Soon after I started to play squash, I went to a squash camp. The mornings mainly consisted of instruction and drills, but late each afternoon, there were challenge matches that pitted players of near-equal ability against each other. One of my first matches was against a player that I knew from the tennis court. Known as being very talented, fast and strong, the player carried a certain air of intimidation. But I liked competition, and I was looking forward to the match.
I got whupped that afternoon. Wasn’t even close. I wasn’t embarrassed, though, just determined. By the end of the two-week camp, we had played six matches, and though I lost all of them, I was gratified that I was able to get a game in our final encounter.
Perhaps because of this early competition playing against a girl (oh, did I forget to mention that the player’s name was Alicia McConnell?), I have never really understood the angst so many men have when it comes to competing against women. Alicia was better than I, and as time went by, I definitely wanted to beat her, but not so much because she was a girl – I wanted to win because she was good.
By the time you read this, Annika Sorenstam will have tried to compete in a PGA Tour event. That means that you will know whether or not she made the cut, and how well she did. As I write this, the event is still a week away, and I am hoping that she performs well. But Vijay Singh, one of the top pros on the PGA tour, has a different opinion.
This past week, Singh said that Sorenstam had no business playing in the Colonial next week and “I hope she misses the cut. Why? Because she doesn't belong out here… We have our tour for men, and they have their tour. She’s taking a spot from someone in the field.”
That last sentence from Vijay is perhaps understandable (Singh once relied on the kind of sponsor exemption that is allowing Annika to play, and, on more than one occasion, missed getting a chance to play because of some esoteric sponsor picks), but also, I think, totally misguided.
Sports, particularly sports in the United States, have had an unfortunate history of discrimination. Especially distasteful are those instances where competitive athletes were prevented from proving themselves against the best.
The Negro leagues in baseball are perhaps the most egregious instance of this, but as Frank Deford, the former Sports Illustrated writer describes, for a long time, another kind of discrimination was even more pervasive: “Essentially, we can thank the British upper classes for amateurism. They wanted to keep sports to themselves, so as long as they made it so poor people couldn't afford to take time to play without reward, only the rich could practice and compete. Then… we adopted Victorian amateurism in many of our sports…”
For a long time, professional players were not allowed to compete in some of the biggest tournaments in the world. Rod Laver, potentially the best tennis player the world has ever known, won two Grand Slams (winning Wimbledon and the French, US and Australian Opens in one year), but many have forgotten that there were seven years in between his two Slams where he was not allowed to play because he was a pro. Why? Well, many felt that the pros had an “unfair advantage” and if they were allowed to play, one of them might take a spot from someone in the field.
Is this beginning to sound familiar?
Here is the thing: the PGA Tour is for the best golfers in the world. Not male, not female. Just the best. If the best woman in the world can be competitive on the PGA tour, she should be welcomed as a worthy opponent. (And, by the way, those who say that therefore men should be allowed to play on the women's tour don't get it. The LPGA is for Ladies; it is not analogous.)
This has happened before... most recently in the NHL, when the powers-that-be were adamant against letting Europeans play in the almost exclusively US-Canadian league. As it has turned out, letting world-class players play has made the NHL continue as the premier league in the world. Did it take away opportunities from lesser Canadians and Americans? Of course. But the league – and its spectators – are better off.
The point of all this is that Annika Sorenstam has had two of the most dominant seasons in the history of golf (she won 13 tournaments last year, more than twice as many as any other golfer in the world, male or female), and she is looking for something new to allow her to test herself. If she doesn’t find something, at least one expert commentator, Judy Rankin, thinks that Sorenstam might retire.
Squash has handled these challenges well, for the most part. Squash got rid of its amateur distinction a number of years ago, squash is slowly becoming more accessible to the general public, and squash has long allowed men and women to compete against one another in the skill level championships (Latasha Khan won the 5.0 championships a number of years ago, taking out a number of men on her way to the championship).
This is a good thing, for it wasn’t so long ago that squash’s greatest champion, Heather MacKay, who lost only one professional match in 19 years, decided that the challenge against other women squash players was not enough, and instead of competing against the male pros, decided to retire… in order to play (horrors!) pro racquetball.
