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>From globeandmail.com, Wednesday, October 23, 2002

Stifling female athletes poor sportsmanship

ROY MacGREGOR



 One cannot help but wonder just how far we have really come.

It will soon be 80 years since Gertrude Ederle swam the English Channel two hours faster than any man had ever managed the difficult crossing; and ever since, women have dominated the sport of long-distance swimming.


It will, in a matter of months, be 30 years since Billy Jean King whipped Bobby Riggs in tennis; and, today, women's tennis is not only far more compelling to watch than men's, but the serve of Serena Williams is comparable to that of Andre Agassi.


A woman golf professional, Connecticut's Suzy Whaley -- who uses her mother as a caddie -- has qualified to play in next year's Greater Hartford Open and become, if she wishes, the first woman ever to play in a PGA Tour event.


But Hayley Wickenheiser, the best woman hockey player in the world, cannot play for a mediocre men's team in Merano, Italy, because, well, the Italian Ice Hockey Federation has ruled it might get a bit too rough for a girl.


It's been almost a half century since Abigail Hoffman had to tuck her hair tight and pose as "Ab" Hoffman to play Ontario minor hockey, more than a decade since Manon Rheaume was allowed to play goal for a period of exhibition hockey by the Tampa Bay Lightning -- yet still they are saying men's hockey is out of bounds for a 23-year-old who has been playing at the top international level since she was 15, who is so strong and powerful that other top-level women players treat her like a runaway train when she sets her eyes on a loose puck.


It makes no sense.


Women's hockey, as the 2002 Winter Olympics showed, has come a long way and still has a long way to go. There are only two truly competitive teams, the Americans and the gold-medal-winning Canadians, with several of the other countries actually in retreat from where they were in Nagano in 1998, the first year women's hockey became a medal sport.


The Japanese did not bother. The Finns had slipped. But the greatest shock came from Sweden, a country that has, in so many other areas, set the world standard for equality of sexes.


The Swedish women gave serious consideration before Salt Lake City to bailing entirely. Not only was ice time denied them, but the head of the Swedish Ice Hockey Federation, Rickard Fagerlund, openly condemned their game, saying a woman's place was in the home, not the hockey dressing room.


You begin to see what Hayley has been up against.


There is, and long has been, a simmering hostility against women in hockey. The more boorish attitude is to go on about the game being barely at the level of male Double-A peewee hockey, that having no body contact renders it roughly the equal of old-timers hockey, that they're just a bunch of lesbians anyway -- a sad prejudice only reinforced when former hockey Olympian Nancy Drolet married her partner, Nathalie, in a Quebec civil ceremony.


The boorish talk is easily dismissible, but it is also important to concede that women's hockey is not NHL hockey, nor will it ever be. It is, in fact, a different game altogether, just as women's tennis differs from men's and, as with tennis, the women's game has pluses that the men's game needs to admire. Women's hockey is far more team-oriented, is far more open to passing than obstruction, is less ludicrously violent and has much more flow to it.


What it needs is precisely what Hayley is seeking: better shooting, faster skating, higher skills. Whatever improvements she might have gained in Italy would ultimately have been passed on.


Development requires both opportunity and time. France St-Louis, who played with Hayley in Nagano before retiring to go into broadcasting, has said that patience is essential. "Don't forget 50 years ago," she said in Salt Lake City, "when the men were winning games 22-0. Give us a chance. It's only our second Olympics."


Too many males, however -- including the lunkheads who run the Italian Ice Hockey Federation -- fail to understand that notion. It takes time, but it will come. Even if Hayley has to take her ambitions elsewhere.


I speak with some small authority on this matter. For several years now I have been writing a series for children called The Screech Owls, and while this is not a promotion for the books, it is most assuredly one for the young readers, who see things differently.


The star of this peewee hockey team is a girl, Sarah, who centres the top line with two boys.


A million books, thousands of letters and e-mails from young readers.


And the number of complaints about a girl being on the town's top team?


Exactly zero.






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