OPINION

By Tim Dahlberg

updated 2:39 a.m. ET May 18, 2007

The WNBA starts its 11th season on Saturday, a cause for celebration among women sports advocates even as the league’s attendance keeps sinking. To them, just surviving that long is reason enough to break out the champagne.

Another 10 years from now it’s likely the WNBA will still be around. NBA commissioner David Stern will make sure of it by using profits from the men’s game to subsidize the league as long as needed.

The game itself, proponents will tell you, has vastly improved even as teams struggle to draw fans. I’ll have to take their word for it, because in 10 years I’ve never felt the desire or need to see one in person.

Apparently, there are a lot of people like me. Attendance dropped to about 7,500 a game last year, the team in Charlotte folded, and the championship game had to be moved to another arena because of a Mariah Carey concert.

It’s not that we’re all male chauvinists when it comes to sports. I enjoy watching Serena Williams hit a tennis ball, and I pay attention to women’s golf. I’ll be rooting for Danica Patrick to win the Indianapolis 500.

Besides, the problem isn’t just that men don’t follow women’s sports. Women don’t watch, either, and that’s the biggest reason the WNBA struggles, the WUSA folded and the LPGA barely registers on the sports marketplace.

The truth is, women would rather watch men play sports than watch their own gender — and by a large margin.

A survey three years ago by New York-based Scarborough Research showed that three times as many women were loyal followers of the NBA than they were the WNBA; five times as many women were major league baseball fans than they were LPGA fans; and women watched the NFL more than anything else.

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It’s been 35 years since Title IX opened sports opportunities to women in college, which means two generations have taken advantage of increased scholarships. But while more women play sports, that doesn’t automatically guarantee there will be audience to watch them.

That was part of the discussion a few weeks ago when a meeting of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights turned into a heated debate over the future of Title IX and whether women were all that interested in sports.

“There are a lot of little girls out there that want to play, but there are a lot of little girls that don’t,” commissioner Jennifer Braceras said. “There are still very many girls that don’t want to play. The law can’t change that. You can’t force people to do something they don’t want to do.”

You can’t force them to watch, either.

When Title IX was enacted back in the 1970s, Billie Jean King, Chris Evert and Peggy Fleming were the biggest women stars. The argument could be made today that no woman since has matched their ability to get people to watch despite the increased opportunities.

Actually, the most popular female athlete of her time barely registers today. That would be Gertrude Ederle, who thrilled the nation when she became the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926, and was given a ticker-tape parade that drew millions.

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