Grappling with Title IX
GABLE, DAN
Grappling with Title IX Gender politics and the Olympics. BY DAN GABLE EVERY FOURTH SUMMER, athletes seek to remind us that the Olympic ideal soars above politics and brings the world together...
...For this the commissioners were greeted with accusations of sexism, even though most of them were women themselves...
...We seldom know one another's favorite candidates...
...Surely we can all find some middle ground to restore common sense and fairness to the law...
...That's because, for some people, the competition serves as a ready-made opportunity to praise Title IX, the federal anti-discrimination law that has acquired an ideological choke hold on amateur sport...
...An article in the Washington Post called Title IX opponents "a bunch of sad sacks...
...You would be hard pressed to find anyone in this country more devoted to the athletic spirit and the opportunity to compete than college coaches...
...One provision already in Title IX says that schools can comply by seeing to it that the number and size of sports programs reflect the level of interest...
...During my years as an Olympic wrestler, the shadow of the Cold War loomed over the games...
...Any elected official who stands up to make a principled argument that gender quotas have no place in a system of equal opportunity is sure to be called a sexist for their efforts...
...It is not done in collegiate dance, or engineering, or nursing, or even college enrollment, where the gender breakdown is 56 percent women to 44 percent men...
...Proportionality may sound harmless, but it isn't...
...There are fair-minded Americans, men and women alike, who care about preserving Title IX and applying it even-handedly...
...Slandering them as sexist or ignorant is one of the cheapest, dirtiest forms of politics...
...Kent State Hockey...
...Because of the unreasonable way federal athletics law is enforced, school administrators fear that only by making their rosters proportional to the gender breakdown of the student body can they be safe from government investigation and trial lawyers...
...UMass gymnastics has had to hang 'em up...
...Americans cannot expect continued dominance by their athletes abroad if they allow continued elimination of college teams at home...
...To make the team "proportional" (the U.S...
...They are making a valid case and are offering real, workable solutions that will allow all athletes the same chance to compete...
...But on Title IX reform, the coaches, working together as the College Sports Council, have been met with a bare-knuckle Washington fight, filled with some of the most hostile language of the gender activist movement...
...His senior year, Illinois State University, rather than add a women's program, dropped its wrestling team...
...Grappling with Soviet wrestlers, many people thought, epitomized a larger, worldwide struggle...
...At Southern Methodist University, just last month, two dozen athletes on the men's track team were told to hand in their spikes for good...
...A broad majority of the presidential commissioners want common-sense reform to prevent this spiteful practice...
...Such sharp language, unfortunately, has everything to do with why the law is so slow to reform...
...They deserve to be heard...
...Imagine that at the recent opening ceremonies of the Athens Games, the 282 men and 263 women who marched out under the American flag had had the current Title IX rules applied on the spot...
...The gender activist groups are demanding we impose an athlete quota based on college enrollment, even if you have to eliminate male athletes just to make those numbers balance...
...The three sports that bring home the most Olympic medals for the United States—swimming, track, and wrestling—have been hit the hardest...
...The heart of the issue is the difference between fair opportunity and equal outcome...
...We don't have political action committees and probably haven't made many campaign contributions...
...In this Olympiad, the achievements and aspirations of some of our finest athletes are being tarnished by hostilities of a different sort—American gender politics...
...Of course, that's not always how it works out...
...That terrible ritual, complete with tears and disbelief, is playing out on college campuses year after year...
...Why no calls for proportionality in college enrollment...
...On the women's side, meanwhile, nearly every accomplishment is chalked up to Title IX, even though the law played no role in many of those sterling athletic careers...
...They believe deeply in the original intent of Title IX—equal opportunity for everyone—but they are concerned about the destruction it has brought to many fine sports programs...
...The coaches believe that there should be opportunities for all male and female athletes, no matter how many or how few show up to play...
...Consider what happened to wrestler Kevin Bracken, a member of the 2000 Olympic team...
...UCLA's men's swimming team, whose members have won scores of Olympic medals, is gone...
...The coaches are not that big on politics...
...Not only our current college programs, but our future Olympic teams will suffer, too, as the pools from which the United States recruits and develops its athletes and coaches are inexorably drained...
...It is no more...
...The university of Miami's diving program, which produced Greg Louganis, has also been axed...
...For men, collegiate teams have been cut across the board, decreasing the talent pool in sports like swimming, wrestling, track and field, and gymnastics...
...And that, to be honest, has been the toughest part...
...BY DAN GABLE EVERY FOURTH SUMMER, athletes seek to remind us that the Olympic ideal soars above politics and brings the world together through the nobility of sport...
...population is 52 percent women, 48 percent men) an entire team of male athletes would have been herded aside and asked to take a seat in the stands...
...Nowhere else in our civic life would Americans tolerate a quota like the one imposed on college athletics...
...A recent presidential commission heard testimony detailing the damage Dan Gable is the former head wrestling coach at the University of Iowa, three-time Olympic coach, and an Olympic gold medalist...
...done to college sports by Title IX regulations...
...So, the commission suggested, we should find ways to measure how interested men and women are in athletics...
...And yet, many of them, men and women alike, believe Title IX is in desperate need of repair...
Vol. 9 • August 2004 • No. 47
