‘Could’ve Been a Contender’: Why I Love Women’s Sports

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It’s not just that I’ve jumped on the Caitlin Clark bandwagon, though I have — along with the 14,624 other people who filled the Barn at the University of Minnesota this week to watch her Iowa Hawkeyes take on my alma mater’s Golden Gophers.

Nor is it that I watched the U.S. Women’s National Team ascend the ranks in the “beautiful game” — a foreign sport, in my youth — in the 1990s and early 2000s, at the very time that my two sons were starting to excel at soccer.

It took 2 minutes and 12 seconds against Michigan to make women’s scoring history.

My father and older brother followed the Purple People Eaters–era Minnesota Vikings when I was a kid, back when the team played outdoors and years before one of the fearsome foursome became a state Supreme Court justice. I’ve watched wistfully from the sidelines while my siblings bond each year over their Fantasy Football League.

But now I, too, have found my sport to follow — women’s college basketball in the Midwestern-based Big 10 — and I’m finally feeling it. Here’s what the hoopla is all about!

I’d written off sports as just a guy thing, a way for men to connect and converse while revealing nothing of themselves. I saw the energy but missed the emotions beneath the surface. Following a team through highs and lows, through wins and losses, through “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” — to call up Jim McKay on ABC’s The Wide World of Sports — is a rush, a disappointment, a heady exhilaration, a shoulder-drooping drag.

It’s a slice of life in a single season.

Kate Brenner-Adams’ crop art from the Minnesota State Fair photographed at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. “Sports are a microcosm of society,” she says, “therefore inherently political.”

As my career was winding down, my husband and I started going to the occasional Thursday morning concert at Orchestra Hall (the ones with free coffee, cellophane-wrapped doughnuts and an audience base that makes me feel young). Those are lovely and elegant, and they underscore my exposure to classical music as a kid.

But what I really enjoy are the rowdy, rollicking Gopher women’s basketball games that we began attending last year to see Lindsay Whalen coach and then committed to with season tickets this year, hoping that new coach Dawn Plitzuweit could coalesce the team.

David and I met at the University of Minnesota, and we followed the Gophers nominally when Whalen was an award-winning 5-foot-9 point guard and, of course, stuck with her storied pro career with the Minnesota Lynx. David says women play basketball the way he did, “below the rim.” (I firmly believe the NBA should raise the men’s rim, but that’s a different story.)

Basketball is not the only sport where fans are paying more attention to female athletes. Minnesota now has a team in the Professional Women’s Hockey League, and the Minnesota Aurora, a pre-professional soccer team, has been selling tickets and winning matches — all with an honorable and enviable mission: “to create pathways for women and girls to reach their potential, on and off the field.”

Women my age rarely had that chance. Title IX, which mandated equity in sports at institutions that receive federal funds, passed in 1972. I was 15 years old, a leggy, athletic girl who was a cheerleader and took dance lessons and loved to bike and was always a fast sprinter (“for a girl”) but who never was allowed to be an athlete, to play on a team.

I see them now in the stands, women like me in their 60s and 70s or even older, some with white hair and walkers. These are women who have lived through historic shifts in our society — abortion rights won and lost, better pay and political representation, the Violence Against Women Act extended to lesbians, immigrants and Native American tribal lands — and who are showing up and cheering loudly, despite being told for years that they were lesser, they couldn’t compete, they weren’t enough.

Following women sports, being a vocal and unabashed fan, lets us demonstrate that we still are standing strong.

I was working as a “Women in Business” columnist at the Saint Paul Pioneer Press in 1999, when Brandi Chastain kicked the winning goal for Team USA in the Women’s World Cup final at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. My sister Debbie and her family were there. “I actually overheard somebody in the stadium say, ‘They play just like boys!’” she recalls now.

As one of few women on the newspaper’s business desk — and the only one who focused on women’s issues — I was the go-to when male colleagues wanted to get the “woman’s point of view.”

Sure enough, after the sports section displayed the infamous photo of Chastain on her knees, eyes closed, fists raised in the air after she had ripped off her soccer jersey in celebration, my editor called me over to his desk. Was her action unsportsmanlike, inappropriate, simply in poor taste? Or was it sexist that Chastain was getting grief for her exuberance when male players ripped off their jerseys all the time?

And then came the predictable: What do you think of this, Amy?

Newsweek celebrates Brandi Chastain and women’s soccer: July 19, 1999.

It was one of those rare moments when I had the perfectly timed response. Pausing to give the photo a once-over, I looked my male editor in the eye and said calmly: “Nice abs.” And then I turned and walked away.

Twenty-five years later, Target Center in Minneapolis is sold out for the Big 10 women’s basketball tournament in March, a women’s sports bar is opening in the Seward neighborhood several miles away and Brandi Chastain, now 55, has framed the famous sports bra, which hangs in her home. As for me? I barely know a fast break from a field goal, but I’m having the time of my life — watching young women excel at opportunities that were denied me, and supporting them every step of the way.

Health Habits for Women to Practice as We Age

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I was born with good health and have been blessed to have medical insurance and routine dental care throughout my life. Dad modeled daily exercise, Mom pushed us kids outside to play (likely because she craved peace and quiet), and both parents ensured we had bicycles and insisted we use them.

I thank them to this day that I still love to ride my bikes.

The habits I have built and the health I have sustained have served me well into my 60s. But it isn’t the decades-long practices — the balanced diet, the use of movement for both physical and emotional wellbeing — that are consuming me these days.

I am thinking instead about the physical changes that come with age, the need to work on bone density and balance, to guard my skin against the sun, to manage unexplained flareups in my hips, hands and feet. “Aging is not for the faint of heart,” my father used to say. (Actually, he said aging is not for “sissies,” but that word feels wrong today.)

So, at a time of life that requires equal doses of courage and self-confidence — and a commitment to spend more time on daily health habits — here are the practices I am working to develop.

Quick tips icons created by Freepik – Flaticon

ProTip #1: Hug your muscles to your bones.

I would hear this instruction in yoga classes, but I never quite grasped it till I was diagnosed with osteoporosis in November 2022, a blow that tossed me into old age without warning. Indeed, the bone-thinning disease that tends to strike women after menopause elicits sobering statistics:

Half of all women over 50 will break a bone because of osteoporosis, a “silent disease” that often is diagnosed only after a hip, wrist or other bone has broken.
Of the 10 million Americans who live with osteoporosis, 80% are women.
Caucasian and Asian American women are four times more likely to experience thinning bones than African American women and Latinas.

You can take medication for osteoporosis, and deal with the risks and side effects, but women can fight back in natural ways as well: eating more protein, taking Vitamin D3 supplements, lifting weights. In addition, I recommend a 12-pose yoga series designed by Dr. Loren Fishman and brought to light by New York Times writer Jane Brody in 2015.

Among the “side effects” of this prescription for osteoporosis, said Fishman, a physiatrist, in Brody’s “Personal Health” column, are “better posture, improved balance, enhanced coordination, greater range of motion, higher strength, reduced levels of anxiety and better gait.”

Kendra Fitzgerald’s version of the 12 poses on YouTube.

My sister found varieties of the 12 poses on YouTube, and after experimenting with several, I landed on the 20- and 29-minute versions by Kendra Fitzgerald. I’ve also strengthened my practice by taking “yoga for bone density” classes from certified instructors who have taught me the power of engaging muscles deeply while holding each pose (and who claim that the practice can improve your T-score).

Try it: Plant your feet on the floor. Root down through your heels and send that energy up your legs. Engage your thighs, your glutes, your abdominal muscles. Pull your shoulders down your back and radiate strength up your spine. Stand tall, sending your head toward the ceiling and pressing your fingertips toward the floor. Feel your strength as you hug your muscles to the bones.

ProTip #2: Employ your smartphone’s flashlight.

Twenty-five percent of older people — 65 and up, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — fall at least once every year. And women are at greater risk. A weakened lower body, vision problems, a Vitamin D deficiency, impractical footwear, and home hazards such as throw rugs and lack of railings in bathrooms and on stairways are among the causes.

If you fall once, according to the CDC, you are twice as likely to fall again. Traumatic brain injury, broken bones and an increased fear of falling may result. People who feel uneasy on their feet are less likely to move around outdoors or to exercise at all — and, therefore, are more likely to become weak and isolated.

One solution? I turn on my iPhone flashlight both indoors and out, a tip from a young man who uses his phone’s flashlight when he’s crossing a street at dusk with his wife and children. I tried it walking home after dark when I still worked full time less than a mile from my home, scanning the sidewalk for uneven surfaces and tilting the light toward fast-moving vehicles as I approached a crosswalk. Now I use the flashlight when I get up before sunrise during a long Minnesota winter. It helps me navigate around houseplants, resting dogs and rocking chairs — as well as up and down the stairs — without waking my late-sleeping husband.

ProTip #3: Wear a funny hat.

Two age spots on the left side of my face came from years of commuting, a dermatologist told me, when the sun would shine hard through the driver’s door window. And to think I used to revel in the warmth.

Sunglasses icons created by juicy_fish – Flaticon

A lover of stylish sunglasses, I also used to wonder why so many men wear baseball or bill caps. Now I get it. A bill cap keeps the sun out of your eyes and off your face. Even better are the hats that have a drawstring at the throat and a circular brim that shields the back of your neck as well.

In addition to applying sunscreen throughout the year — another dictate from the dermatologist and one of five skin-protection recommendations from the CDC — I cut my hair short so it looks halfway decent after a sunhat or bike helmet flattens it throughout the spring and summer. I bought my sunhat at REI. But instead of disparaging them as “old lady” hats, I wish I’d started wearing one when my skin was as dewy and wrinkle-free as the young models on this Sungrubbies site.

ProTip #4: Love your feet.

Time seems to speed up as we age, an aphorism cited so often that psychologists are studying whether it is perception or reality. Growing older is like a time machine that swirls you around in busyness for decades until it dumps you in your 60s, with more wrinkles, less ambition, a craving for sleep — and feet that, overnight, start to cramp and crack.

Baby feet icons created by Eucalyp – Flaticon

I was introduced to foot massage in a mat Pilates class after my osteoporosis diagnosis, where the teacher has us spend the first 5 minutes of every session rubbing lotion methodically on and between our toes, down the instep, up the outer edge, around the ball of the foot, over the heel. My feet tingle with pleasure, just as they do after I wince and roll barefoot over a spikey red plastic “peanut massage ball” that the Pilates teacher recommended.

“As you age, the muscle tissue in your feet can thin, and your nerves may not work effectively. This can lead to loss of feeling in your feet, [called] neuropathy,” says an article on footcare for seniors, which also instructs women — hooray! — to “avoid shoes that have high heels or pointy toes.”

The next steps? To stride toward the sunlight and shadows of old age, until the next physical and mental challenges present themselves.

Pictures at an Exhibition (of My Life)

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I am drawn to bookstores and concert halls more than to art museums; to music and literature more than so-called fine art.

Still, given that one of my close friends is a longtime docent at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA), I have learned over the years to appreciate paintings, especially, for their micro and macro characteristics — their ability to evoke personal, sometimes painful memories and to illuminate a perspective beyond my own.

More than other visual art forms, paintings inspire me to interrogate my past and present — the skinny girl I was, the old woman I am becoming — and pose questions about a future that already is proving to be more enriching, difficult and diverse than the narrowly white, middle-class, comfortable environment in which I was raised. Paintings inspire me to learn, to stretch and grow. They help me ponder a life that reaches decades back and point me toward an indeterminate amount of time forward.

The Awakening

My mother hauled us kids around to museums and the theater when we were sometimes too young to appreciate or comprehend the experience. She figured the exposure would be good for us; plus, being a native of Chicago, she yearned always to escape our small town. I did a version of that awakening in 2007 with my younger son, Nate, when he turned 12, arranging with my docent friend, David Fortney, then in training for his role, to conduct a tour of the art institute for 12-year-old boys.

Imagine our surprise (not) when the tour began with a naked male statue, Doryphoros (Roman, 1st century BE), muscled and marbled but missing a left forearm. Other highlights of the tour included surprisingly small battle armor (how our species has grown!) and MIA’s post-World War II Tatra T87 from the Czech Republic, a luxury car designed in 1936 whose front end resembles the earliest Volkswagen Beetle.

These days, I notice how much more diverse the Minneapolis Institute of Art has become, from the offerings in its bookstore and the ages and ethnicities of its clientele to the artwork displayed in its hushed, white-walled galleries.

I was introduced to Indigenous artwork in a variety of media through my friend’s book tours, which MIA hosts monthly, of The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich (Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2021) and Horse by Geraldine Brooks (a favorite of mine this year).

On a MIA book tour for the novel *Horse,* docent David Fortney talks with participants about “Four Days and Four Nites, Ceremony” (2020) by Jim Denomie. An exhibition of Denomie’s work runs through March 24, 2024.

That long-ago museum tour for 12-year-olds left an impression on my son, now 28, because he joins me on these book tours, self-designed by each guide. Widely read in many genres and cultures, Nate has encouraged me to move beyond books about racism and the Black experience (White Fragility, So You Want to Talk About Race, How to Be an Antiracist) and instead read fiction by Blacks and other people of color. That has me currently working through the lyrical, unpunctuated prose and contemporary Black British references of the novel Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (winner of the Booker Prize in 2019).

Honoring and naming a Dakota man who was hanged: One Who Stands on the Earth.

Lately, it is Indigenous lives and cultures that I want to explore, perhaps because I am from the town where 38 Dakota men were hanged, in the presence of their families, on December 26, 1862. When I was in school in Mankato during the 1960s and early 1970s, we learned nothing about the mass execution, lessened by three dozen pardons but ultimately approved — the order issued — by Abraham Lincoln, the president we herald as the “great emancipator.”

A Dog’s Life

My childhood family always had pets — dogs, specifically — and my husband and I continued the tradition with our own sons. Pixie, Gretchen, Skip, Lucy: Those beloved family members came to a humane and sad but dignified end until Griffin, the miniature schnauzer my husband adored and carried around on his shoulder as a puppy. My husband, David, called Griffin his grandchild (we still don’t have one), sometimes telling acquaintances at the dog park, “I’m surprised I don’t sit at home and knit him sweaters.”

Griffin was killed at age 6 in November 2018, hit by a car outside a rural house we were renting in my hometown to attend my stepmother’s funeral. The dog was killed instantly, from what we could discern, with no visible damage or blood on his body. “He died immediately, and we found him,” I tried to reassure my husband. To no avail.

David cried — shuddering, back-heaving sobs — as our older son dug a hole in the frozen dirt of our backyard. Then they wrapped Griffin in a sheet and laid him to rest in the cold ground while I watched from the kitchen window.

You can’t replace a “heart dog,” my sister Penny likes to say. But only a month later, I convinced David to adopt a puppy from Standing Rock in the Dakotas, via a neighbor who rehomes dogs from Indian reservations. Gabby is an athlete, a wary and sometimes standoffish girl who barks at any person, dog or school bus that dares to venture down our side street.

She looks like a smaller, tamer, better-fed version of a dog I saw pictured in the Raphael Begay photo Rez-Dog (2017) at MIA’s special exhibition “In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now.”

“Rez Dog” (cropped) by Raphael Begay, 2017

“This is a post-butchering celebration and gathering with my family at my late grandmother’s home,” the artist wrote in the statement hanging alongside the photo. “There, I saw this dog dragging a sheep’s head that we left outside. . . . I look at it in the same light as how we treat our unsheltered relatives. There’s this sense of concern, empathy, but there is a lack of responsibility or commitment to help.”

Women’s (R)evolution

The last several times I have visited the Minneapolis Institute of Art, I have returned again and again to a portrait on the third floor of a stern, stylish woman sitting upright in a chair, her face turned to the artist — almost daring him to objectify her.

It stands in stark contrast to the reclining nudes and bare-breasted ogling of traditional, centuries old western European art, which grows tiresome for me in the way that its countervailing fascination with royal propriety and the ruling classes turns off my older son, Sam, a Democratic-Socialist.

The painting that speaks to me is Temma in Orange Dress (1975) by Leland Bell, one of several portraits of his daughter by the largely self-taught painter. I perceive it less as a father’s flattering gaze than a reflection of women’s emerging independence — two years after the U.S. Supreme Court passed Roe v. Wade in a 7–2 vote (inconceivable today) and at a time when women’s labor force participation rate exceeded 46 percent, more than 10 points higher than in 1965, a decade earlier.

Unlike the uncertainty and timidity of Christy White (1958) by the feminist portrait artist Alice Neel, which hangs nearby, Temma projects strength. To me, she reads as a career woman, who pursues her own identity and financial means.

When I showed “Temma” to my younger son, I told him the painting reflects my career-woman phase. “Oh, you mean the 40-year phase?” he shot back. And yet much as my sons have seen me, and I have wanted to see myself, as Temma — fierce and forceful, a woman to be reckoned with — at heart I am more “Christy White.” Fearful, insecure, wrestling to this day with whether I walked the right path in a society that forces women to make hard and heartrending choices.

I walked up to “The Barn,” a 1954 painting by Wisconsin artist John Wilde, to see the rendering of a naked woman breaking free, and then a guard pointed out the face of a man watching in the lower left-hand window, a child’s wagon on the ground nearby. Some time later, I came upon a color-soaked painting, “Think Long, Think Wrong” by Avis Charley, of a fashionably clothed Native woman waiting in the sunshine for a bus.

“I create images that I wish I would have seen growing up,” said the artist’s statement. This painting, she explained, “is about putting aside distractions and staying present.” Aside from the art itself, that’s the beauty of an art museum: It helps us reflect upon our lives and values in a calm, quiet place, and assemble disparate images into a cohesive whole.

The Middle Stages: Between Midlife and Old Age

By Amy Gage

Health Habits for Women to Practice as We Age

ProTip #1: Hug your muscles to your bones.