This is a cross post with FierceAndNerdy.com.

A couple weeks ago the New York Times ran an article about the disparity between boys and girls’ sports.

Schools have made great strides towards scholastic athletic equality since the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Although Title IX made no specific reference to athletics and in fact covers any school program, it’s most prominent effect has been to equalize expenditures on boys’ and girls’ athletics for any institution receiving federal funding. Even beyond the direct dollars spent, Title IX has had a profound on girls’ sports participation. Witness the rise of the WNBA and of the Women’s Final Four as a televised event. They may not draw the fans and advertising dollars of the men, but twenty years ago their success would have been unfathomable.

According to the Times article, “50 percent of girls in the suburbs described themselves as ‘moderately involved’ athletes,” compared to 54 percent of boys. Those are nearly even numbers.

In that statement, however, lies the rub: “in the suburbs”. The point of the Times article is that in urban areas, female athletic participation suffers greatly; only 36 percent of girls, compared to 56% of boys, in the city consider themselves “moderately involved” in sports.

Continue Reading Fierce And Nerdy: Girls vs Boys = City vs Suburbs?

I was a very lucky kid.

When I was 10 years old, my Old Man built a 60 foot two-hooped basketball court in our back yard. My parents had a feeling I might be difficult to handle—I can’t imagine what gave them that idea—and this was their ingenious way of keeping me close to home.

The strategy worked. For much of the next 6-7 years, many school nights and countless summer days were spent at Porp’s house playing a pick-up game of basketball. Everybody thought my dad was god and all were secretly happy my mother would have fewer opportunities to make them shudder when she called me in for dinner….

“Garyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.”

It was a unique screech that reverberated throughout the neighborhood. (Rumor has it one of her ear-shattering bellows woke a dying neighbor from a coma one October evening—but that’s another column.)

The stage was set for a memorable phase of my childhood. All the neighborhood kids thought I was cool. Even the older or bigger ones treated me with respect because if they couldn’t play at my house they had to trek a half-mile to the junior high and shoot baskets into bent, net-less hoops.

There were a few drawbacks. The cement was unforgiving if a player took a tumble. Someone’s parents, too often my mom, were always nearby. The typical prepubescent cursing and gesturing was prohibited. One side of the court was bordered by a steep hill fraught with “jaggers”, poison ivy, and wasp nests, and it was agreed the suckiest player had to retrieve any wayward ball.

As Fate would have it, that suckiest player was damn near always your humble columnist.

Continue Reading Dear Diary… Why I Hate Basketball

Several months ago I commented upon a Yahoo! Sports article on Hasheem Thabeet and his importance to his native Tanzania, an article which really hit home for me having lived in that country two years myself.

It may not have quite the personal connotations for me, but Yahoo! has done it again with Todd Pitman’s piece on the difference former NBA-player Ndongo Ndiaye is making in his home country of Senegal. It’s a wonderful story about one basketball player realizing just how blessed he is and using those gifts off the court to better the world around him.

The similarity between the two tales is striking.

Continue Reading Sports Bright: The Beauty of Sports Redux

One of the twin titans of baseball power, reviled by fans everywhere, is finally retiring.

Donald Fehr will step down. (Sing to the tune of “Casey at the Bat”.)

Fehr announced on Monday that he will leave his position as the head of the Major League Baseball Players Association no later than next March–a position he has held since December 1983. Fehr has already given his recommendation that Michael Weiner, the union’s general counsel, be named his successor.

Fehr has been demonized by fans for the 1994 players’ strike and the stratospheric rise in players’ salaries which, when coupled with the lack of a salary cap, has resulted in the extreme financial inequities between the baseball haves and have-nots. More recently, his resistance to performance-enhancing drug testing has earned him the ire of all but those players using steroids.

Baseball fans love Donald Fehr as much as they do MLB Commissioner Bud Selig–which is to say not at all.

The big question is, what will Fehr’s retirement mean for the game? Could things possibly change? Will Weiner be willing to take those steps necessary to better the game that Fehr would not?

Continue Reading And There Was Much Rejoicing…

The Lakers’ victory parade is today, at a cost of $2 million. Half of that is to be covered by the Lakers organization; the other half by the city.

Although a certain hardcore Lake Show fanatics couldn’t care less from where the money came, another sizable percentage of Los Angeles residents–Lakers fans among them–were understandably upset at the initial announcement that the city would be kicking in any money. Like much of the country, Los Angeles is in a financial crisis, with many workers being laid off. How could the city justify $1 million for a parade?

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa then announced that “private donors” had been found to cover the city’s share. And the protests diminished.

But should they? That the decision to use public monies in this time of need was ever made at all is highly disturbing.

And isn’t it sad that these “private donors” consider a sports victory parade a worthy cause to which to contribute? How about giving that money to the city to save jobs?

Where are our priorities?

Continue Reading Rain on the Parade