Feminists make a stand at wrong goal - allowing girls to play high school football - Column

Insight on the News, Oct 4, 1993 by Suzanne Fields

Mom watches with fearful eyes the first day her teenage son puts on his oversize shoulder pads, helmet and cleats to try out for the high school football team.

The sight of a goalpost standing out against a cool September sky fills her heart with terror. She imagines the worst, her son unable to return home because he's lying on the field with a broken leg, a twisted spine, a cracked skull. She would cheerfully settle for a bloody nose.

Now mothers (and fathers) can start worrying about their daughters, too, as increasing numbers of young women join the huddle as tight ends, wide receivers, linebackers and cornerbacks. In Texas, where everybody, even the ladies, is a macho worshiper of the pigskin, girls are playing next to boys on the field.

Equal access to the whole 100 yards is not intended to widen the pool for better players. It's to avoid lawyers and what they can do to innocent people. Federal law forbids sex discrimination. Consequently, more than 100 high school girls are likely to find themselves at the bottom of a pileup of boys in an up-close-and-personal moment this football season.

Such application of antidiscrimination law shows how far we have come in losing sight of the essential differences between boys and girls, not to mention men and women.

Some things must be learned the hard way. Tawana Hammond, for example, wanted to be a fullback for Francis Scott Key High School in a suburb of Baltimore. She didn't get past the practice season. She suffered the loss of half her pancreas in a 1989 scrimmage. She was prepared to run with the ball and get tackled, but when she fell on an opposing player, with her pancreas taking the hit, her dreams of becoming a Friday night hero instead of cheering for Friday night heroes were over.

Last year, Hammond sued the Carroll County Board of Education for $1.5 million on the grounds that no one warned her "of the potential risks of serious and disabling injury inherent in the sport." (She must have gone to bed early on Monday nights.)

A judge dismissed the case, but it's on appeal. Young men and women who put on a helmet won't make Hammond's mistake -- and neither will their fathers and mothers -- if they read the warning label that reminds the wearer that death and paralysis lurk as potential consequences of playing football.

Fear of injury hasn't deterred Becky DeLeon, a tight end for Laredo United in Texas, who says she can handle the vulgarities of trash talk at the line of scrimmage, but that she didn't like it at all when a player for Laredo United South winked at her.

Such macho behavior raises fascinating possibilities for new penalties: five yards for a wink, 10 yards for offensive holding (hands) and 15 yards for a completed pass. Female fullbacks and distaff defenses will give pass interference an entirely new meaning. No cuddle in the huddle. A flirt can get hurt. Tarts can't start. Shall we throw the bomb to the bombshell?

Equal opportunity football creates provocative questions for sex litigation, too. Can a female tight end charge sexual harassment if the quarterback gives her the ritual pat on the bottom? Or can she charge sexual discrimination if he doesn't? If a guy holds back from tackling a girl because he doesn't want to hurt her, is he a knight or a nerd? And how offensive can a line be?

Such questions, of course, defy common sense. The reason girls and boys don't play contact sports together is because girls are more likely to hurt. Boys are bigger and more aggressive. Whether the girls like it or not, boys can hit harder. (Ask any boy's sister.)

When women reduce arguments over equality to requiring equal time on the playing field, they render legitimate feminism absurd. Fair lady is not fair game.