I am with Dr. Johnson on women's athletics. The remarkable thing is not that it is done well, but that it is done at all. I can think of nothing other than sexual politics to recommend it, and I cannot understand why anyone would pay to see it.

There are exceptions, of course, most notably, tennis. That's because tennis is not a well-designed game for men. The serve is too dominant, the court the wrong size. Red Smith famously wrote that ninety feet between the bases is as close to perfection as man has come. (He was perhaps not familiar with Bach's cello suites.) If he is right, then the dimensions of the tennis court are less perfect than the lay-out of the baseball diamond. Indeed, they are so less perfect that the court is ideal for a women's game, which is what tennis really is. Women's tennis matches are just less boring than most men's matches. (And again, there are exceptions at the very highest level of men's play, but most men's matches are not something you'd want to sit in the sun for three hours to see.)

Basketball is a man's game. Played at its best, it requires physical attributes that not enough women have to make for a competitive league. The women's game is competitive, and there are great players, but there are not enough of such specimens to populate a court. If a great women's team cannot beat a good men's team, then, by definition, the teams are playing different games. And the fact is that most people do not want to see women asserting physical dominance over other women. It's just not something our DNA is into.

The basketball game women play doesn't work for me because it does not show humans performing at the apex of human capability. Caitiln Clark is feted for having scored more points than any other basketball player only because it would be politically incorrect to cite the quality of competition against which she scored them. She was playing a different game with the same name.

Altius, citius, fortius is the Olympic motto. I don't see any point in gender norming it. I want to see what our species can do. I want to see feats done as well as they can be done. That's what men do. Golf played from the women's tee is a sport called "Women's Golf." It is not the sport Bryson DeChambeau and Rory McIlroy play.

I do understand how sports is part of the social movement toward functional interchangeablity of the sexes. I believe that's a bad thing, but I accept that it may be an inevitable thing. So we will have women's sports, and we will hear whining about why, somehow, women don't get paid as much for playing them professionally. Maybe that's because they don't sell as much beer or as many trucks, which is what professional athletes do for a living. At some point, the market tells us whom they want to be like by buying what those people endorse.