| Salt Lake City |
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12 |
16 |
7 |
35 |
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| USA |
10 |
13 |
11 |
34 |
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11 |
7 |
6 |
24 |
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6 |
3 |
8 |
17 |
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6 |
6 |
4 |
16 |
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2 |
4 |
10 |
16 |
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4 |
4 |
4 |
12 |
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4 |
5 |
2 |
11 |
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| SUI |
3 |
2 |
6 |
11 |
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| NED |
3 |
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0 |
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Game face
U. exhibit aims to define what a female athlete looks like
By Susan Whitney
Deseret News staff writer
Ten years ago, when Jane Gottesman was a sports reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, she got in the habit of counting photos in the sports section. It was and is a common pastime among women in the news business. They count the women quoted on the front page, the number of female bylines, the number of female anchors on television news.
What Gottesman found, in her count, was not unusual. "Mostly, there were no pictures of women, so the count was simple: 15-0; 11-0; 12-0. A 'good' day was a 9-2 day, an 11-1 day." The numbers were no better when she counted female athletes on the cover of "Sports Illustrated."
What Gottesman found wasn't unusual, but what she did about it was. She began to ask every photographer she could find, "What does a female athlete look like?" Along with photographer Geoffrey Biddle, Gottesman pulled together a photo exhibit and a book.
The exhibit, "Game Face: What does a female athlete look like?" drew about 600,000 visitors over the past six months as it was displayed in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. Currently, as part of the Cultural Olympiad, the 182 photos hang in the Olpin Union Building at the University of Utah. "Game Face" will be in Utah through March, which is Women's History Month. (The exhibit is free and is open 7 a.m.-11 p.m. Monday-Saturday and from 10:30 a.m.-9:30 p.m. Sundays.)
Some of the "Game Face" photos are historic, some are modern. Some are in color, others are in black and white. Some are of young, professional athletes. Some are of girls at play. Some are of older women — bowlers, dancers, swimmers and golfers.
One photo shows a woman with white hair and wrinkles around her eyes holding the shot put. In another picture, a boxer hits her opponent square in the face. In a photo taken in 1959 in Minnesota, speedskaters struggle to catch their breath after a race.
In other pictures: Picabo Street soars against a blue sky. Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova arm-wrestle. Paralympian Aimee Mullins stands before the cameras wearing her U-curved prosthetic legs — and a winner's smile.
As it turns out, Mullins came to Salt Lake City just before the Olympics began. She spoke to reporters during the opening days of the "Game Face" exhibit.
Mullins knows and reveres the history of women's sports. Certainly she is young enough to have benefited from Title IX (a 1972 educational amendment to the U.S. Civil Rights Act, which says that no one shall be excluded or discriminated against on the basis of sex in any program in any school that gets federal funds). Still, she says, she never forgets that her mother played half-court basketball and could not join a college team.
Growing up in a small town in Pennsylvania, Mullins was surrounded by scores of cousins, all of whom were raised with the same expectations — that they would excel and go to college. Her father, an immigrant from Ireland, had to go to work at 15. To him, education was everything.
Mullins was born without tibulas. Doctors amputated her legs when she was a baby. Still the expectations for her were the same as for her cousins and her brothers — not only was she to make honor society and play two instruments, she was also to excel at sports. It was a given that she'd learn to ski and that her high school softball team would win most of its games.
Mullins went to George Washington University and then Georgetown College on academic scholarships. In college, she met other amputees for the first time. She'd never heard of the National Disabled Sports Championships and didn't know the difference between the Paralympics and the Special Olympics.
When she went to her first NDS track meet, she discovered her wooden legs were like something from the 1930s compared to the high-tech prosthesis everyone else wore. Mullins won the 100-meter dash and the long jump, nonetheless.
She describes herself as having a "spunky pitch." Before she even transferred to Georgetown, that school's track coach, one of the winningest coaches in the United States, agreed to work with her. Before she'd gone to her first Paralympics, she called a premier prosthetic designer to ask if he'd make her some better legs. The designer said that just the night before he'd been dreaming of cheetahs. Since she was a double amputee and he didn't have to match a prosthetic leg to a real leg, he thought she might as well run on legs modeled after the world's fastest animal.
Mullins went to the 1996 Atlanta Paralympics on curved legs and set world records in the 100-meter dash and the long jump.
She had gone to college believing academics were everything. But sports may have taught her more about commitment than classes ever did.
And until recently, men were always the ones to learn commitment, teamwork and leadership through sports, points out Biddle. He and Gottesman, co-curators of the "Game Face" exhibition, also came to Salt Lake City for the opening of the show.
One of the purposes of the exhibit is to encourage women to discover the lessons that only sports can teach, Biddle says. Another message is this: There are many kinds of capabilities and many kinds of bodies.
"Women have been given a fairly narrow set of conventions," about what constitutes an acceptable body, he notes.
And Claudia Wilson agrees. Wilson is a nutritionist for University of Utah athletes and also an expert on eating disorders.
"Do media and society contribute to the problem?" she asks. "Yes," she answers her own question.
"But does the media cause eating disorders? No."
Therefore, the media can only go so far to promote healthy body images, she says. She does believe a diversity of images, such as the diversity of bodies presented in the "Game Face" exhibit, is good. But there is much more to be done, she points out. Unfortunately, Wilson says, being physically strong is no guarantee that an athlete is mentally strong enough to avoid eating disorders.
As for Kathryn Brooks, she's happy the "Game Face" exhibit came to Utah in time for the 30th anniversary of Title IX. As director of the Women's Resource Center at the U., Brooks is also touched by the "Game Face" book, in which women tell their stories of growing up. More than one of the women who broke the barriers had a dad who was on her side.
"Game Face" tells women how far they've come and how far they still have to go, says Brooks.
In 2000, when Gottesman wrote the forward to the about-to-be-published book, she noted, "Today the sports section had twenty-three pictures of men and one small picture of women playing basketball. 'Game Face' carves out a different space, a niche where women's athletics is first-rate and women's abilities are the camera's delight."
E-mail: susan@desnews.com
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February 15, 2002
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