Pigskin pretenders

When the NFL season starts on Sunday, NFL referees will likely be locked out by management.

But, the folks behind “NFL For Her” are the ones who should really be locked out.

Just when you thought the WNBA season was over and it was safe to turn ESPN back on, marketing geniuses at the league’s New York offices want to feminize football.

If the NFL’s sponsorship of breast cancer groups and its touchy-feely strange appearances on gyno-outlets like Lifetime Channel haven’t annoyed you, then its other ludicrous “outreach” efforts – like “NFL For Her” on the NFL website and “NFL 101 For Women” – should.

Real football fans have waited since January for this masculine contest between flak-jacketed brutes on the gridiron. The sheer clash of bones, the ooze of blood, the smell of fear on the runner’s breath while he tries to escape a mammoth lineman’s crushing tackle – that’s what football’s about.

But then comes Ally McBeal and the Dallas Cowboys in commercials on FOX, trying to get more women to watch football. Ally McBeal and football? Please – make it stop.

It’s all part of the league’s campaign to get more female customers. But, isn’t anything male sacred anymore? Can’t men have anything to themselves? Must everything be transformed and sensitized into a wimpy, feminine product line? Apparently, the NFL thinks so.

Several years ago, the NFL brought in Sarah Levinson to run its marketing division and make the league more palatable to soccer moms. No longer with the league, many of Levinson’s ideas, like NFL 101, remain the hallmark of this campaign to feminize football. NFL players singing in Visa ads and appearing in emotional ads during soap operas – that was Levinson. “NFL Stories Straight from the Heart,” featuring players crying over cancer-stricken loved ones on Lifetime – Levinson, again. Ditto for the NFL’s bizarre new dedication to breast cancer. “We’ve really crested on how we want to communicate with our female audience,” said an NFL Properties vice president. What’s next – NFLers in tampon ads?

The great thing about football is that it’s a purely masculine domain. There is no WNFL, thank G-d. And there is no estrogen on the field. If football fans wanted that, they’d watch the WNBA. And with a paltry 1.1 rating, last weekend’s WNBA championship answers the question, what happens when you hold a “pro” women’s sports event and nobody comes?

Men love football because it speaks their language. They don’t want their guys making a chop block or touchdown on Sunday, then crying on Lifetime Channel, Monday. It’s pathetic. Women who want to see that need to watch more Valerie Bertinelli and Melissa Gilbert movies of the week and stay away from my football game.

By the NFL’s own admission, football is the favorite sport of women (22.1 percent, according to an ESPN-Chilton poll), and on an average weekend, 54 million women watch NFL games and 375,000 attend NFL games – making them 40 percent of the NFL’s audience, already. As one of them, I can tell you, we don’t watch to see sensitive guys talk about Mother’s Day and breast exams. Women don’t watch “girl power” channels, like Oxygen and WE, but they’re watching NFL Sunday. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Then, there’s NFL For Her. Sounds like Bras For Him. And it’s equally stupid. It’s more like NFL for NOW – more Title IX propaganda. Aside from the questionable brag that 779 girls played high-school football last year, this silly section of the NFL website has articles about how excited NFL players are to have girl players at their summer football camps, where “girls tend to mature faster and be even more adept than the boys,” according to Philadelphia Eagles running back, Duce Staley. NFL For Her declares “the NFL’s on-going attempt to respond to the explosion in participation in women’s sports to encourage women to play the game of football.” Oh brother – or is that, sister?

“NFL 101 For Women,” Levinson’s legacy heavily touted by NFL For Her, is billed as “a workshop setting [where] women will learn about life in the NFL, the history of football, strategy, equipment, official signals, and helpful hints on watching a game.” No, they won’t. Though the website proclaims that “NFL 101 classes are one element in the NFL’s ongoing programs that concentrate on the explosion in participation in women’s sports” and brags about girls’ growing participation in “Punt, Pass, and Kick” and “NFL Flag Competitions,” NFL 101 is a joke.

In 1998, I covered the inaugural Detroit Lions’ version for the Detroit Free Press. The seminar featured three Lions players, including quarterback Charlie Batch. The women that attended were either died-in-the-wool football fans, who didn’t need or want to see the NFL’s feminine side, or groupies looking for a “date.” For most of the session, the players got on the field with the women, and they tackled each other. Somebody got a hotel room. One of the players left with a woman in a lime-green leather suit – for drinks, and whatever else. NFL For Her’s description of NFL 101 features “Wine & Cheese Pairing Ideas.” Girlie Martha Stewart food ideas and football don’t mix. Football fans drink beer. And the “helpful hints on watching a game”? “Listen to the lingo used by announcers and ‘Joe Football’ sitting next to you”; “Listen to stories told before and after the game by avid fans”; And, “Eat stadium fare.” Thanks for the tips, NFL For Her.

Also featured on NFL For Her is the “Women of the NFL.” Sorry, it doesn’t feature the real women of the NFL – strippers at Atlanta’s Gold Club (who performed sex acts on the Broncos’ Terrell Davis, Falcons’ Jamal Anderson, and others) and Tampa’s Mons Venus (Latin slang for a woman’s body part), where the NFL forbade players to go during Superbowl weekend (but many went anyway – to get a little extracurricular feminism).

It rambles about players’ mothers and wives, some chick who’s a position coach for high school football, and Jazzercize during Falcons half-time. Who cares? A story about Raiderette cheerleader Monique Beuk tells us she’s a welder by day, and a dancer-cheerleader by night. “Flashdance,” anyone? “There is an ethos in the Raiders organization. I dared to dream,” says Beuk. “It’s a message we should carry to young women everywhere, and even little girls.” Hello – you’re a cheerleader in a glorified Hooters outfit, not a rocket scientist. Not much more about this member of the NFL’s Silicone Valley ethos.

Another of the “NFL’s Women” is Amy Trask, Oakland Raiders executive and attorney, who likens her invasion of the NFL to civil rights leader Rosa Parks’ refusal to sit in the back of the bus.

Puh-leeze – black Americans should be incensed by this ludicrous comparison. And she should be embarrassed, since, this year, she lost her boss’ (Al Davis) kajillion-dollar lawsuit against the NFL – big-time. It drove our ticket prices up. Thanks, Amy. None of these women are actually playing in the NFL, so they are not the women of the NFL. They don’t matter.

Few are even on the field and, of those, the only one who deserves any respect is CBS’ sideline reporter Bonnie Bernstein. The girl knows her football and sees herself as a sports reporter, not a crusader on the field. She watches film with players, understands plays and options, and has as much insight into the game as a guy who puts the pads on. She’s one of the best TV sports people out there. But still, there’s a reason the NFL featured the attractive, cute brunette as a “Woman of the NFL.” She is not a blonde airhead, like CBS’ Jill Arrington and ABC’s Melissa Stark – babes who’d turn off the jealous, threatened soccer moms at which NFL For Her is aimed. They don’t know football, but they came in 1st and 2nd, respectively (Bernstein was 4th), in a Playboy poll for prospectively posing nude. While she refused to discuss it, even Bernstein, according to The Irish Times, sent Playboy a better pic than the one they were using – so did Stark. A fact they know, not mentioned on NFL For Her: You’ve gotta be sexy to be a true “Woman of the NFL.”

With no more Swedish Bikini Team ads, the degradation of men in most movies and TV shows and the total feminization of most pop culture, men need a release that lets men be men. It’s evidenced in the backlash mainstreaming of oversexed, but popular, semi-porn mags – like Maxim and FHM. Right now, that release is the NFL. NFL For Her contradicts that, which is why it’s a silly sham. As is any effort to feminize the gridiron. Football is a man’s game. That’s who plays it, and that’s the law of nature of the game. It’s why men – and women – watch it.

And it’s why the NFL must decide whether it wants to be the Oprah show or football. Trying to be both is as phony as an NFL regulation football’s vinyl pigskin.