Men only rich list grotesque
There is, perhaps, a selective outrage towards this week’s Forbes list of the top 100 earners in sport, remarkable largely for the conspicuous absence of a single woman. After all, a ratio of 100-0 in men’s favour is by no means an outlier in this rarefied realm. Last year, it was 99-1 – the only exception being Serena Williams, at No 51 – and the headline registered barely a ripple.
Now, the list has vaulted straight into the hall of infamy, held up as a searing indictment of the gender pay gap, ostensibly because the most dominant player in women’s tennis lost millions in potential tournament earnings by having a baby.
As with all rich lists, the latest Forbes effort is many shades of grotesque.
Besides shining a deeply unflattering light on the inequities faced by female athletes, it is topped by Floyd Mayweather, a boxer with a history of domestic violence spanning at least seven assaults on five different women. Somehow, a man who once served 60 days in prison for hitting the mother of his children made himself US$275 million (NZ$390m) from an ugly, forgettable brawl with Conor McGregor that scarcely qualified as sport at all.
It was Mayweather’s only break for three years from retirement, which so far has ranged from sessions at his Las Vegas strip club to meet-and-greets in half-full Staffordshire leisure centres, and yet he amassed more money per second in fighting McGregor, a boxing neophyte, than a female counterpart could expect to make in a lifetime.
Such a dispiriting reality usually triggers two stock responses: either you believe that sport is irredeemably sexist, in which women are only ever an afterthought, or you hold fast to a view that it is a market economy, where women find themselves devalued simply because fewer people want to watch them.
Both perspectives are somewhat defeatist. Sport is no longer a uniform patriarchy: after all, Norway’s male footballers recently rejected an extra 550,000 kroner (NZ$97,150) a year in marketing payments, so as to ensure parity with female colleagues. Equally, we should not blindly accept the notion that women’s cricket, for example, is destined to remain forever peripheral. On the timeline of gender politics, the profile of women’s sport is rising at warp speed.
Only 10 years ago, it would have been inconceivable that England’s women cricketers could perform in front of a sell-out crowd at Lord’s, or that the netball team would merit an as-live replay on BBC 1 for their Commonwealth Games gold medal. What we regard as unlikely today might well look very different in another decade’s time.
The main barrier to this happening, and to women other than Williams or Maria Sharapova featuring among the top 100 earners, is a deep-rooted belief in the intrinsic inferiority of women’s sport as a spectacle. This is far from an extremist position.
Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics no less, described the inclusion of women at the Games as ‘‘impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and incorrect’’.
True, he was a creature of his era, but one detected echoes of Baron de Coubertin’s aversion in a statement by Bill Simmons, the most influential basketball writer in America, who in 2013 described the elite women’s game as equivalent to a ‘‘good intramural match at a Division Two college, only if nobody could jump or dunk’’.
Progress in sport towards greater equality between the sexes will not be linear, for no better reason than subjective matters of taste.
For all the brilliance of Ireland’s Katie Taylor in a boxing ring, there is a sprawling constituency implacably opposed to the sight of two women stoving each other’s faces in.
And for the strides taken in rugby, there are certain myopic perceptions of beauty that do not allow for women wrestling in the mud and rain.
Such preconceptions stretch back far, to the days when the "muscular Christianity" of the mid-19th century portrayed sport strictly as a masculine enterprise.
Tennis, or so the received wisdom goes, has shown the path to enlightenment. After all, it is the only sport that propels its leading ladies into the ranks of the super-wealthy. It has been ahead of its time, too, in ensuring equal prize money at grand-slam tournaments.
The picture is still imperfect, though. The enduring irony about tennis is that for all that it bangs the equality drum, it perpetuates a system where men play best of five sets at major tournaments and women best of three. Is this distinction, which the sport never adequately justifies, a tacit acknowledgement of female frailty, of the idea that women cannot go the same distance?
Or does it suggest that if women were compelled to contest five-setters, people would not bother tuning in?
If you search widely enough, the evidence is that there is a receptive mass audience for once-marginalised female sports.
In Perth this year, almost 55,000 spectators filed through the turnstiles to watch women play Australian rules football.
Similarly, TV viewing figures for the 2017 edition of the Women’s Big Bash cricket reflected a 46 per cent increase on the previous year.
The issue, ultimately, is one of projection: if women’s sport is afforded a more prominent platform and promoted with consistency, knowledge and conviction, there is every chance it can break through to once unheard-of heights.
Today, the distorted Forbes list might seem to many women like an unbridgeable frontier.
It ought not to be so. In these times of incipient revolution, the most powerful enemy to change is fatalism.