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It is the rare female athlete indeed whose performance on the field of play makes the jaw drop of a guy in a ratty T-shirt with a beer in one hand and a hot dog in the other.
Laura Davies achieved this feat at the LPGA Championship a decade ago, when two golf fans matching the above description craned their necks to watch her drive soar high over their heads and fall exactly where she wanted it to land. I didn't watch the drive. I watched the guys and noted for the first time in my career an example of one of the rarest events in spectator sports: the average Joe's awe over a female athlete's power.
Women athletes exhibit power all the time, not that the beer-and-hot dog guys pay much attention. Some might ask why we in turn pay attention to these guys. I'd wonder myself if it didn't seem that these were the people who congregate in front of their TV sets to watch sports more often than any other subset of our population.
This summer, these stereotypical Real Men Who Love Sports are focusing on Michelle Wie. They aren't watching her because she's a girl or because she's 15 or because she's tall and attractive. Well, maybe they are, just a little. But mostly, they are watching her because, in the vernacular of sports, she's a girl who can dunk.
They are drawn to their TV, or race ahead to get close to the gallery ropes at the next tee, because she can hit the 350-foot home run. She can serve 120 miles per hour. She can throw the deep ball.
They watch because she is powerful the way professional male athletes always are described as powerful. When she hits the ball 300 yards off the tee, their mouths fall open. In this way, she is not a stereotypical female athlete. She is a golfer, a peer of Tiger Woods. She is, simply, an athlete who happens to be a woman.
This is why Michelle Wie is making more history than even she realizes, by simply attracting the guys so they can see with their own eyes just how far she hits the ball.
"This is a big deal because the typical sports fan is looking at her as a legitimate athlete," said Donna Lopiano, CEO of the Women's Sports Foundation. "With Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, people focused on sexism and typical roles. Thirty years later, we are looking at the power of Michelle Wie and Annika and Venus and Serena."
We've all heard people denigrate women's basketball because it's slower and different from the men's game. How many times has someone criticized the WNBA or college game because there basically still is no dunking? For those looking to drag down women's sports -- and those people seem to come out of the woodwork all the time -- the visual comparison matters, with little or no thought given to those oft-ignored concepts of teamwork, passing, strong defense and acting like a role model.
Role models, schmo models, our stereotypical sports guy will tell you. Give me power. Give me strength. Give me big drives and home runs and exclamation points. This is why they watch Tiger -- and why, this summer, they are watching Wie and Paula Creamer and Annika Sorenstam on the LPGA tour. It should come as no surprise that viewership of the 2005 U.S. Women's Open final round was up 68% from last year.
Wie has come close to winning an LPGA event twice in the past two months, and she nearly made the cut on the PGA Tour three weeks ago. That helps, but when trying to gain the attention of the true guy sports fan, raw power matters most. When Wie was coming within three victorious matches of winning the men's Amateur Public Links and receiving an invitation to The Masters, she not only occasionally drove the ball 300 yards, she once hit a 3-iron 220 yards out of a divot to birdie a hole. Golfers love to retell stories like that. Usually they are talking about what Tiger did, or Phil Mickelson, or John Daly.
That they are telling that kind of tale about a woman might be a first not only in golf, but in all sports.
"Let's say she's a 15-year-old boy playing in men's tournaments, in the Amateur Public Links and winning these matches, or coming within strokes of missing the cut in a PGA tournament," Mickelson told reporters at the British Open. "When I was 17 I couldn't come close to making a cut, and at the time I was doing very well in junior golf. I just can't believe any 15 year old, especially a young girl, could be doing what she's doing. I can't fathom it. It's just amazing."
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