NEVADA VIEWS: On the Golden Knights, the Aces and the stifling patriarchy

The recent NHL championship garnered by the Vegas Golden Knights gives Las Vegans, and all Americans, a unique opportunity to look at ourselves in relation to how we view women’s accomplishments in our society.

Many of us have perhaps forgotten that, only nine months ago, the Las Vegas Aces became the first major professional sports team in Las Vegas history to earn a championship. A major U.S. city will rarely have such a unique opportunity to look around and compare its community’s reactions to two such similar events; two major professional sports championships only nine months apart. The only substantial difference between the two events is that one was an accomplishment by a team of women and the other was an accomplishment by a team of men.

There were two parades. How did they compare, both in community support and attendance?

What did the road to the championship look like at your workplace? Were you encouraged to wear jerseys or team fan attire? In workplaces with dress policies, did supervision provide allowances to celebrate our local teams with a similar frequency or level? Was fan attire simply allowed or did leadership really promote it?

How many of your friends will tell you, “I never watched hockey until the Golden Knights became successful”? If this is the threshold for taking on a new interest, are they now WNBA fans as well?

Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman bestowed keys of the city on the Golden Knights. Did she do the same for the Aces?

How many thousands of Golden Knights bumper stickers, license plates and flags do you see around Las Vegas right now? Have you ever noticed a Las Vegas Aces license plate? Apparently the Nevada DMV doesn’t offer one, but they do offer a Las Vegas Raiders license plate, and I have little doubt someone is contemplating one for the Las Vegas Athletics.

I think Americans’ entertainment consumption habits are a complex subject. Why some of us become positively rabid in regard to one home team and regard another with indifference is something we should each probably reflect on. Did I become a hockey fan overnight? If the Aces had been an NBA team winning a championship, how would I have responded?

Most of us know the simple truth: A mediocre or losing men’s professional sports team is more coveted than a championship women’s team. The Raiders illustrate this. I’m not sure how to change this. How would I convince people to buy tickets to an event they have no interest in watching, or to tune into a channel they wouldn’t normally watch?

But I find it impossible to view our collective attitude toward men’s professional sports as anything other than another societal double standard that celebrates the accomplishments of our sons while simply pretending to do so for our daughters. This perhaps would not be so problematic if we did not hold our sports heroes in such high regard. We place them on pedestals and hail them as national heroes, in the company of kings and presidents. So many of our society’s pedestals were built specifically for men. And when we do build a pedestal specifically for women, it is so often in the shadow of the pedestal built for men.

There is another aspect to all of this. Many of the community responses to these two events were sanctioned by community leaders, government agencies and workplace managers. With mindful policy decisions and public relations initiatives, these entities have the power to highlight and celebrate the accomplishments of women and men. Particularly in government organizations, managers should be as excited about getting people to wear their Aces jerseys as they are about getting people to wear their Golden Knights jerseys.

And if your workplace likes to fly sports team flags, the Aces flag should fly the highest. They were the first, after all.

Eric McCammond writes from Las Vegas.