Samantha Gordon believes in life, liberty, and the pursuit of football.
The 14-year-old, along with six other female football players, filed a Title IX suit against several Utah school districts, as reported by Breitbart News’s Susan Berry last week.
After playing in a Utah girls’ tackle football league, Gordon wants to play on a female tackle football team in high school. Since no girls’ tackle football team exists, Gordon wants Herriman High School to create one for her. Her father, an attorney, organized a lawsuit to that end.
“Girls can do anything the boys can do,” Ms. Gordon tells Bleacher Report. “We can hit just as hard, we can run just as fast, we can throw just as far.”
But they cannot, which helps explains why the demand for girls’ football hovers somewhere around the appetite for boys’ beauty pageants. The clichés Ms. Gordon mistakes for truths mirror the public response to the rough game. Football? Concussions! Neanderthals! Women’s football? Grrrl power! Progressive!
Five years ago, I attended a number of practices for a women’s professional football team and interviewed scores of players as part of the research for my book, The War on Football: Saving America’s Game. Despite the “professional” tag, they paid $500 to play and competed for the love of the game. They displayed amazing athleticism and inspiring commitment. They dared to stand out rather than cowered to fit in.
One could probably say the same for Ms. Gordon and her fellow plaintiffs. The one clear difference between the young female gridiron litigants and the older female pigskin enthusiasts involves an understanding that sexual difference rather than sexual discrimination fuels the public response to boys’ and girls’ football. Although many of the athletes—moms, jail guards, nurses, students, etc.—in “professional” women’s football leagues no doubt cheer Ms. Gordon’s lawsuit, one senses that they know that as members of the gentler sex competing in the roughest game they are not, as Dave Davies once sang, like everybody else.
The unique, I-don’t-follow-the-crowd quality of these women makes you pull for them. The common, I’m-gonna-sue-the-crowd-into-following-me quality of the girls, or, more likely, their overzealous parents makes you root for the joyless school bureaucrats they haul into court.
“Defendants have intentionally discriminated against female student athletes by funding, authorizing, constructing, renovating, and maintaining football facilities, fields and stadiums intended for male football players who play on boys football teams, while at the same time refusing to provide female students the opportunity to play on officially sponsored girls football teams using the same facilities, fields and stadiums as boys football teams,” the lawsuit contends.
One can only guess if they win in court. They have already won the court of public opinion’s scorn.
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