Women still have far to travel

It's the anniversary of Title IX but exactly how far have women come in the world of athletics? Title IX most certainly opened doors for women but it can only do so much.
This country will only let women go so far.
Even as the WNBA moves into another season, the league is simply a mirage. It's not a symbol of women achieving new heights but rather, a sign that things really haven't changed that much.
Women's basketball is a much bigger deal overseas. The WNBA is not the primary job of the top players, it is simply a part-time hobby.
I found this article recently and thought it was quite interesting.

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By Paul Oberjuerge
Sports columnist
PHOENIX - Diana Taurasi worked her second job Friday night.
She's moonlighting again ths summer. Earning pin money. Even if it would be better for body and soul if she took some time off.
Taurasi's "other" job?
WNBA superstar, unofficial league poster kid, face of the Phoenix Mercury.
But that isn't her real focus, though fans of the domestic women's basketball league are forgiven for not knowing better.
Her real job is in Russia, where she played over the winter for Spartak Moscow of the Russian Super League.
Where she earned an estimated 10 times her reported 2007 WNBA salary of $49,000.
And lived in a rent-free, six-bedroom house with Spartak (and former UConn) teammate Sue Bird.
Where she had the services of a translator, a driver and flew business class to all games. And was showered with bonuses by the Russian businessman who runs the team.
"We have to do the job to pay the bills, to live, basically," Taurasi said before the Mercury's game with the Connecticut Sun. "And our bills mostly get paid overseas, by overseas teams and companies."
Nearly every WNBA player (Taurasi estimates 90 percent) spends the winter playing in another league, usually in Europe.
The WNBA's elite makes far more money in Russia, Spain, Poland, Italy, South Korea, et al, than they do in the salary-capped ($728,000 per team), red ink-drenched WNBA. Which can only grimace and bear the knowledge that its players increasingly consider Someplace Else their No. 1 job.
"It's always been a concern" of the WNBA, Mercury general manager Ann Meyers Drysdale said. "I'd say in the last three or five years, even more so and more so."
The "other job" phenomenon is not widely recognized by WNBA fans, who seem to share the common American conceit that our pro sports leagues are the best and wealthiest on the planet.
"I doubt (WNBA) fans even know about the other leagues," Mercury coach Paul Westhead said.
The WNBA continues to trumpet itself as the planet's most competitive women's basketball league, home to the best players. Which remains true, but perhaps solely because its brutally compressed summer season doesn't conflict with the rest of the planet's traditional fall-winter-spring hoops time frame.
Knowing it is Plan B for most top players might be little more than a source of embarrassment for the WNBA, except for this:
The strain of playing two seasons in a year is beginning to tell on the league's best players. They are becoming open about the possibility they simply will skip the WBNA season.
"That," Taurasi said, "would be everyone's dream. Three months kicking back. Going to Cancun ..."
Taurasi is perhaps the greatest women's player in the world, and her situation is instructive.
She calculates she has had six weeks away from basketball since May of 2005. That's more than 26 months ago.
In one insane two-week period in May, she led Spartak to the Russian championship on a Thursday night, flew all day Friday to Los Angeles, was maid of honor in her sister's wedding on Saturday, drove to Phoenix on Sunday and on Monday rejoined the Mercury, which opened the WNBA season five days later.
She is blunt about the toll exacted by year-round practices and games. She has had an Achilles injury for a year and a half, and deals with it by getting cortisone injections, rather than time off.
"Eventually, you need a break. That's just too much basketball on someone's body, on someone's psyche," she said.
Taurasi suggests WNBA defections already have begun. She seems convinced the "surprise" retirement of Sparks standout Chamique Holdsclaw, 29, last month is about too much basketball. Period.
Holdsclaw was the MVP in a Polish league earlier this year.
"She said, `You know what, I've played for so long, I'm going to take my summers off and play overseas (in the winter) and still make great money,' because she's still one of the top players in the world," Taurasi said.
"That might be the trend for people who get a little bit older."
Taurasi is only 25, but she already feels herself breaking down. If she continues to play in two leagues each season, with national team commitments, too.
"If I keep this up, I can play only four or five more years," she said.
To be sure, Taurasi and nearly all American players feel a deep sense of commitment to the struggling WNBA. They would love nothing better than to make "overseas money" domestically (as their NBA brethren do) and have a real home, and a real offseason, and give up living out of suitcases year after draining year.
"Sometimes you have to make decisions that have to be selfish," she said on the same day that adoring Mercury fans cheered her in a 111-109 double-overtime victory over Connecticut. "Because at the end of the day, no one is going to worry about you but yourself. That's just the bottom line."
And for the record, Taurasi returns to her real job on Dec. 1, when she returns to Moscow.