Spoiled Sports. - Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex, and Title IX - book review

National Review, July 1, 2002 by Kathryn Jean Lopez

Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex, and Title IX, by Jessica Gavora (Encounter, 181 pp., $24.95)

When Brandi Chastain stripped down to her sports bra after helping the U.S. team win the women's World Cup soccer championship, it was page- one news -- one of the most memorable images of 1999. As the current legend has it, neither that win, nor Chastain's display, nor indeed any victory for women's sports would ever have been possible without a law known as "Title IX."

Jessica Gavora knows the value of girls' sports. The same year Title IX was passed -- 1972 -- Gavora, author of Tilting the Playing Field, was playing fourth-grade basketball in Fairbanks, Alaska. Inspired by competition with her brother, she played basketball through high school. In grade school, she says, she had been awkward, too tall, and an "uninspired student": "What saved me was sports." Today, Gavora is chief speechwriter to attorney general John Ashcroft (and wife of National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg).

So this new book is emphatically not a polemic against girls' sports; it is, rather, the chronicle of a law that, as Gavora says, "more than any other federal law" has been "interpreted and twisted and bent outside the institutions of our electoral democracy."

Passed as an amendment to an education bill, Title IX was patterned on the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In the minds of its congressional sponsors, it actually had little to nothing to do with women's crew and men's wrestling -- or indeed any other sport. It was crafted as a general protection against discrimination, stating simply: "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." What the backers had in mind, says Gavora, was not sports but "more prosaic educational benefits, like admission to schools and programs, access to financial aid and career opportunities."

The legislators were in fact concerned about the potential for abuse of the Title IX legislation, so they included in it an explicit provision against quotas:

Nothing [in the law] shall be interpreted to require any educational institution to grant preferential or disparate treatment to the members of one sex on account of an imbalance which may exist with respect to the total number or percentage of persons of that sex participating in or receiving the benefits of any federally supported program or activity, in comparison with the total number or percentage of persons of that sex in any community, State, section, or other area.

But Title IX has come a long way, baby. Today Title IX -- which, to most Americans who have heard of it, means "women's sports" -- does exactly what that provision in the law forbade it to. Feminists are celebrating this sainted law's 30th anniversary this year -- with Lifetime cable specials, prime-time hours on ESPN handed over to quota fanatics, galas, the works (there's even a women's sports-clothing catalog named "Title 9 Sports") -- but unrecognized in most of these events will be the casualties of the Title IX numbers game: men.

As Gavora explains, this law benignly written "to end discrimination against women" has had the effect of "causing discrimination against men." The stories are all similar, and every year the casualty list gets longer -- as more and more men's high-school and college teams are eliminated to make room for women's teams. Much to the delight of feminists, the Clinton Education Department added to the Title IX law a standard that sports programs be "proportional": If a school's student population is 60 percent women and 40 percent men, the sports have to reflect that breakdown exactly -- even if 60 percent of the women don't want to play sports. Otherwise, it's Cutsville for the men -- meaning not just the team destroyed and players displaced, but student athletes often forced out of college altogether, or into a search for similar programs at other schools because they have lost precious scholarship money. Since 1972, according to the General Accounting Office, over 170 wrestling programs, 80 tennis teams, 70 gymnastics teams, and 45 track teams have been eliminated -- all men's teams. In high schools, while girls' sports have increased ninefold in the Title IX years, boys are just about where they were 31 years ago. This is the legacy of Title IX.

Sterling Martin, renowned coach of the Bowling Green University track team -- a team that has a large percentage of minority athletes, and has even produced an Olympic gold medalist -- is now out of a job at Bowling Green. He is considering ending his 15-year career as a track coach because he's not confident that there's going to be much of a future left for men's track coaches.

For Title IX, it has been a weird evolution. As Gavora points out, feminists want sports to be both separate and equal. They want separate teams, because they are not stupid: They know that most women are not going to make the cut on a justly selected co-ed team. But they also want things the same -- the "same opportunities." But how exactly are you going to guarantee that, when men and women simply aren't going to be interested in the same sports and with the same level of enthusiasm?