Christine Brennan Growing Up Female in Sports

Published: June 2, 2017, 3:40 p.m.

b'Female sports - Growing Up in the 60s and 70s\\nChristine Brennan - Our Town Season OneChristine Brennan: Yeah. I still own the family home where we grew up in Ottawa Hills.\\nA Ockershausen: Is that right? Oh wow.\\nChristine Brennan: Yep. I go back for Thanksgiving, Christmas. When I\\u2019m doing some speeches. I do a lot of charity work.\\nA Ockershausen: You\\u2019re in a hotbed of sports right there in Toledo.\\nChristine Brennan: Exactly. This is in the \\u201960s and into the early \\u201970s. I graduated high school in \\u201976, when girls were not encouraged to love or play sports. Yet, I had a dad, I\\u2019m the oldest of four kids, and my dad, who had been a football player in high school in Chicago, and then went to Drake and played football for a year in Des Moines, then went into the army at the end of World War II, my dad was saying, \\u201cHey, my daughter wants to play sports? Play sports.\\u201d My mom jokes I was born size 6X and kept right on growing. I was really tall. I\\u2019m the tallest kid in the neighborhood. I\\u2019m taller than the boys. They wanted to play sports with me. Every other girl was shooed away. \\u201cGet out of here. We don\\u2019t want you to play.\\u201d Of course, there\\u2019s no organized soccer. There\\u2019s no tee ball. You just played.\\nA Ockershausen: In the \\u201960s, right.\\nChristine Brennan: Sure. You just played. The kids, you just played in someone\\u2019s front yard or down the block or in the field. We would just go play. Goddard Field across from the University of Toledo and I\\u2019d be with all the boys and that was it, and me. I was the only girl. I was natural. I was a good athlete, and so they wanted me. They always picked me first to be part of the baseball team or whatever. We\\u2019re Mickey Mantle or Al Kaline up to bat. My dad \\u2026\\nA Ockershausen: Kaline Detroit.\\nChristine Brennan: Yeah, exactly. Close by. My dad, he taught me how to throw the ball properly. The old term \\u201cthrow like a girl,\\u201d which we should retire as a nation because now we\\u2019re teaching, of course, all of our daughters to throw the ball properly, so \\u201cthrow like a girl\\u201d is a compliment now with all these millions of girls and women playing sports because of Title IX. The old days, in the \\u201960s, girls were pushing the ball.\\nA Ockershausen: They pushed it.\\nChristine Brennan: My dad wouldn\\u2019t tolerate that for any of his daughters, much less his son, so I knew how to fire the ball and throw it and cock it behind my arm and throw it. I never threw like a girl, even though of course that term is ridiculous now. I don\\u2019t know if anyone\\u2019s heard. A woman actually ran for President. News flash. I don\\u2019t know if you\\u2019ve heard the news.\\nA Ockershausen: We\\u2019ve read the papers.\\nChristine Brennan: Hello, let\\u2019s move beyond \\u201cthrow like a girl.\\u201d Back then, I didn\\u2019t throw like a girl.'