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Group Writing: Mary and Me
I was jogging early one morning on a path through the woods in Eugene, Oregon, when Mary Decker came jogging toward me. Mary’s glory days were over, but she still ran with the smooth and efficient stride that helped her become the world’s best female mid-distance runner in the 1980s.
“Morning Mary. Big fan,” I shouted as we passed one another. Eighteen years earlier, I had watched Mary gut out a 3,000 meter World Championship victory against two Soviet runners. (Go capitalists!) Having followed her career from its beginnings until she finally hung up her Nikes, I felt as if I knew Mary personally.
Mary condescended to utter a little “Hi.” Then we passed one another. But that little ‘Hi” inspired me to firm up my posture and quicken my pace, just in case Mary wanted to look back to admire my style.
Watching Mary run in races from the 800 to 10,000 meters helped to teach me that men and women aren’t as different as I once thought. Mary was as driven and as tough an athlete as they come, male or female. Yes, she cried when Zola Budd tripped her and thus put her out of the 1984 Olympic Games, but I can’t blame her for crying. I would have cried too.
Here’s what I once believed: Females would forever throw like girls (they were just built that way); they really weren’t suited for the rough and tumble of high-level athletics; and they lacked the inner drive, in all fields, that men have. And if they initiated sex, they were probably hussies. (Hey, cut me some slack. I was born in 1938.)
If someone had told the 18-year-old Kent that females would someday play baseball with as much skill as males, I would have said “Pooh!” (I wasn’t a terribly verbal kid). But have you seen females play softball lately? Female pitchers deliver the ball underhanded up to 77 miles an hour, and they’re only 43 feet away from home plate. (In baseball, it’s 60’ 6”.) I wouldn’t want to face a pitcher that close who threw with that kind of velocity. (The word “softball” is a misnomer. Softballs are hard.) And females, with enough practice, now throw overhand with the same fluid motion as males.
Female basketball players also surprise me. Some can get off their own shots against a pressing defense — a rare skill even for NBA players — by stopping on a dime, elevating, hesitating at the top for a split second, and then flipping the ball into the hoop from just beyond the free throw line. Women set hard picks, execute the weave with skill, and use their bodies to guard against a shot-block when they drive to the basket — all just like the men. They can’t dunk, of course, but I’ve never been a big fan of dunking anyway.
Now I follow the University of Oregon women’s basketball with more interest than I follow its men’s team.
I’m also a fan of women’s track, especially the middle and long distance races (Mary’s forte), where the women, just like the men, push their way through lactate pain and physical exhaustion as they come down the straight in the 10,000 meters.
I can’t, however, go all the way that the silly left and hardcore feminists want me to. Both groups seem wedded to the idea that there are few, if any, baked-in differences between men and women, and if women can’t quite match up with men now, in the near future they will. Fiddlesticks!
Back in, oh, around 1984, it was common among the forward-thinking crowd to say that in about twenty years, women would compete on an even level with men in the marathon. Their reasoning had something to do with women’s toughness (they endure the pain of childbirth, don’t they?) and their small stature. (Marathon runners tend to be small and wiry.)
That never happened. Here we are thirty-five years later, and the gap between men and women in world record times is still a huge 14 minutes.
But to show just how far women have come, my personal best in the marathon, set in 1985 in the Chicago Marathon, would have been the women’s marathon record in 1967. I thus missed the opportunity, because I was born too late, of being able to enter women’s marathon races by identifying as a woman. I could have been a contender!
The height of folly is allowing transsexual males who identify as women to run against biological women. “What’s the problem?” the woke crowd asks. Well, the problem is that these transgender males beat the socks off the women. Transgender men don’t leave their speed and muscles behind when they pretend they’re women. But none of that bothers the left-wingers, who have always loved ideology and virtue-signaling more than fairness and common sense.
Differences in physical structure between males and females can’t be overcome. Not a single woman, for instance, has ever had enough speed and strength to play in the NBA, NFL, MLB, men’s pro tennis, or even the PGA. (Women chip and putt almost as well as men, but their lack of distance on drives prevents them from competing on the same level as men.)
I remember a while back — oh, around 1980 — there was talk that Nancy Lieberman, a basketball phenom, might get on with an NBA team. But it came to nothing. Her height of 5’ 10” wouldn’t have stopped her, but she just wasn’t strong enough to compete against men. (NBA player Mugsy Bogues was 5’ 3”, and Spud Webb, at 5’ 7”, could dunk the ball.)
In 1956, Charles Dumas was the first human to jump over 7 feet. I remember this well because I was attending Compton JC when Dumas, a fellow student, jumped over 7 feet, using the old Straddle technique. (The Fosbury Flop didn’t arrive until 1968.). So here we are over 60 years later, and no woman has yet jumped over 7 feet. The men’s record has increased to a little over 8 feet.
Feminists sometimes bring up the 1973 tennis match in which Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs. They usually fail to mention that Riggs, a former world-class tennis player, was 55-years-old at the time. King was 29. And they almost almost always fail to mention that Riggs had beaten Margaret Court just four months previously when Court was the #1 female tennis player in the world.
None of this matters much to me these days. Women compete hard, with the kind of skill and grit that I never thought I’d see.
Females have some important advantages over men, but they have to do with the neural connections in the brain, not musculature. Numerous studies have shown that females, not too long after birth, are better at reading faces. A couple of years later, they play better with other children, have the better verbal ability, and their pain threshold is higher. And of course, they excel at the most important trait of all: nurturing a child. (For a study of the innate differences between men and women, see LouAnn Brizendine’s book, The Female Brain.)
Boys are more adventurous (and or course die from accidents more frequently), are hornier (double the brain space devoted to sex), and are more aggressive. Although men make up half the population, about 85 percent of murders are committed by men. Yes, toxic masculinity is a real thing. Compassionate masculinity is also a real thing.
So each sex has its strengths, each its weaknesses. When we join up in marriage, we make a complementary pair. (For a superbly written exposition of this idea, see the April 20th main feed post by Cow Girl.)
And how does all of this male/female stuff work out on a personal level? Perfectly. I could clean Marie’s clock in a mixed martial arts match, but she would mop up the floor with me in an empathy contest.
So thanks to Mary Decker, I’m now partly woke. Unhappily, I don’t think I can get any more woke, because even though I’d like to see females compete with males on an equal basis, reality has no regard at all for my feelings.
Published in General
Nice write up. I am a fan of Mary Decker as we share a birthday (along Barack Obama). It is nice to think that she is still running.
Riffing on the evolution of athletic records, I heard an interesting sports talk discussion on the limits of human physiology. Is training today able to create muscles that are too big/strong for our joints, tendons, and ligaments? Aaron Judge of the Yankees is out of the line-up for 10 days, because he swung the bat too hard. Football players routinely tear ligaments and pull muscles just leaving the line of scrimmage. There is also a growing condition called “rhabdomyolysis”, which is a blood issue caused by too much weight training. I am sure that medical science will find a way for athletes to achieve better balance, but this need for intervention and increase in “freak” injuries reveals how close we are to the edge.
Bonus question: who would win in a basketball game between 1992 Dream Team and 2019 champions UVA ?
Thanks for bringing up that name. I was a young boy in 1984 and remember that Olympics well with her and Mary Lou. I was rooting for Mary and watched all of her races. Zola made me so mad. I wanted them to rerun the race, give Mary another chance.
The paragraph about aggressiveness reminds me of lessons from our suicide awareness training. It’s been changing over the last few years, but when the training started, women attempted suicide more often but men succeeded more often. This was because men used more violent methods that provided a better chance at success, such as guns. Women would more likely try to overdose on pills.
Dick Fosbury: another Oregon connection. He is two years younger than I, and his high school was in the same league, so I followed him and his flop. He was big news in Oregon.
Interesting question. I don’t think it would be an easy win for the Olympic guys — if they would win at all. Time marches on, and so do advances in athletes, so it could be that UVA would beat the Olympians.
Right. His technique revolutionized the high jump. No one uses the scissors or the western roll anymore. No one.
Some time ago we had a fascinating discussion about women’s sports: Dr. Bastiat’s @drbastiat post “Concussions in Sports.” His perspective was that of a doctor with teenage daughters involved in various athletic programs.
It’s an interesting subject. When my daughter was a little tyke, she took gymnastics. Her coach told me that he could increase flexibility but not strength. He told me that there’s an upper limit to the amount of strength a person’s muscles can ever achieve.
It was great food for thought while I watched practices. Certainly, muscle is an actual tangible physical thing, like bone. It made sense to me that it had fixed biochemical and physiological properties and characteristics.
As an aside: children who grow up in a dysfunctional and chaotic family environment always have trouble accepting limits. Limits are something we get children to recognize when they are young. If we fail to do that, we’ve hurt them for life. The fact that our society is going down this road of believing there are no biological differences between men and women strikes me as evidence of the dysfunctional society we have become generally, perhaps as a product of the high number of dysfunctional families there are. Our society’s inability to accept limits was painfully obvious when Larry Summers was forced to resign from his post as president of Harvard for daring to suggest that men and women were different.
Human beings don’t grow to ten feet tall, and female human beings are different from male human beings. In an emotionally and mentally sane world, this fact would be heralded as species-saving diversity. :-)
There needs to be 3 teams, male, female and transgendered. Pit the transgendered against each other both male and female.
Here’s what Marci wrote: “The fact that our society is going down this road of believing there are no biological differences between men and women strikes me as evidence of the dysfunctional society we have become generally.”
Unfortunately, Marci, I think you’re right. The woke people in particular have become nutters.
In fact, the entire Democratic Party is about a half bubble off plumb.
We’re still OK, aren’t we Marci?
Kay, it might make for an interesting competition.
Thanks to the liberals, we would have to make a further distinction between transsexuals who’ve undergone psychological examination, the full hormone therapy treatment, and reconstructive surgery, vs. those who merely “identify” as the other sex . . .
If they played today I’d give UVA a solid chance. Pretty sure all the players on the “92” dream team are over the age of 50. Barkley looks way out of shape. In their primes? No way.
Women are starting to dominate ultra marathons. Courtney Deawaulter won the 2017 Moab 240 beating the 2nd place finisher by over 10 hours. Another woman Jasmine Paris just recently won a 268 mile race. Woman have a higher pain threshold and are well suited for ultra marathons.
Interesting Thelonious. I haven’t followed ultras in a long while, so I had no idea. I want to know more. I’ll get back to you.
I was a big fan of Mary Decker, too. I remember when she got tripped. I was in middle school. We always watched Olympic Track and Field. One of my sisters went to college on a Track & Field Scholarship. We went to every track meet.
Bravo. And hear, hear.
Not being a runner and not being particularly interested in track sports, the main thing I remember about Mary Decker is the way she behaved after her fall in the 1984 Olympics. Decker, who was behind Zola Budd, collided with Budd and fell. She then accused Budd of causing the collision by bumping her leg. This was disproven when officials reviewed films of the race. Over the years, Decker continued to blame Budd for the loss of that race. It wasn’t until probably 20 years later that she admitted that the reason she fell was that she had been “very inexperienced in running in a pack.”
EB, thanks for your response. Whose fault it was seems, to this day, a bit inconclusive. I’ve remember seeing it live, and I’ve seen tapes of it since.
I think that Budd, slightly ahead, moved too quickly to the left into Decker’s lane, and Decker’s foot then clipped Budd’s left heel. That caused Budd to stumble and Decker to fall over Budd. Budd got up, Decker injured her hip and couldn’t continue.
As you say, the Olympic Committee first declared it was Budd’s fault and disqualified Budd, but after reviewing the tape, the Committee reinstated Budd. It didn’t make any difference, of course, since Budd finished out of the running anyway.
What a thoughtful piece on athletic excellence and inspiration. It makes me want to lace out my New Balance running shoes and move, although the weather has been warm for long enough to make the pool perfect for lap swimming.
This conversation is part of our Group Writing Series under the April 2019 Group Writing Theme: Men and Women. We still have room for one or two more contributions. Tell us about your favorite couple, witty or tragic observations between the sexes, or perhaps the battles and truces. Or do something entirely different. Maybe a musical or dance post! Our schedule and sign-up sheet awaits.
May’s theme is now up, and the days are being rapidly filled: May 2019 Group Writing Theme: Blooming Ideas.