It was one of those front-page juxtapositions that won’t make Jay Leno but still made me cringe.

On the same day last week that we ran photos of an emotional memorial service for a woman who contributed great things to sports in the Miss-Lou, we had a story about a Sports Illustrated swimsuit shoot held in Natchez last year.

I’m not completely against the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, but I have no use for it. Still, if a photo of a woman in a bikini on Giles Island attracts more people to our region, I’m all for it.

The folks who read the magazine are most likely not the same people who are reading brochures about Pilgrimage or the balloon race, so we need to stretch our marketing as far as we can go.

And there is a place in our community for tourists of all shapes and sizes and backgrounds and interests, and we need to make sure we are doing what we can to attract them.

Besides, the SI swimsuit issue is going to live long after any complaints I make about it, so I’ve long since given up trying to find someone who can explain what skimpy bikinis have to do with sports (other than, as a friend explained, driving SI’s readership &045; which makes good marketing sense). And I can also squelch my arguments about how young women need proper role models rather than half-starved swimsuit models.

Because young women &045; and young men, for that matter &045; have plenty of proper role models, and we’re smart enough to know the difference.

We have the memory of women like Mary Irving, the longtime Natchez High girls basketball coach who passed away a week and a half ago after a long illness.

According to those who spoke at her memorial service last week, she was a coach, a mentor, a surrogate mother to hundreds of young women over the years, players who went on to coach for themselves or who took her lessons into their careers and their family lives.

Women like Mary Irving are what make sports great &045; not just women’s sports, but sports in general.

She’s inspired other great coaches and players in the Miss-Lou, but she is not alone.

We can look for inspiration to Pat Summitt, the legendary University of Tennessee women’s basketball coach who juggles championship seasons with her duties as a mother.

We have West Alabama’s Tonya Butler, who may have been the first women to make a field goal in a college football game last fall when she helped her male teammates defeat Stillman College one Saturday afternoon.

We have female marathon runners and marathon swimmers, who are quickly closing the gap between their times and the men’s.

In fact, at last year’s marathon swimming world cup, the top woman was a mere 50 seconds behind the top male finisher.

So marathon swimming isn’t exactly sweeping the nation as the next big sport, and it certainly won’t be selling the same number of magazines as a swimsuit issue, and unless we ever build an aquatic center it won’t attract anyone to Natchez.

But I’ll remember those numbers when someone tells me girls aren’t as good as boys, and I’ll remember reading about what an inspiration Mary Irving was to her players.

Kerry Whipple

is editor of The Democrat. She can be reached at 445-3541 or by e-mail at

kerry.whipple@natchezdemocrat.com

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