Commentary -- Don't Dare Miss This Gem About Women In Sports

PROVIDENCE - Do not miss the stunning HBO documentary Dare to Compete: The Struggle of Women in Sports tomorrow at 10 p.m.

If you can't watch it, tape it.

Dare to Compete gets two thumbs up. Five stars. It's a home run. Written by tennis player-turned broadcaster Mary Carillo and Frank Deford, this documentary traces the historic struggle of women to compete on playing fields so long controlled by men. During this 80-minute history class you will laugh and you will cry.

How powerful is Dare to Compete? As the credits rolled after a screening Monday night at Brown University, the audience of about 200, mostly students and mostly female, rose in a standing ovation. Several members of the women's track team, having learned that women were prohibited from running distances longer than 100 meters in the Olympics from 1928 to 1960, wept openly. One runner approached executive producer Ross Greenburg, Brown Class of 1977, and hugged him.

"I've done documentaries for a decade, and I've attended hundreds of these screenings. I've never had the reaction that I saw tonight," Greenburg said. "It was pretty powerful. You know you've done something right."

Dare to Compete opens with Hillary Rodham Clinton reminiscing about her childhood and playing football with her brothers. She ends by saying, "Victory belongs only to those who dare to compete."

During the Victorian Era, women rarely got a chance to compete. Exercise was thought to be too strenuous. Plus, women were bound to the home. Establishment thinkers of the time decried the baby carriage and the bicycle because they provided women mobility.

There were exceptions. Vassar College fielded a baseball team in the late 1800s. Women played basketball for the first time in 1891. The first collegiate game pitted Stanford against California. Men were not allowed. The game lasted 40 minutes. Stanford prevailed, 2-1.

Well into the 20th century, women participated in "play days." Competition was discouraged. Women from different schools would make up teams. There was no winner. They would finish their competitions with cookies and milk they brought themselves.

Such a lifestyle seems outrageous in these days of female hockey players and boxers. The footage is eye-opening and, at times, hilarious.

Change began in 1919 with the Suffragette Movement and the passage of the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote. From then to now, women progressed, but not without a struggle. HBO profiles the pioneers.

- Suzanne Lenglen, the French tennis player and first women's superstar. Not pretty, but gorgeously elegant. And daring. During matches, she drank liquor on changeovers.

- Gertrude "Trudy" Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel and the first person to swim the 35 miles freestyle. She beat the men's record by two hours.

- Jackie Mitchell, first woman to sign a professional baseball contract. Struck out Babe Ruth in an exhibition game in 1931. Banned from baseball by Commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

- Mildred Burke, female wrestler who earned $100,000 in the pre-War years.

- Wilma Rudolph, the first American woman to win three Olympic gold medals, in Rome in 1960.

- Billie Jean King, whose "Battle of the Sexes" against Bobby Riggs in 1973 "wasn't about tennis. It was about social change."

- Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, the greatest rivals in tennis.

- Anne Meyers, Nancy Lieberman and Pat Head, among the first recipients of athletics scholarships, thanks to Title IX, and stars of the first U.S. women's Olympic basketball team, in 1976.

Dare to Compete also provides glimpses of Olympic figure skaters and gymnasts, and, of course, the gold-medal winning U.S. hockey team from Nagano in 1998.

HBO presents all this against a backdrop of a changing America, from the Victorian Era to the Feminist Movement. HBO addresses difficult issues like racism and sexuality. Didrickson, for example, was suspected of being a lesbian until she married George Zaharias. Navratilova speaks candidly about the attacks she endured after revealing she is homosexual.

The footage, some of it rare, is always outstanding.

HBO has developed a curriculum to accompany Dare to Compete and is working with the Women's Sports Foundation to distribute the package to as many schools as possible.

Good. Dare to Compete should be in every school library and should be required viewing. Fathers, especially, should watch.