Six days after the Watergate break-in, with a 1,000-watt smile suggesting he hadn’t a care on this or any other world’s horizon, Richard Nixon chiseled into his legacy one of the most transformative acts of his doomed presidency.
On June 23, 1972, 50 years ago this Thursday, the 37th president put his autograph on Title IX of the Education Amendments, capsizing the essential demographics of American sport right down to its chromosomes.
“I was too young to pay attention to it, hear about it, have any understanding of what was happening,” said Olympian point guard Suzie McConnell of the Brookline basketball dynasty, who wouldn’t be 6 for another month. “When I started playing sports, I literally started on a boys basketball team, at Our Lady of Loretto, for two years, and I played Little League Baseball because we didn’t have a girls basketball team and we didn’t have a softball program, but then they started seeing all the interest in girls wanting to play, so they started a girls team, started a softball program, and those were some of the changes I started to see as a young girl not even understanding the effect of Title IX.”
As a record-breaking All-American at Penn State, a two-time Olympic medalist (Gold in Seoul, 1988), a professional athlete and a collegiate head coach, few women have had such a crystalline view of the effect of Title IX as McConnell. A particular focus for the former Pitt and Duquesne coach was the demonstrated notion that freedoms and rights and benefits like those afforded female athletes by Title IX, from that historic day 50 years ago, required constant advocacy.
Parallels to the struggles of the civil rights movement are thus inescapable to the social scientists and point guards of both genders in the new century.
“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability,” said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “but comes through continuous struggle.”
At Penn State in the late ‘80s, McConnell first understood that struggle and the face of advocacy for it.
“Coaches of that time were all about Title IX, and I remember seeing firsthand how they fought for their student-athletes,” McConnell said. “Just trying to get them to be treated equal and for things like pay for women’s coaches. If you look at that, on the women’s side, coaches are getting paid so much more than what they were back then. Coaches in that era were really fighting for those kinds of things.”
The fight, of course, never ends, cannot end, because even a half century of seismic rumblings on the question of who gets what (the very academic definition of politics when I was in college) has left peaks and craters in the landscape of compensation.
It’s wonderful, miraculous, historic that on June 1 of this year, the U.S Women’s National Team’s union lawyers finally negotiated a pay scale for its soccer players that was equal to the men’s team; wonderful, miraculous, historic that World Cup money will henceforth be pooled, that per-game bonuses will be equal, that commercial benefits like sponsorships and media rights will be split down the middle, but Brittney Griner remains detained in Russia.
Griner isn’t a soccer player, granted, but she’s a star for the Phoenix Mercury of the WNBA and shouldn’t have to be playing in Russia to supplement her income. Do you think Steph Curry’s level of compensation requires some degree of moonlighting? More pointedly, what if it were Steph Curry “wrongfully detained” according to the State Department, his detention extended a third time by Russian propogandists?
Empowered to whatever extent you would describe by Title IX and 50 years of ripples, women have come to know that the more you have to agitate for equality, the more you have to be aware of people trying to steal it back.
If the culture war in full progress has targeted voting rights and abortion rights, among so many others, it’s not likely to balk at the hard-won notion that women should have equal facilities and rewards from March Madness.
That, of course, riotously undersells what is actually at stake. There’s a dubious journalism protocol that insists these stories are best told with numbers, so if we must, consider that there are close to four million girls playing high school sports, about 12 times as many as in the 1971-72 school year. Then consider what that really means outside the numerology.
“My philosophy about sports — and I’ve experienced it and seen it over all these years — is about what sports participation can do for people in terms of lifetime benefits,” said Donna Sanft, the long-time Pitt administrator and advocate. “I was at Pitt long enough that I worked with some students and then I worked with their children. I did get to see the benefits to the men as well as the women who participated, and you know as well as I do that this is about personal development as well as physical development.
“I’m sure there are other activities that people can learn these skills in, but sports is a really exceptional arena to learn a lot of these skills — resilience and overcoming obstacles, the important of preparation — these things, they sound trite but they’re so true. How to be a great team member, value your teammates, leadership, how to compete. So many important life lessons. I’ve seen this from so many different angles. I have seen so many women and men take those skills and then make that transition to their futures, and utilize all of it to go after their dreams, build their careers and their families and be active in their communities.”
All of this was pretty much unavailable to half the population until this day in 1972. To the people to whom that seemed most ridiculous, June 23 could not come fast enough.
I asked Sanft if she remained hopeful that progress will be maintained on equality and opportunity for women and transgender athletes, for whom Title IX benefits were also extended, or that she feared a rollback in the current climate.
She said she was confident in the movement’s progress, as did McConnell.
“The way I’m looking at it, there are just too many women with the platform to continue to fight for it,” McConnell said. “When you look at professional soccer, WNBA, looking at tennis, these professional athletes have the platform and will continue to fight. I don’t think it will change in a bad way, and obviously we all hope for that.”
Title IX made things better in a thousand ways from the moment Nixon finished the “n” on that signature line, all of it made possible by strong women. God bless them.
Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com and Twitter @genecollier.
First Published: June 23, 2022, 9:00 a.m.
Updated: June 23, 2022, 3:58 p.m.
