John Nieman
Regular visitors to this place are, no doubt, keenly aware of my political leanings. Like most people, I think of myself as right thinking and middle of the road. But I have to confess that I have on various occasions be referred to as a “Commie socialist” and” left of Lenin.”
Those opinions may very well be true, but it took me a long time to get there. I have confessed in this space that my stance regarding gays was pretty much Neanderthal in my youth. Something of which I am quite ashamed.
The very same can be said of my early years’ position on women’s sports. I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s and women’s sports were something of an oddity. I remember my first encounter was not until high school. The women’s basketball and softball teams wore dresses as their uniforms. And in basketball, for some strange reason, two players had to stay on the defensive side when their team was attacking.
My arrival at UNC Chapel Hill changed so much of that. I came thinking I was some kind of progressive liberal and realized I fell far short.
And eventually I came upon the UNC women’s soccer team. I’ve written in a previous column about my admiration for Coach Anson Dorrance’s remarkable success with that team. I would often tell visitors to Chapel Hill who wanted to understand the sport of soccer to just go watch our women’s team play. It was truly a different sport from the men’s.
Men’s soccer in the ‘70s and ‘80s was basically unarmed warfare. Slide tackling was the norm. Referees closely inspected players cleats before each match for good reason. In my life, I’ve played pretty much every sport there is in this country and the most horrific injuries I’ve seen were inflicted during soccer matches.
Not the women ‘s game. It was and remains tactical, precise and beautiful to watch.
And not to take away anything from Coach Dorrance’s skills, one of the major reasons UNC women’s soccer was so dominant was that they offered comparable scholarships to the men.
Institutional gender equity in sport should be such a simple thing to achieve. Offer all of the same opportunities in sport to everyone. Scholarships, facilities, equipment and staff pay should be equal.
The introduction of NIL to collegiate sports should make this even easier. Payments to athletes may widely vary for their name, image and likeness, but the infrastructure provided by the institutions can and should be equal.
And when I refer to institutions, I’m talking about educational programs and national teams. Professional sports are governed by the market.
For the schools and national teams, the fact that one gender’s team generates more income for the school or national federation should not govern how much is spent by gender. Those organizations are supposed to be dedicated to the success of everyone, no matter what their gender.
And as much as I want to say that it is simple, one has to address the issue of transgender athletes. That is not so simple. One easy way to go is to deny the existence of transgender identification. To say that it is just not a thing and to suggest that an athlete is pretending to be another gender in order to gain an advantage.
I just can’t accept that. And as a culture I believe we should not.
But life is about perspective and I cannot deny or merely dismiss the perspective of the athlete who is competing against a transgender opponent and feels unfairly treated. I certainly don’t agree that the answer is to make it a national issue so that the Ted Cruzes of the world can weigh in with their opinion, but I also believe it should be considered.
As should the perspective of the transgender athlete. Where does equity lie? I just don’t know.
On a completely different topic, UNC has completely botched their handling of Coach Mack Brown. I’m sure there are legal and institutional issues of which we’re not aware which resulted in this fiasco, but I am hard-pressed to understand what they could possibly be. I cannot for the life of me understand why the announcement could not have waited until the end of the post season.
They clearly did not have a particular candidate in mind. And if their reasoning for dispatching Coach Brown is that he is an old guy who cannot accept his aging and for whom the game has passed him by, I cannot get my head around even considering Bill Belichick, a guy at the same age with a 24-year-old girlfriend.
Martha and I returned from a fantastic Thanksgiving in the Bahamas with our family. So much to be thankful for. It has been a long journey from the mobile home park in Orange County to a 14-place Thanksgiving dinner table in Nassau. Fat Boy index: 287.