Leave No Little Girl With a Soccer Ball Behind

There’s a scene in the 1995 film “The American President” when POTUS -- the President of the United States in West Wing shorthand, Michael Douglas in the movie -- gets buttonholed at a party by a man named Gill.

Gill: Mr. President, militant women are out to destroy college football in this country.

President: Is that a fact?

Gill: Have you been following this situation down in Atlanta? These women want parity for girls’ softball, field hockey, volleyball....

President: If I’m not mistaken, Gill, I think the courts ruled on Title IX about 20 years ago.

Gill: Yes sir, but now I’m saying these women want that law enforced.

President: Well, it’s a world gone mad, Gill.

Boy, isn’t it, Gill? The script says that Gill is wearing a green blazer. Maybe he pinched it from a closet at the Masters golf tournament.

I don’t know what was going on in Atlanta, Ga., to put a burr under Gill’s saddle when that movie was made eight years ago, but what’s going on in Augusta, Ga., this week is the Masters, and the protests by women who think they ought to be able to join the Augusta National Golf Club -- as the opening round, perhaps, to playing in the Masters, to the day one of those green jackets will have darts in front.

Up in the Yankee capital of Washington, D.C., on Monday, 200 people crowded into a hearing room, but the bipartisan array of members of Congress -- including California Democrats Nancy Pelosi, George Miller, Lynn Woolsey and Hilda Solis -- weren’t the stars that the sportswriters and 8-year-old girls had come to see. They were there for the Title IX babies, soccer’s Mia Hamm, star of the “Title IX Team,” the U.S. women’s World Cup champs, and Olympic gold-medal gymnast Dominique Dawes, who declared, “We have many wars that we’re fighting now. This should not be one of them.”

I wish they could’ve heard from Gurinder Chadha, director and co-writer of “Bend It Like Beckham,” the fine little film about a soccer-mad Sikh girl in London. Chadha told me last week that the film has come to be regarded as a kind of recruiting poster for girls’ soccer, and that women’s teams around the United States are using it as a Title IX rallying cry.

If Title IX is common enough for a Hollywood film, I expect you already know what it is, but in case you don’t, it requires equal gender opportunity in academics and athletics by any outfit that cashes a federal check.

Richard Nixon signed it into law in 1972, which was just about the last time a Republican administration thought it was a really swell idea. Ronald Reagan’s first Education secretary wrote in his memoirs that mid-level administration officials sniggered at Title IX as the “lesbians’ bill of rights.”

The present White House hates anything it imagines has a whiff of quota to it. And President Bush got a Title IX earful from some conservatives of the Phyllis Schlafly school -- she was the mother of six who traveled 300 days a year making speeches telling other women to stay home with their children -- who deep down probably suspect all that running and sweating is just unladylike.

They must have a sneaking fondness for the Connecticut judge who declared in 1971, “Athletic competition builds character in our boys. We do not need that kind of character in our girls.”

Monday’s informal hearings were held because of formal hearings by a panel assembled by Education Secretary Rod Paige to take a second look at Title IX. Some Title IX supporters -- including a couple on the panel -- found the panel’s report ominous in its vagueness, and worry that Paige will use his administrative power to pull the plug on the Title IX provision most schools use to prove they’re obeying the law: equal numbers and equal dollars in sports spending between men and women.

Rep. Solis, of El Monte, remembers Mrs. Thomas, her phys ed instructor, teaching her to play tennis -- “a Latina playing tennis, hello!” -- and thinks it’s “disheartening” that after “30 years of progress, they want to dismantle it now, when we still don’t have parity, even at high schools.”

Although Title IX is widely flouted, it still gets the blame when a men’s sports program is cut. But it’s the schools, not the law, that choose to make Title IX a zero-sum dollar game. Universities regularly suck up to moneybag alums, pouring millions into marquee men’s sports, bankrupting less popular men’s sports and then crying, “Title IX made me do it.”

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To this day, I believe I did not win a Rhodes scholarship because of the athletic requirement. My sport was croquet. (Rhodes scholar Bill Clinton’s athletic qualification was that he chaired Georgetown’s Student Athletic Commission. He probably batted .400 with the gavel.)

Women’s sports have flourished under Title IX. Millions play in high school where thousands had before. In 1972, $100,000 was doled out in women’s sports scholarships. Now it’s nearing $200 million. A famous study concluded that girls who play sports are 92% less likely to do drugs, 80% less likely to have an unwanted pregnancy. They have better body images, less depression, may even stay in school longer and score better on tests.

One of my cousins has three daughters, all sports stars. The 23-year-old, Tracey Milburn, earned basketball and soccer scholarships to UCLA. She just spent a couple of years as a forward with the Washington Freedom team of the WUSA soccer league, where screaming little girls begged for her autograph.

“It gives you self-confidence, and I was one of the better athletes on the team, so I guess it gave me leadership skills too,” she said. A Cal State Northridge college football player she knows blames Title IX for cutting out his sport. “He saw using it as an outlet to place the blame on,” she said, but “I don’t understand why they’re placing the blame on Title IX as something negative for guys -- it’s not something negative for guys, it’s positive for women.”

In the Capitol building on Monday, Mia Hamm reduced it to bumper-sticker clarity: “So many people use the phrase ‘Our children are our future.’ I’ve never seen a sidebar or a side note that says it’s just for little boys.”

The administration would do well to tread lightly here, keeping in mind that massive, swing-voter population of soccer moms -- and the fact that those kids they drive to practice aren’t just boys.

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is [email protected].