Women's sports deserve better

I noted the hypocrisy right away. \nOn one hand, CBS' Bonnie Bernstein, showing some responsible journalism, asked Kansas coach Roy Williams whether he was interested in the vacant coaching job at North Carolina within minutes after Williams' Jayhawks lost the national championship game to Syracuse on Monday night.\nWilliams noted that while it was responsible journalistically for Bernstein to ask the question, "as a human being," it was "insensitive," and then he punctuated with an s-bomb that one doesn't normally hear on network television.\nWhat's interesting is that the very same CBS announced last weekend that it would completely ignore the long-running Masters controversy between National Council of Women's Organizations chair Martha Burk and the Augusta National Golf Club's no-women-members policy as long as the protesters did not affect the way the players played during this weekend's tournament.\nThat is not responsible journalism.\nThen again, maybe that's a good thing. After all, has any issue in sports over the last year been more overblown? Of all the fascinating issues involving gender and sports, Augusta National's women-only is probably near the bottom.\nSo many other issues in women's sports deserve so much more of your attention. Elsewhere in Georgia, at the women's Final Four in Atlanta, Connecticut and Tennessee played for the national championship, making it the greatest interconference rivalry in the history of college basketball regardless of gender. This is the third time they have met in the championship game and the fourth time they have met in the Final Four since 1995.\nThe personal rivalry between Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma and Tennessee coach Pat Summitt -- they are the two most famous coaches in the women's game and they hate each other -- has refreshed me as a fan since rival men's coaches go out of their way to sidestep each other.\nMichelle Wie's burgeoning career has rekindled the debate of how young is too young. At 13, she finished ninth at the LPGA Kraft Nabisco Championship, the tour's first major, and her incredible length off the tee is more than comparable with other players, routinely driving the ball 300 yards.\nShe hasn't turned pro yet nor has she indicated that she will anytime soon. The last major athlete to turn pro so young was tennis player Jennifer Capriati, who turned pro at age 13 in 1990. Capriati's life and career have been messy, with the pressures of the tour leading her to drugs and a long hiatus from the game. \nEven worse, Capriati is a perfidious diva. Off the top of my head, I can't think of anybody in sports who would be more unpleasant to interview or spend time with. She's both dense and arrogant -- an unbearable duo.\nHopefully, Wie is nothing like Capriati, but the worry is that if she turns pro early to receive all the endorsement money that shoe, ball and equipment contracts provide, then she will become insufferable at a time when she could have the world wrapped around her finger.\nHopefully, Wie can handle any adoration she receives as well as Gertrude Ederle has. Ederle, 96, received word she will be inducted into the Women's Hall of Fame in October, an overdue but well-deserved honor for the first woman to swim the English Channel.\nAmong women's sports pioneers, Ederle deserves to be below only Babe Didrikson Zaharias. When she swam the English Channel, it was at a time when men still had prehistoric ideas of a woman's role in society and on the athletic field of play. Some even feared that women who played too many sports would become infertile later in life. Ederle was a trailblazer, swimming the English Channel faster than any man had at that time. She needs to be celebrated while she is still alive.\nLastly, there is Title IX, a subject that I have tried to avoid because I have trouble understanding it -- but it is a very important subject nonetheless. To put it simply, colleges have to give out athletic scholarships at the same proportional level of students at its school. For example, if 48 percent of the students are female, then 48 percent of the athletic scholarships must be given to women. Some schools have dumped men's programs such as wrestling and swimming to achieve proportionality. Amidst reports that women's college sports have taken a financial wallop, the Bush administration has considered capping women's athletic scholarships at 43 percent no matter the proportion of students and exempting football, the biggest men's sports moneymaker, from the count.\nWhatever side one lands on in the Title IX debate, issues like these should dominate conversation, not whether some bluebloods in Georgia open their country club doors for a different type of blueblood.\nThat would be responsible.