This essay covered the topic of female sports writers and sports casters. One woman in particular was Winifred Black. She was the first woman in sports reporting and she attended boxing matches. The essay called to attention the way that she interviewed boxers and the types of questions that she asked them. When she interviewed them, she asked questions about how they feel during competition instead of about their approach to the fight or about their tactics during the fight. It also connected her to the way that women in sports were rising and how the sports world was changing.

There were some very interesting topics that were discussed in this article. I was fascinated to learn that there were so few women broadcasters. I never thought about it, but the sports shows that are shown can definitely paint a negative image of women and minorities for young, immature viewers. I got to thinking and every Lysol commercial that I’ve seen is shown with a woman doing housework. However, I don’t think that it is meant to do so.

There are also points that were made that I found completely irrelevant. As far as professional wrestling commentary using wording such as violent and aggressive, that is what pro-wrestling is! In the sport of football, the game is designed to be played physically and aggressively. When broadcasters support athletes for making a good, strong, aggressive play it shouldn’t be looked upon as a negative. I don’t think that these paint an aggressive or sexist viewpoint for younger audiences.

This article contained some very good points. How do we consider athletes different than any other person? I remember when my former geography and government/economics teacher got word that his wife was headed to the hospital because her water broke. He went running out of the classroom and out the door to his car and sped off. I thought that it was great that he was so anxious to be there for his wife and the birth of his child. But when Romo did the exact same thing, people ridiculed him simply because his team was in the playoffs. I personally find this to be ridiculous. I can’t believe that anyone would think that it was more important for someone to be at his job than to bear witness to the birth of his child. People need to understand that there are some things that are more important in life than sports! Being a father and husband are far more important than being a talented athlete and being there for your team.

Reading this story, along with a few other discussions in both this class and my spanish course have been fairly upsetting. I have come to realize that in nearly every expert’s opinion, women are discriminated against. Frankly, I disagree. When the author makes the point of there being so many derogatory names directed towards women, he explicitly leaves out all of the derogatory names that exist for men (e.g. bastard, ass hole, douche bag, etc…). It is extremely upsetting that no one seems to realize that people are just as derogatory towards men as they are towards women. As for the point made of the NCAA tournament being marked as the “women’s” tournament, this is completely false now. As we read in a previous assignment, broadcasters explicitly avoid marking it as such. And that was in 2002. A full decade ago! Now a days, there is far less marking of names than in the late 20th century. This subtle contradiction is angering and makes me question the reliability of this work. Maybe it’s time for us to conduct some new studies and come up with new results. Maybe, instead of focusing on what the traditional viewpoints of the past have been, we need to work together as a society, not man and woman, to move forward. If people stopped complaining about how women have been treated in the past and just open their eyes for a moment they could see that the world has changed!

I had never even considered attire to be a major issue of sports until I read this article because it isn’t a big issue for our time. I hadn’t thought about how women in the 19th century would have rode bicycles in those long skirts. And a corset? Forget about it. Also, maneuverability is of such importance in every sport imaginable that the way women would have been expected to dress is just plain ridiculous. I found it interesting how there were journals and articles designed to inform women on how to participate in, dress for, and improve themselves in certain sports. We have known how to play these sports and what to wear for them since we were little, but back then, everything was just breaking the horizon. I thought the author seemed very knowledgable on the subject and made some very good points.

I found great difficulty in finding the overall motive for this article. I think that the author made some good points as far as how women have been perceived in sports throughout the years. However, I feel that the information provided about what sportswomanship is compared to sportsmanship was irrelevant. The most recent resource that was sited in the article was from 2001, that is over a decade ago. When they are talking about what sportsmanship means versus sportswomanship I couldn’t help but think that things are looked at differently now. I was also made upset when the author talked about how women in sports were influenced into thinking less about sportsmanship than winning by male coaches. I know of plenty collegiate female coaches who value winning just as much as any male coach of any sport that I have ever met. It doesn’t matter whether you are coached my a man or a woman, winning is always going to be important because if they don’t win, their job is in jeopardy.