The great football divide: Men and women

By Joanna Weiss, Globe Staff, 2/2/2002

EW ORLEANS - It's a sad thing to admit, but a tough thing to avoid, in this week of gridiron-mania. When it comes to football, women and men think differently.

First, the disclaimer. Yes, of course, there are female football nuts. Yes, women are capable of football obsession. This is a question of choice.

And this divide, between the men who choose football and the women who choose to think men are insane, isn't just big. It's institutional. So the NFL, eager to increase its fan base, is taking concrete steps to shrink the gap. This week at the ''NFL Experience,'' the league's flashy football museum/theme park park down the road from the Superdome, there was a ''Football 101'' clinic, specifically for the female fan.

Nobody seemed surprised.

Sure, there were the obvious theories about why football fandom is so male-dominated - theories about aggression and testosterone and the male psyche. But Carolina Panthers tight end Wesley Walls, one of the instructors, figured it was more of a practical matter.

According to Walls, boys had no choice but to learn football. ''We grew up playing football since we were that tall,'' he said. ''If we didn't learn the plays real quick, we'd be the last people picked at recess.''

That doesn't quite hold up today, though. Stephanie Becnel, 11, a sixth-grader from a New Orleans suburb, has been playing coed football at recess for some time. ''We kind of play by our own rules,'' she admits. Sometimes, for example, someone yells ''Freeze!'' and everyone on the field has to stand still.

And while she enjoys it, she also says it gets boring after a while. The girls are interested in going back to soccer.

''I think we just grow up faster,'' said Monica Mason, 37, a registered nurse from New Orleans, watching with skepticism and interest from the bleachers. ''Men never grow up. I mean, only a kid would be interested in rough play continuously.''

''They obsess over it,'' said her sister, Rhonda McClain, 42. ''Now why, I don't know. I might pick a team, but if they don't win, I'm not all upset.''

Maggie Romens, 28, a women's rowing coach from Minnesota, is an athletic type. She played football with her brothers in the backyard.

''I do like football, but I don't know it down to the nth degree,'' she said.

Maybe women don't care to obsess over details.

''It's like using a computer or being a computer programmer,'' says Catherine Becnel, 43, Stephanie's mother. ''A woman can watch the game, but she doesn't know the intimate details of it. And she probably doesn't care.''

Details, of course, were what this football clinic was all about. The difference between a slant and a flag and a button hook. The finer points of a football player's life. (You get fined if you pull your socks up wrong.)

But the questions had less to do with the rules and more to do with ... interpersonal relations. What happens when you do something terrible on the field? What do the coaches say to you in the locker room at halftime?

It led Ray Romero, the New Orleans sportscaster who emceed the affair, to figure the differences had to be something fundamental.

''It'd be like me going to a Meg Ryan movie,'' he said. ''It's not that I want to.''

Catherine Becnel hopes he's not suggesting women are soft. She heard Walls and Lions kick returner Desmond Howard describing their injuries - the pain, the soreness, the bruises - and recalls she has gone through childbirth, five times.

She figures she wins.