I had a girlfriend once who was a fairly handy hockey player.  This was back in the day when ‘water turf’ meant it had been raining in Dunedin for a week and Logan Park was a lake.  Games were played on grass – grass often churned up by games making divots and bumps do funny things to the ball.
A lot of her teammates were spectacularly gorgeous but with odd physical deformities.  A less than symmetrical face, one eye socket more depressed than the other, crazily broken noses and the like.  As we usually played rugby and hockey at the same time, it was a couple of months before I saw her play and realized why some of them had these differences.
Up until then, I had always thought of hockey as a genteel sort of game of pushing the ball about and scoring goals (hockey not having been an option at my school). Put 22 women with sticks on a churned up field, and after 15 minutes I was starting to feel like I was in a war zone.  It was little wonder there were so many broken bones about.  The advent of water turfs has lessened the chances of copping a ricochet, but women’s hockey is still possibly the toughest, scariest game about.
Radio jock Martin Devlin (better known these days for his shock value than insightful commentary) got stuck into women’s sports last week, saying – amongst other things - “I don’t like women playing cricket because the thing I love about cricket is the power.” I agree with him on netball, a sport made stupid because of the constant whistle blowing, but on the rest of it I have to stand up for my sisters in sport.
My wife once played rugby with cracked ribs because her team desperately needed her.  Her father helped her tape the Saturday edition of the paper to her torso, and she went about her usual “snap them in half” tackling routine as per normal.
I now have male representative rugby players who won’t play because they “might” get a knock.  You can imagine how this goes down in the clubrooms afterwards when Mrs. Lewis finds out.
One of my old athletics training partners suffered from dysmenorrhoea.  Now exercise is supposed to help with painful periods, so despite having spent a day in bed crying in pain, she would be out running 400m repetitions because her training was important to her – even if it didn’t help with “the curse”.
I’ve coached men’s and women’s cricket teams.  Getting a bloke to field at silly mid-on often seemed like I had asked them to chop off one of their testicles with a blunt plastic knife.  Never heard a peep from any of the women, and three players in the Queens High School 1st XI often fought over the right to field within death distance of the bat.
Played basketball in a mixed grade?  They might not have the strength, but they have sharp elbows(to the face, no less) and aren’t averse to playing the “let’s bend your fingers all the way back” game.
Devlin, in the hope of saying something that might be controversial, has only succeeded in making a dick of himself once again. Had the All Blacks not won the World Cup, the top Halberg Award would likely be going to Valerie Adams again next year.  Putting the boot into women’s sport might give some of the blokey listeners a guffaw.  Most would be waiting for the next ad break.