longer intermission. When we turned on Hustle, I thought we would follow the same fate; after an hour, we would quit the movie, opting to responsibly conduct our nighttime routines to give ourselves the best possible chance at a decent night of sleep.
Instead, we watched the whole movie. It was not that it was suspenseful. It was not that we love Adam Sandler. It was not even that we were too hot to do anything else, including move off the couch.
We watched it because we enjoyed it. We knew there would be a happy ending. We knew there would be redemption. We knew good would win and bad would lose.
To be more specific, we knew the good guys would win and the bad guys would lose.
Instead of going to sleep wrapped in the comfortable hug of a feel-good movie, I fell asleep wishing that LeBron James and SpringHill Company had flipped the script and produced a movie about an unknown female basketball phenom. I wished that Queen Latifah had been the agent rather than Adam Sandler. I almost wished that Heidi Gardner had played the shortsighted and egotistical heir rather than saving the team from her brother’s missteps.
For the past 12 years, I have worked in the sports industry. For the 20 years before that, my dad worked in the sports industry, and my siblings and I benefitted from his position to secure various internships during high school and university. Before that (and still today, though to a lesser extent), I played sports. From birth through college, I cannot remember a season when I was not on a team, learning a new sport or running daily loops of the neighborhood.
I am fortunate to know many talented women in sports. Many of us were or are athletes; most of us are fans. One of these women and I struggled when trying to think of women’s sports movies this week. Battle of the Sexes. Bend It Like Beckham. Bring It On. Blue Crush. A League of Their Own. We argued whether Million Dollar Baby and King Richard were about the women or their male coaches. We debated whether I, Tonya, Step Up and The Queen’s Gambit fit the genre.
My friend reminded me that the first women’s World Cup was 30 years ago, more than 60 years after the first men’s contest. Perhaps women’s tennis is more popular, she surmised, since the WTA started 50 years ago, less than 50 years after men’s professional tennis. Maybe, we posited, women’s Olympics events are popular because women have competed at the games since (almost) the beginning.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Title IX, which inadvertently helped increase female participation in sports in the U.S. It is no surprise that the business of women’s sports is less mature than men’s; prizes, media, endorsements and sponsorships largely favor men’s contests. When U.S. Soccer agreed to pay the men and women’s national teams equally, it felt less like a victory than a begrudging acceptance — a belated realization the women’s team might just be U.S. Soccer’s most valuable asset.
Certainly, there are more important challenges for women today than representation in sports movies. Imagine, though, if Hustle had been a story about women basketball players, and Brittney Griner had played the Anthony Edwards’s role — would she still be sitting in a Russian prison right now? Imagine if, rather than focusing on the redemption story of an NFL coach suspended in a scandal that paid bounties to players who injured their opponents, Adam Sandler made a movie about how Kim Ng persevered for nearly 30 years and through six interviews before becoming the first general manager of a major North American men’s sports team. Would younger generations expect to see female head coaches and managers pacing sidelines?
Sports is culture, and culture is sports. Celebrities frequently sit courtside at coveted sporting events, and sports stars frequently appear on the red carpet at awards shows, celebrations and movie premieres. A few female sports stars — Serena, Megan, arguably Simone and Naomi — even make that seamless transition themselves.
Maybe if there were more women’s sports movies, more feel-good stories of women defying the odds and achieving physical and emotional greatness, there would be more support for women on and off the field.
Sports inspire because they showcase the limitlessness of human potential. People compete, with others and themselves, and within constraints — rules, space, time limits, laws of physics. Unlike a mathematician solving a complicated proof for the first time, or a professional writing an outstanding email, there is an audience who cares (sometimes too much) about the outcome.
Though they may not show up on the big screen, inspirational stories of women breaking barriers in sports abound, and more are written every day. Just this month, Kate Madigan has become the sixth female assistant general manager ever in the NHL; Sydney McLaughlin smashed her own world record in the 400-meter hurdles; and next Sunday women cyclists and football players will compete in the final stage of the Tour de France Femmes and the Women’s European Championship.
We do not know yet if these stories will make great sports movies — if they will have the requisite happy ending for our chosen protagonists. I will cheer for these athletes, and hope the movie industry cements their stories in our culture.
