Christine Brennan’s Title IX Nonsense

BizzyBlog is making a temporary turn to sports because of a channel-surfing happenstance a little over a week ago.

An episode of ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” (OTL) covered Annika Sorenstam’s pursuit of the Grand Slam of women’s golf, and the upcoming third leg of the slam, the Women’s US Open. Having won the first two of the LPGA’s major tournaments in dominating fashion, it appeared that Sorenstam, who is certainly the best female golfer of this generation, and perhaps the best ever, might have a chance to accomplish this rare feat in 2005.

So OTL brought in Christine Brennan to comment on the relative lack of notoriety Annika’s pursuit of the slam has received, a true-to-an-extent observation.

Brennan proceeded to credit Title IX, a law passed 33 years ago to ensure equal opportunity for women in the United States to participate in intercollegiate sports, for the improvements in and visibility of women’s golf today vs. many years ago, and frankly seemed obsessed with making sure Title IX got mentioned at least a few times.

This struck me as odd, given that Sorenstam is from Sweden (though she starred at the University of Arizona in the early 1990s–more on that later).

A subsequent search of her articles in USA Today and elsewhere indicates that Title IX is at least a pet project for Brennan, and more like a lifetime crusade:

• This column (about halfway through) ludicrously gives Title IX partial credit for Tiger Woods’ friendship with and respect for Sorenstam’s accomplishments:
  

  “Today, 33 years after Richard Nixon signed Title IX, we can see the kind of open-minded young men that law helps produce. (without Title IX, Tiger would be an incorrigible caveman–Ed.)

• In this USAT piece, Brennan’s opening paragraph claims that Title IX “opened the playing fields of this country to the other 50% of our population.” Apparently women’s sports didn’t exist in America before 1974 (then who the heck were those people lapping me in swim practice in the late 1960s?). The column also equates an attempt to gauge interest in sports on the part of women as an all-out attack on Title IX’s cherished equal-numbers mandate (so does this website which screams “Title IX Under Attack!”).
• She even takes the time to attend Title IX symposia like this one that sing the “not enough has been done” creed. It must not hurt that there’s good money in it, often from the public trough (be nice: after all, she’s a “woman legend”).

But for Brennan, equality appears to only go so far:

• Here’s what she said when asked if prize money for men’s and women’s tennis should be equal:
  

  Yes, I absolutely think it should be equal. The old argument that the women play only three sets just doesn’t work for me. When we go to the movies, we pay the same amount whether the movie is two hours or 2 1/2 hours. Right now, the women are more interesting to watch, so yes they should be paid equally here at Wimbledon. (Does that mean if the women become less “interesting,” Christine will be at the front of the line demanding inequality?–Ed.)

• Here is her response to (in my opinion) legitimate claims that football players should be excluded from the quota-like headcounting exercises because (doh) there are no female football teams: “In this world, we don’t have three genders: men, women and football players.” The inclusion of football players in the headcounting has led to the elimination of scores of minor sports programs for men at dozens of colleges (the usual victims have been gymnastics, wrestling, swimming, and track) to get the total number of men and women participating in all intercollegiate sports equal. This column notes that in May, the University of Utah disbanded its men’s track team, so it could devote more resources to….the women’s track team!

So, since Christine is so hung up on the supreme importance of Title IX, I decided to do a little test to see how relevant it is to women’s golf today.

I reviewed the top 12 finishers at the Women’s US Open, plus Sorenstam (who ended up having a very rare poor performance) and Michelle Wie (who led after the 3rd round but shot 82 on Sunday). I looked at where they were born, where they live now, and their exposure to US intercollegiate athletics. Here’s what I found:

#1 - Birdie Kim–Korea, Korea, none
#2 - Amateur Morgan Pressel–USA, USA, None
(still in high school)
#2 - Amateur Brittany Lang–USA, USA, Duke
(currently a sophomore)
#4 - Natalie Gulbis–USA, USA, Univ. of Arizona
#4 - Lorie Kane–Canada, Canada, None
#6 - Candy Kung–Taiwan, USA, Southern Cal
#6 - Lorena Ochoa–Mexico, Mexico, Univ. of Arizona
#6 - Karine Icher–France, Switzerland, None
#6 - Young Jo–South Korea, South Korea, None
#10 - Cristie Kerr–USA, USA, None
#10 - Angela Stanford–USA, USA, Texas Christian
#10 - Karen Stupples–England, USA, Florida State
(still English citizen)
#23 - Annika Sorenstam–Sweden, USA, Univ. of Arizona
(still Swedish citizen)
#23 - Michelle Wie–USA, USA, None
(still in high school)

So, of the 14 players listed, seven (Lang, Gulbis, Kung, Ochoa, Stanford, Stupples, Sorenstam) can claim to have benefitted from US intercollegiate experience. But only three of those seven (Lang, Gulbis, Stanford) were born in the US.

So based on this admittedly limited look, here is what I see with women’s golf and Title IX:

1. Title IX has not been at all involved in the success of many US-born players (Pressel, Kerr, Wie).2. It may have led schools scrambling to meet the law’s equal-participation mandate (the inevitable result of litigation that followed the law’s passage) to bring in foreign-born players (Kung, Ochoa, Supples, Sorenstam) at taxpayers’ expense (the schools involved are state schools, and collegiate golf is either a non-revenue or money-losing sport). Although Title IX arguably helped the career progress of these women, foreign citizens were clearly not the targeted beneficiaries of the law.

3. It certainly hasn’t contributed to anything resembling American dominance of women’s golf, even though the rest of the world is “handicapped” (excuse the pun) by not having the wonders of Title IX available to it. In fact, the high-schoolers appear to be the more likely source of the elusive dominant USA female golfer, which we really haven’t had since Nancy Lopez back in the 1980s.

So, Christine Brennan, remind me again, because I’m missing something: What in the world does Title IX have to do with Swede Annika Sorenstam’s Grand Slam pursuit more than 10 years after her graduation? And what specifically has Title IX done for American women’s golf?
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UPDATE: Apparently some people have tired of Christine’s schtick:

• This message-board poster notes that Chrstine was at this year’s men’s US Open but apparently did not attend the women’s even a week later (Hmmm).
• Another notes that she writes ” same stuff over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again.”
• And this person accuses her of slanting USAT’s coverage of the Athens Summer Olympics in 2004 towards American women.

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UPDATE 2: This post is a proud participant in the Outside the Beltway traffic jam.