Fans of musicals will recognize the great duo, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The pair danced their way through nine films in the 1930’s with style and flair.
It’s been joked that Rogers could do everything Astaire could do, and do it moving backwards and in heels. It’s a clear reference to the idea that a woman’s contributions are often devalued next to a man’s.
That witticism came to mind when thinking about Mo’ne Davis and Becky Hammon.
At first blush, they have little in common besides their shared gender and sports. Hammon is about to retire. Her professional basketball career began four years before 13-year-old Davis was born. What links them, at least in my mind, is that both have burst onto the national scene because of their connection to what boys and men do.
Davis is the 18th girl to pitch in the Little League World Series and the first since 2004. She tossed a two-hit shutout, striking out eight as her Philadelphia team beat a team from Nashville. Davis has thrown pitches clocked at 70 miles per hour, significantly faster than some of her male counterparts. Her games have drawn substantial attention, and rightfully so.
Meanwhile, Hammon, a point guard for the WNBA’s San Antonio Stars, will wrap up a 17-year career when the team’s playoff run ends. She is a seven-time league All-Star and was named one of the WNBA’s top 15 players of all time in a survey of league media.
We chronicled Hammon here on Sports at Large in 2008 when she became a naturalized Russian citizen so that she could play for that country in the Olympics, a feat she repeated in 2012.
Yet Hammon will be best known for her next job:assistant coach with the NBA champion San Antonio Spurs. She will be the first woman ever to coach full-time in the NBA. That “achievement” is being hailed on all the news shows and across the culture.
Please don’t misunderstand what is being said here. I’ve thought Becky Hammon was a heck of a basketball player for years, and I think Mo’ne Davis can be a terrific baseball player, if she chooses to keep playing.
The point is that their careers shouldn’t have to be validated by how they compare to men. That either of them may succeed or fail ought to be just that, the success or failure of a person.
We take it as an accepted fact that men are superior to women in athletics. That bias extends to coaching. Why? Yes, generally speaking, men are stronger and run faster than women, but that doesn’t make them or their games intrinsically better, only different.
Becky Hammon may or may not be a great basketball coach for men or women, but whether she is or not will have nothing to with her gender, only her abilities.
And, in the future, when you say that Mo’ne Davis throws like a girl, it should mean just that.
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