Another Battle Won

The coming weekend will be a fine time for any hoops fan in the county.

The Port St. Joe girls' basketball team hosts a region quarterfinal at 7 p.m. on Thursday with a chance to return home this coming Tuesday with a shot at a berth in the state semifinals.

The following night, the R. Marion Craig Coliseum, "The Dome," will be alive again as the boys District 3-2A tournament is hosted by Port St. Joe, with Wewahitchka and the Tiger Sharks looking increasingly likely to be squaring off Saturday night for the district title and home court in the first round of the Region 1 tournament.

That this is being written together, this mix of boys and girls athletics, is something we should all be proud of because while the comparison is not apples-to-oranges, the road traveled by women's athletics since 1960 mirrors the road the civil rights movement traveled without the violence and deaths.

And it is worth noting, during Black History Month, that one of the unsung heroes of that fight, of both fights if taken in context, was Wilma Rudolph, whose charisma and stunning talent in winning the sprints at the Rome Olympics of 1960 helped shatter the notion of inferiority based on either skin tone or gender.

As David Maraniss points out in a recent book, those Olympics in Rome were a watershed on so many levels.

During the height of the Cold War, as the USSR pounded away about all being equal in a socialist society but not in an America founded on freedom, Rafer Johnson, a decathlete, became the first individual of color to hold the American flag and lead the U.S. delegation during the opening ceremony's march of countries.

In Rome, we first heard of a young fighter named Cassius Clay who would by the decade's end be one of the most recognizable men on the planet, known as Muhammad Ali.

In 1960, women's athletics were so minimized that Track and Field News, the standard bearer of track in the country, did not even cover the women's national championships.

In fact, there might not have even been a women's track team without the Tigerbelles of little Tennessee State University, a historically black college that fielded some of the fastest women in the world, including the one they called "Skeeter," Rudolph.

At that time it was unseemly for women to be seen sweating and strict dress codes and lessons in decorum were instilled so that the women of this country would project a positive image.

This was a time when distance running was forbidden for women athletes - it was the first time in 32 years that the women's 800 meters was even conducted, since it was believed women had dispositions too delicate to run such a long distance.

 Twelve more years would pass before women would compete over 1,500 meters in the Olympics and 1984 before the women's marathon was part of the program at the Los Angeles Olympics.

In a study, Bridget Mary Handley identified five factors that held women back in sports, which marginalized them in the eyes of the press and the Olympic movement which dominated much of sports at the time.

Females were not tough enough, psychologically or physically to stand up under competition; the historical connection between sports and war and the perception that physical competition was not compatible with being a woman; the fear of becoming muscular and unfeminine in appearance; and menstruation and pregnancy.

But as time proved, Handley' study continues, women were not as fragile as perceived and no more susceptible to stress than men, medical science demonstrated no damage to reproductive organs and menstruation had little if any impact on performance.

In 1960 nearly double the women athletes competed compared to the Olympics of four years earlier and the number of events were double what they had been in Berlin in 1936, 24 years earlier. Women began to grab some of the spotlight.

None that summer more than Rudolph, who had survived polio as a youngster, a teenage pregnancy and entrenched prejudice while growing up in the South and dazzled the world in the record heat at Rome with wins on the 100 and 200 meters.

Rudolph's wins were not so much victories as dominations of fields comprised of athletes who knew little of her, but who came to understand the determination and athleticism - she was also an outstanding basketball player - and fueled this lithe, beautiful girl.

Her victories in Rome, the way she carried herself, made Rudolph an international star and something of a symbol of the fight for racial and gender rights in this country.

So while they may not know the name, the Lady Tiger Sharks and all other female athletes in the county owe a sizable debt to Wilma Rudolph, who arrived in Rome an unknown and left having forever changed the way the world would look at female athletes and people of color.

We are all better people for her accomplishments.