This just in: Sports is not a boys' club

Last month, the former technical inspector for NASCAR's Nationwide Series, Mauricia Grant, filed a $225 million lawsuit against her former employer, alleging 23 specific incidents of sexual harassment and 34 specific incidents of racial and gender discrimination.
    Grant, who is African American, claimed in the lawsuit and in an interview with ESPN that two NASCAR officials on different occasions exposed themselves to her and that the overall work atmosphere was "hostile."
    Yahoo! Sports has an anonymous source who told them who the two officials were, and Grant named several people (all of whom are also named in the lawsuit) in her ESPN interview last month. But since I did not do any original reporting on this story, suffice it to say that if you want to know who these guys are, you can look on either espn.com or the Yahoo! Sports web site.
    Grant alleges in her ESPN interview that she complained several times and took the matter all the way up to Nationwide Series Director Joe Balash, but NASCAR chairman Brian France told Yahoo! Sports that she never went to NASCAR's human relations department with these complaints and that her lawsuit was simply about the money.
    I'll certainly keep a close eye on how this thing unfolds, but these allegations give me an icky feeling about how male-dominated the professional level of sports is and how unchangeable that fact seems to be. Please don't fill my inbox with the supply-and-demand argument, either. I get that.
    But advertisers know they can get "X" million fans to see their product by advertising on an NFL game and only "X" thousand eyes from advertising during a WNBA game. Even male-dominated sports that aren't lucky enough to be among the big three (NFL, MLB, NBA) know that all they have to do is add one Danica Patrick to Indy Racing here or one Annika Sorenstam (a tremendous gofer and athlete who will be retiring after this season) to a PGA event there and, all of a sudden, your sport gets almost circus-like attention.
    People can't stop talking about the girl who wants to give it a try against the big boys. This extra attention paid to those athletes who compete with men seems patronizing to me.
    Another place this subtle discrimination come out more vocally is in the treatment of the WNBA by the male sports fan base. When a WNBA commercial comes on the television, invariably a group of meat-heads in your neighborhood and mine cracks a joke they find clever about the perceived illegitimacy of the women's game.
    It's time to stop hating on the WNBA is all I've got to say. These women have reached the top of their sport, and the worst team in the league (currently the Atlanta Dream, for your information) could put the hurt on your rec team any day of the week.
    We've all got to remember, though, that women's basketball is a different sport from men's basketball. There is no room for comparison between the two.
    Before the beginning of the 2008 season, the WNBA Players Association worked out a new collective bargaining agreement with the league, and player salaries are on the rise, even though, as Indiana Fever All-Star and players' association president Tamika Catchings told USA Today, "the league is not really making money at this point."
    Marquee players will soon be making six figues per year, and the list of WNBA and college players who dunk the ball is growing as well. That's just the way the game is moving, and, if I remember correctly, wasn't the lack of the dunk the number one knock on the women's game at the inception of the WNBA?
    It took several seasons of men's professional basketball before they started dunking as well. Remember George Mikan? Me neither.
    I look to ESPN's mothership (the nickname for the primary television channel - consequently, they don't call it the "fathership," do they?) to change the coverage of the dunk in WNBA games in the near future. With more and more players able to slam it down, they need to tone down the aura of amazement that surrounds the woman-dunk-Sportscenter-highlight.
    I wish a daughter upon every man who has thrown an insult at the WNBA or at any of its players. What are you going to tell her when she wants to play middle school basketball?