AMERICA AT LARGE/GEORGE KIMBALL:IN WHAT amounts to a protracted and, for its participants, bittersweet valedictory lap, the United States Olympic softball team is in the midst of a 46-game barnstorming tour that has been labelled 'Bound 4 Beijing', but might better have been called 'Goodbye To All That'.
Against an array of college, international, and all-star teams, our girls have thus far warmed up for China by winning 25 of 26 games, beginning with a February 19th 16-0 squeaker over the University of Arizona through Tuesday night's 8-2 win at UCLA. The surprise should be that they lost even once (1-0), but when the opposing pitcher - Virginia Tech's Angela Tischer, last month - throws a no-hitter at you, that's going to happen.
While facing the best competition North America has to offer, Team USA has outscored its opposition 276-11, which is pretty much in keeping with our Olympic dominance over the years. Since softball was introduced as an Olympic Sport at the 1996 Atlanta Games, the Americans have unsurprisingly won four gold medals, and it would be a shock if they didn't make it 5-for-5 at the Fengtai Softball Field come August.
In Athens four years ago, the American softballers not only went 9-0, but when the Australians pushed across a run in the next-to-last inning of the gold medal game, it marked the first time they'd even been scored on. The aggregate run total for the last Olympiad read USA 51 opponents 1.
Small wonder the rest of the world has seen enough of this "competition." Three years ago the 117th convention of the IOC, in keeping with president Jaques Rogge's suggestion of eliminating sports that lack a global following or competitive depth, voted to exclude both softball and baseball from the World Olympic Programme, beginning with the 2012 London Games. The domestic reaction to the decision to jettison the two American sports has been strangely disparate.
There hasn't been much of a clamour about losing baseball. That the Games traditionally coincide with our own professional season, rendering our best players unavailable, has been our excuse for winning just one gold medal in four tries.
The Cubans won the other three, and in two of those Olympics the Americans won no medal at all. (As recently as last November, there had been talk of the recently-retired pitcher Roger Clemens bolstering Team USA's chances by signing on for Beijing, but a month later came the Mitchell Report fingering Roger as an abuser of performance-enhancing drugs, and that seems to have been the last of that.)
Since the alternative appeared to be continued embarrassment by the Cubans, the Japanese, and Taiwanese in what is supposed to be our National Pastime, few Americans seem to have shed a tear over the demise of Olympic baseball.
Softball appears to be another matter. Since it is a game few countries have even begun to play, much less master, its presence on an Olympic programme makes little sense to non-Americans, but its adherents in this country have chosen to interpret the move not as an Olympic issue, but as a women's issue.
"The birth of softball in the 1996 World Olympic Games was a great accomplishment in the world-wide acceptance of women's team sports," trumpets savesofball.com, a website devoted to the preservation of the species. "It would be a tragic event for so many young dreams of participation to be shattered."
"The dreams of thousands of girls are just gone," pitcher (and three- time gold medallist) Lisa Fernandez moaned to the Los Angeles Times' Helene Elliott before the UCLA game the other night.
Elliott is the latest distaff sports columnist to take up the cudgel in a war that would seem to have been already lost. In her distorted interpretation, softball isn't being eliminated because nobody else in the world plays it at our level, but because it is a game played by women.
Although in nearly the same breath she conceded that "there is a semblance of logic for dropping baseball," Elliott, excoriating what she termed "good-old-boy arrogance" for consigning softball to the same fate, termed the latter decision "one of the less-enlightened moves by a rarely enlightened body".
"(The IOC) delights in making money from the female gymnasts, runners, and swimmers who become the Games' marquee athletes, but has been slow to welcome women on to its playing fields or into its boardrooms," wrote Elliott in Tuesday's edition.
Although the chances of softball taking place in London four years hence are absolutely zero, the sport's movers and shakers haven't given up on the idea of a restoring it to future Olympiads. The first step appears to be demonstrating solftball's widespread appeal by beefing up the number of countries in which it is ostensibly played.
The International Softball Federation hopes to encourage international participation by offering (free) equipment and instruction to any country willing to participate. (Jordan, for instance, became a recent convert, though exactly how many Jordanian women actually play softball is another matter entirely.)
The ISF is an allegedly global organisation based in Plant City, Florida, whose roster of membership seems in many cases to bear an uncanny resemblance to George Bush's 'Coalition of the Willing'.
Don Porter, the president of the ISF, claims his umbrella organisation represents 130 national softball federations, more than the 122 members of the Switzerland-based Federation Internationale de Hockey sur Gazon, field hockey being a discipline not presently threatened with Olympic extinction.
In its efforts to present a compelling justification for its existence with an expanded body count, the ISF appears to employ a fairly liberalised view of what, exactly, constitutes a sovereign state.
The 'nations' comprising the softball federation, for instance, include the USA, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, the Mariana Islands, and American Samoa.
It shouldn't surprise you, then, to learn that the ISF's list of the world's softball-playing nations also includes Iraq.
Why, with numbers like this, we'll have softball back in the Olympics in no time flat.
