Sally Ride, new role model

If, only a couple of weeks ago, you dropped the name Sally Ride into the conversation anywhere in America, I doubt you'd have heard even a stammer of recognition. To avoid any nauseating suggestion that I was holier or wiser than thou, I ought to say that a month ago, the name Sally Ride meant absolutely nothing to me either but last weekend, with a couple we've known for 30 or 40 years, we found ourselves, at the inspiration of Sally Ride, talking about American heroines. This was not difficult to do since Moira Shearer had just died.

We were talking about her and as old fogeys will – and young fogeys too, for that matter – we went on naturally to reminiscing about our contemporaries and other American heroines. We were talking, musing rather, about popular heroines and of all the movie stars and famous models and singers and such, one name came back to us with a special dazzle.

It was called for by an item in the news we were watching, an announcement that Los Angeles has just put on sale tickets for the 1984 Olympics. It was recalled that the last time Los Angeles housed the games in 1932, the first-day tickets could be purchased for what, in the depth of the Depression, was considered a very stiff price indeed – three dollars. Last week, the Olympic Committee announced, without a blush, that an opening day ticket next year would cost you $200.

This led, as it inevitably would, anywhere in this country among old-timers with an interest in sport, to the recollection of the indomitable and cocky figure of Babe Didrikson who hypnotised the thousands in Los Angeles by setting, on the opening day, the new women's record in the javelin throw. A couple of days later, she broke the record in the high hurdles and was second in the high jump. The Babe was only 19, had already made an all-America women's basketball team, was a remarkable swimmer and tennis player. Nobody had ever seen an athlete, male or female, like her. She went on a vaudeville tour. She was, could have been exclusively, a first-class tap dancer. She pitched an innings for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Two years after this show of versatility, she responded to a sports writer's suggestion that she ought to take up golf. 'Think I just might,' she said.

I ought to throw in here that this June 1983 weekend is the weekend of the United States Open Golf Championship and in an off-the-course interview, Jack Nicklaus, probably the best golfer there has ever been, reminded us that from the age of ten to twelve, his teacher held his head while he hit a couple of hundred balls a day. Two years, Nicklaus figured, is about the least time in which you can learn to hit the ball with any accuracy or predictability.

Well, Babe Didrikson, within one year of buying her clubs and grabbing a teacher and keeping him at it on the practice range till nightfall, within one year she was touring the country with Gene Sarazen, then in his prime, showing the customers that a woman could crack a drive past the 250-yard marker. I will bring instant cheer to long-suffering hackers by saying that her game was not all that hot as yet. She just banged the ball but she settled down to learn and practice nothing but golf. It took 12 years for her to win the Women's Championship and then, in the season of 1946/7, she reeled off 15 tournament victories in a row, something no golfer, man or woman, has ever done since or is likely to.

It was not just her astounding ability, it was the marvellous sassyness of her personality. Once she was invited to play an exhibition game at a club in Iowa. The club picked its champ to play along with her. Before a sell-out crowd, the local champ teed up to show her the way. He fired a beauty, about 260 yards down the fairway. Hearty and relieved applause from the locals. The Babe, driving also, of course, from the men's tees, cracked one about 20 yards beyond the macho champ and as they took off down the fairway, she turned to him and hissed, 'Don't it burn your tail though!'. She naturally won the British Women's Championship too and delighted the crowds as much with her comic asides, as with her sizzling and, by then, precise talent.

So, how about Sally Ride? If you haven't heard it already, you certainly will hear it ad, shall we say, libitum, in the next few days. Sally Ride is 32, a cheerful, attractive, no-nonsense woman who thought of becoming, and probably could have been, a crack tennis player. She decided instead to major in college in Los Angeles in astrophysics and English literature. She is the first American woman astronaut and is off with four men on the sixth mission of the space shuttle Challenger. They intend to deploy two enormous communications satellites for the benefit of paying customers in Canada and Indonesia. They will also drop over the side an experimental instrument platform and let it float alongside for nine hours, after which they hope to retrieve it with a robot arm. This has not been done before and we have to take it from the boys and girls at the Kennedy Space Centre that the success of this retrieval is crucial to future shuttles.

The public relations staff at Kennedy would never know it. They report that most of the enquiries that have come in, what the PR men say has been a paralysing volume of enquiries, have been all about Sally Ride. Whether she likes it or not, she has become an overnight heroine, film star and, as the popular jargon has it, role model. It happily turns out that she doesn't like it much.

She was interviewed a night or two before the flight and, I must say, was admirably crisp – not curt, just courteously unforthcoming about the usual nonsense that is put to any woman these days who does something that was once thought to be the exclusive job of a male. No, she had no interest in politics. How would this affect her marriage? Sweetly, she said, 'I think that is between Stephen and me'. She refused to make her mission any sort of landmark event for women's liberation – a giant step forward for womankind was suggested. If you say so. She put a stop to such misty mush by saying, apropos of the publicity and the big hype, 'I think it's too bad that our society isn't further along in accepting these things. This is not such a big deal. It's time people realised that women can do just about any job they want to do.'

End of interview. End of the media's (restless) attempt to make her into a combination of Marilyn Monroe, Gloria Steinem, Babe Didrikson and Eleanor Roosevelt. Her one ambition, she said, was to be a good physicist and a team player in the astronaut corps.

For myself, I must say that I'm pleased, almost excited to hear that there's a doctor along on the flight with the particular mission of finding out why so many shuttle crews suffer from motion sickness. I recall that after an early orbit by an American astronaut and when the space programme began to dawdle for a while, one embittered astronaut said all that the public was getting from the expenditure of those billions of dollars was the discovery of a non-sticky frying pan.

Well, I'd like to believe that that robot arm does its stuff and that its success will lead to progress undreamed of in space shuttling but it would be a great thing, also, if the studies up there of Dr Norman Thagard mean that people can soon sit in the back seat of a bouncing taxi and not feel like throwing up.

Talking of heroes and heroines reminds me that they will emerge in the next two weeks in their most conspicuous form, if not in their purest form – I'm thinking about the start on Monday of Wimbledon, what, for some reason, the linguists have never explained, Americans, even American sports commentators, call Wimble-t-on. However, I believe this is the right time to talk about what can only be called a crisis in the conduct of tennis tournaments.

Not only the fans, but the casual onlooker will know what I mean if I say that the crisis crept in on cocky feet about a dozen or more years ago with the arrival on centre court of Ilie Nastase. It approached more boldly in the following years with the jumpy Jimmy Connors. It roared in as a full-blown problem in human behaviour with John McEnroe. It's nothing more or less than what is now a routine defiance of the etiquette of decent behaviour that once made tennis, and still makes golf, an exercise in maintaining grace under pressure.

The official response to these sulks which turned into tantrums and then into storms of obscene abuse, was to look uncomfortable at first. 'Am I hearing what I think I'm hearing?' Then to turn grave, then to administer a slap on the wrist in the form of a warning, a second warning and then fines. Fines of hundreds of dollars against players who earn a million or two a year.

I took this up with a famous sports writer who's been covering tennis for 40 years or more. 'It's too late,' he said, 'the crowds expect it. Some of them come for nothing else. If umpires disqualified them, there'd be a riot.' So? One riot would be a cheap price to pay for restoring the game as a decent sport. Already in a terrifying documentary film I saw the other week we see that little tots, ten-year-olds at tennis schools are hurling rackets, shouting at linesmen, exploding in obscenities just like their heroes from New York.

'It would take great courage,' my veteran reporter said, 'for an umpire to disqualify any big star.' I dissent. It would not take courage of the order of Shackleton, Martin Luther King, Lech Walesa, It would take ordinary, simple guts. Just announce in a circular before the games start that protesting a call would produce a warning. Abuse of an official would forfeit the match. Obscenity against an umpire would have you thrown out.

As the late, great Red Smith put it, 'To have an umpire fire one of these riff-raff from not the match, but the tournament, would dispose, at a stroke, of the whole, slum-clearance project.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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