No one whipped off her shirt after the U.S. Women's Hockey Team captured Olympic Gold in Nagano, Japan, in 1998. With all the equipment worn in hockey, it might have taken half an hour to peel down to a sports bra.

Still, so much that was exhilarating about the performance of the U.S. Women's Soccer Team during this summer's World Cup was also apparent in 1998, as the American women skated their way to the first gold medal ever awarded in women's hockey.

Then too, an immensely appealing and talented American women's team played with a tenacity and passion that attracted millions of fans overnight. Just like now, the nation was captivated by the spectacle of women playing with a toughness and physicality usually associated with male athletes, but also with a selflessness rarely seen in any top-tier sporting event.

And just like now, the media celebrated the notion that athletic young girls suddenly had champion role models of their own gender in a sport traditionally seen as a male preserve.

"One Giant Leap for Womankind," the Washington Post crowed in a representative headline after the hockey team beat the favored Canadians in a tense final.

Now, just a year and a half later, America is in love with another women's sports team. But if you think Cammi Granato is rueful, forget it. She couldn't be happier.

You remember Granato. She was the face of women's hockey, the same role Mia Hamm has performed in women's soccer for so long. Granato was captain of the U.S. women's hockey team in 1998 and its most potent offensive player. Like Hamm, she was also attractive and humble, the perfect antidote to any preconception about the sort of brute who would choose women's hockey.

America's short attention span has moved far away from her, but Granato says she was as thrilled as anyone about the soccer players and the adulation they received. "I followed it really, really closely," she said this week from her Manhattan Beach, Calif., home. "I was glued to the TV and made sure I was there for all the games."

She would have been at the Rose Bowl for the soccer final had it not conflicted with an Olympics-related event in Salt Lake City that same weekend. She watched the game on television with other Olympians. She was struck by how devoted the soccer players were to each other, exactly what had been noted about her hockey team.

"You have to have unity to get there, maybe more in women's sports. We had it, and it was written all over them."

If the World Cup team was a revelation about female athletics to many Americans, it wasn't for Granato. It was merely the latest and most emphatic evidence of the impact of Title IX, the 27-year-old federal mandate for equal funding for men and women in high school and college athletics. Granato knew that the momentum has been building from year to year and from sport to sport.

"We got to ride the success of the women who were in Atlanta in 1996 [at the Summer Olympics]," Granato says. "The softball team, the soccer team, the basketball team, gymnastics. When '98 came around, there was already a buzz going on, and that helped us."

Women athletes from all sports take special pride in each other because of their similar struggles, she says. Title IX aside, they get less financial support than their male counterparts, and less attention and encouragement. That's why women athletes exult over any breakthroughs, especially when the entire world happens to be paying attention, as it was during the World Cup, the most watched women's sporting event in history.

"When you walk into a newsstand and see [the women's soccer team] on the cover of every newspaper and every magazine, that's amazing, and that's what it should be like. When you get respect for your sport and people recognizing what you put into your sport, it's really rewarding. We had that. But they have it on a much huger scale."

When she won her gold medal, Granato, the all-time leading goal-scorer at Providence College, was halfway around the world. It wasn't until she returned home that she learned how celebrated she and her team were. "We had no idea the country was going to embrace our sport like it did," she says. "We had no idea people had been so psyched by it. They'd come to us and say, 'You inspired us,' or 'I cried when I watched.' That was so wonderful for us to hear."

For the hockey team, as the soccer team, there were appearances with David Letterman, at the White House and at ballparks, where they received standing ovations from an American audience that loves its winners.

It was a reception beyond even the dreams of the women hockey players. As youngsters, many of them were forced to pretend they were boys to play youth hockey. If girls were on the ice at all, they were supposed to be twirling in sequins, not slapping pucks into nets or crashing into the boards. At 28, Granato, also a star soccer and basketball player in high school, is old enough to remember how uncomfortable it was to be viewed as a female jock. She appreciates the distance traveled.

"Now everyone is talking about women athletes, about their strength and beauty. That's 180 degrees from the way it was when I was a kid. You were supposed to be thin, and muscles were frowned upon. It's like America just discovered this."

She was tickled when soccer player Brandi Chastain stripped off her shirt at the end of the World Cup final to reveal her steeled body. "I know listening to people talk, they've said, 'Boy, [Chastain] is so built, and she's so strong and so attractive.' That in itself is making huge strides because for so long, being strong wasn't considered a good thing for girls. You weren't supposed to be athletic."

Just as there is talk now of a professional women's soccer league, aspirations for women's hockey skyrocketed in the euphoria after Nagano, perhaps unreasonably. Still, there seems no question that girls' hockey is here to stay. According to USA Hockey, the sport's national governing body, hockey registration for girls in the United States has grown from 6,336 in 1990 to nearly 34,000 today. Girls' hockey is now growing at a faster rate than boys'.

Additionally, each year more northern colleges are adding varsity women hockey teams. Later this year, the Western Collegiate Hockey Association will inaugurate a new seven-school women's league, the nation's second.

Heather Ahearn, a spokeswoman for USA Hockey, says the growth of women's hockey owes much to the '98 Olympians.

"They brought women's hockey to a new level of visibility, which can only help in the future," says Ahearn. "The women on the Olympic team didn't really have any women role models before them. Now, little girls can say they want to be Cammi Granato or [Olympic goalie] Sarah Tueting."

Granato has seen evidence of the increased popularity firsthand. "My brothers and I just put on a hockey camp this summer near Chicago, and we had 170 girls come. That's just phenomenal."

Still, she admits her desire of playing professionally remains a long way off, even farther away than a women's soccer league. After the World Cup, sponsors immediately materialized to promote a national tour of the U.S. Women's Soccer Team this fall. Nothing similar happened in hockey. Since Nagano, the U.S. Women's Hockey Team hasn't played a single game on home ice.

"The players wanted to keep going, but we haven't had even one game in this country since the Olympics, which is frustrating," she says. "It was sort of a bittersweet thing. You play for that one season and then the day it's over, it's over."

After Nagano, Granato and her teammates were forced to get jobs off the rink. In her case, it wasn't far off: Last season, she did color commentary on the NHL's Los Angeles Kings radio broadcasts.

She still trains rigorously and plays in a men's league once a week. There have also been some opportunities to play the women's game. Last winter, select U.S. national women's teams were briefly assembled to compete in two tournaments in Europe, one for a world championship (the Americans finished second to Canada). Even though many Olympians were on those teams, the Americans were again competing in all-too-familiar obscurity.

"There was no coverage," says Granato. "No one had any idea we were even there."

Nevertheless, she's optimistic change is coming. USA Hockey recently agreed to assemble a national women's hockey team for six months of training and international competition in each of the next three years leading to the 2002 Olympics. In 1998, Granato said, the team was only together in the seven months before the Games.

Of the 20 American Olympians from 1998, 15, including Granato, have signed on for another Olympic push.

If the Olympics are as far as she ever goes, Granato says that will still be beyond her childhood dreams. "I'd give anything to play professional hockey," she says, "but I feel blessed. Other women didn't get to play in the Olympics or to get that gold. I did."

It is that combination of joy, gratitude and pride -- refreshingly distinct from the attitudes of so many male sports figures -- that has endeared America's women teams to the nation in the '90s. One way or the other, they keep giving us the shirts off their backs.

Pub Date: 7/24/99