Sitting in the grandstand at high school and college basketball games, I’ve heard guys discuss how they enjoy watching women play hoops. The guys have an air of macho condescension about them. They speak of the women’s sound fundamentals, the passing and defense, the selflessness that distinguishes the women’s game from the men’s. Yet for all the surface sexual evenhandedness, they’re really just proving themselves basketball aficionados, students of the game more astute than the other guys. It’s left unspoken that women can’t jump or shoot or–most important of all to a basketball spectator–dunk like men, that there’s a whole aerial aspect lacking in the women’s game. I appreciate women’s basketball myself for the same reasons, but I’m not about to say that women play as entertaining a game as men. The explosive athleticism of a dunk is what separates today’s game from the two-handed set shot era, when basketball was largely ignored in America.
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Soccer, by nature, is a relatively two-dimensional game. It’s true that the ball leaves the ground, and a large part of what separates the top soccer players from the rest is their skill at manipulating the ball in the air, with shoulders and knees and heads. But it’s still for the most part a ground game, and for all their added speed and agility men do not play an inherently more interesting brand of soccer than women. That’s why I’ll venture–with the minimum possible machismo, I hope–that I’d rather watch the U.S. women’s soccer team play than any other team in the sport. Unfortunately, the team that just won the Women’s World Cup will probably never play as a unit again; this was a great team, full of skillful players and identifiable personalities, and as I watched them pursue the cup in their home country, I found myself not reassessing but simply remembering what it is about sport I find captivating. Like dance, it’s beautiful bodies in beautiful motion, but it adds the elements of competition, intense pressure, and drama, with unscripted characters emerging spontaneously. The Women’s World Cup final attracted more than 90,000 fans to the Rose Bowl, reportedly the largest crowd ever to see a women’s sporting event, and it set a record as the largest U.S. audience ever to watch a soccer game on TV. Rightfully so. This was a great game played by a great team.
The vaunted Chinese offense, led by Sun Wen, was shut down by the U.S. defense, which stopped the opposing rushes and picked off errant passes. The U.S. team, meanwhile, played its usual ball-control offense. Typically one player would dribble forward until confronted by an opponent, at which point she would pass laterally with no unnecessary razzle-dazzle to a teammate who would move forward until confronted and pass laterally again. The U.S. offense advanced like waves breaking on a shore. No one player dominated, not even Hamm. It was the overall team that controlled the play, so it was something of an irony that the U.S. won on a perfect sequence of five individual penalty kicks.
