Title IX plan is a win for women's sports

Desperate times call for desperate deals.

Selling a sports franchise to a casino is that kind of deal.

The NFL, so obsessed with maintaining its distance from gambling, wouldn't allow even a TV ad for Las Vegas to sully the Super Bowl. Baseball is worried that Pete Rose, under consideration for reinstatement, is still hanging out at casinos and sports books.

Leagues and college teams are forever fearful that they will be tainted by gambling, that games could be fixed and credibility lost.

Now comes the deal to sell the WNBA's defunct Orlando franchise to the Mohegan Sun casino, owned by the Mohegan Indian Tribe in Uncasville, Conn., and play home games within sound of the cheerful ka-ching of slot machines.

WNBA president Val Ackerman shrugs off this odd coupling, pointing out that the Mohegan Sun doesn't take sports bets and that the casino, with its 1,200-room hotel, spa, shops and theater, is more a family kind of place than a den of iniquity. WNBA point spreads are hardly the stuff of big-time, or small-time, gamblers.

"It doesn't present a problem for us," Ackerman said.

She's right, of course, though not everyone might be comfortable equating casinos with Disneyland.

If there is a moral issue over whether sports leagues should get cozy with casinos, it is taking a back seat to the issue of survival. The WNBA is in trouble, with attendance and salaries low, the Miami franchise also folding and the Utah team moving to San Antonio.

These are not the best of times for women's professional sports.

In soccer, the eight-team WUSA, with attendance at 7,000 a game, is hanging on but not quite capturing the public's imagination the way the women's World Cup championship team did.

Even the hugely successful WTA Tour, bolstered by the stardom of Serena and Venus Williams and coming off its best year of attendance, TV ratings, revenues and profits, has had problems. Sanex stunned the WTA by ending its overall sponsorship and nobody stepped in to take over. The WTA's chief executive officer recently resigned after only one year, as did its president, and the tour championship in Los Angeles last November drew small crowds.

The LPGA Tour is successful by every standard except the PGA Tour's, with the men garnering far higher purses and sponsorship deals.

All of which is reason to applaud the Title IX commission's vote Thursday, and to be wary of any future attack by the Bush administration on a law that is the underpinning of all women's sports.

At a time when women's sports could use all the help they can get, the last thing they need is a weakening of the 31-year-old gender equity law that has enabled them to flourish in high schools and colleges and has propelled their growth in the Olympics and pros.

In a huge victory for Title IX, a majority of the 15 commissioners appointed by Education Secretary Rod Paige voted 11-4 against abandoning proportionality of male and female athletes to the male-female student populations at schools. The commissioners deadlocked 7-7, with one absent in an early vote, on a plan to alter even slightly the proportionality standard.

Instead, they recommended changes that deal with roster spots, nonscholarship athletes and nontraditional students in measuring compliance. Some women's groups are rightfully worried that even those concessions will diminish the law's effectiveness.

"The commission has opened the door for the secretary to do a lot of damage to Title IX," said Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women's Sports Foundation. "They changed the way of counting collegiate participation. The number of male athletes will be deflated; the number of female athletes will be inflated."

Paige can follow the recommendations or toss them aside. If he and the Bush administration choose to ignore the commission and weaken compliance to Title IX, they will ultimately hurt women's sports at all levels -- as participants and fans.

Title IX needs more enforcement, not less. It should be tweaked so that it is more easily understood and applied and is not used as an excuse to cut men's wrestling, gymnastics, track and other programs. If cutbacks are needed, though, a little trimming of bloated football and men's basketball budgets could go a long way toward saving other sports.

There is no great mandate for a Bush administration assault on Title IX, which has helped boost the number of girls participating in high school sports from 294,000 in 1971 to 2.8 million last year. The number of women in college sports increased fivefold over a similar time frame.

A Gallup Poll released this week found that, among those familiar with the law, 61 percent view it favorably and are not eager to see it changed. Younger Americans who have grown up under the law's influence are the most favorable toward it, with 71 percent of those 19-29 saying it's been positive.

"A lot of people don't know what Title IX is," Frank Newport, head of the Gallup Organization, said. "But if they're familiar with it, the general reaction of everybody is to say, 'Yes, it's had a positive impact on sports. It's a good thing."'

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Steve Wilstein is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at swilstein(at)ap.org