The Chase

Celebrated American author Annie Dillard died yesterday at age eighty-one. I've only read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, her Pulitzer-winning masterpiece, but today I spent time scrolling through quotes and passages from her other works. One excerpt stopped me cold, particularly in the wake of female athletes' fury over Sydney Sweeney's Novig ad.

A self-described tomboy, Dillard penned an ode to playing football with neighborhood boys:

"Some boys taught me to play football. This was fine sport. You thought up a new strategy for every play and whispered it to the others. You went out for a pass, fooling everyone. Best, you got to throw yourself mightily at someone's running legs. Either you brought him down or you hit the ground flat out on your chin, with your arms empty before you. It was all or nothing. If you hesitated in fear, you would miss and get hurt: you would take a hard fall while the kid got away, or you would get kicked in the face while the kid got away. But if you flung yourself wholeheartedly at the back of his knees—if you gathered and joined body and soul and pointed them diving fearless—then you likely wouldn't get hurt, and you'd stop the ball. Your fate, and your team's score, depended on your concentration and courage. Nothing girls did could compare with it."

"The Chase" from An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard

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Dillard's words hit because I lived them. Born twenty-five years later, in the same year Title IX became law, I was the only girl on the boys' soccer team—no team yet for girls in Ann Arbor. I rock climbed, hiked, skied, and biked with my brother and my father, who pushed us equally hard. Like Dillard, I looked at the activities labeled for girls and found them wanting. I wanted grit. I wanted pain with bigger payoff. I wanted to contribute to the team, to be seen as an equal.

That desire has never left me. The urge to be recognized as an athlete, a teammate, someone worth passing the ball to—it shaped who I became.

So my fists clenched when I saw Sweeney's ad. I recognize her right to make choices for herself, but that ad doesn't celebrate female athleticism. It mocks it. It trivializes our athletic accomplishments. Women before my time didn't have the choice to play sports at all. The opportunity was stolen from them. Not everyone wants to compete, but no one should strip away the chance by reducing the opportunities that exist.

I ran through the neighborhood with a gang of boys—jumping off forts, swinging on ropes, racing through backyards. The male athletes always treated me well. They were never the problem. Like the boys who taught Dillard football, they welcomed me to the team. Shoulder slaps. High fives. Dirty palm to dirty palm. With concentration and courage, female athletes built a ladder to equality, aided by male friends and teammates, climbing on the shoulders of mothers and grandmothers who fought off-book, unseen, unheralded.

That's what Dillard understood. That's what Sweeney's ad betrays. Not everyone needs to see us competing. But everyone should protect our chance to compete without apology, without objectification, without having our hard-won equality demeaned.

The real athletic moment—the one that matters—is the one where you fling yourself wholeheartedly at the back of your opponent's knees. Where you gather body and soul and courage and point them at what matters. No ad campaign can compare with it.