OLD SCHOOL; LONG BEFORE HAMM, THESE WOMEN RULED.

Byline: KAREN CROUSE

My favorite athlete is inexorably linked to the Women's World Cup. She is a trailblazer and a terrific role model. I have an autographed copy of her biography and I've memorized each page.

And no, her name is not Mia Hamm.

The U.S. women's World Cup team plays Nigeria today and you know what that means. Chicago's Soldier Field will be alive with the sounds of Mia.

Hamm, the U.S. team's star forward, has the kind of rabid following generally reserved for rock stars. Indeed, she engenders more high-pitched squeals than Ricky Martin.

It's curious. You'd come off daffier than Farrah Fawcett in her disjointed discourse with David Letterman if you suggested Martin is the first musician to swivel his hips and sway a generation. And yet it's considered perfectly politic to carry on as if Hamm and her U.S. teammates were the first females to make it hip to be jocks. Let the record show that is simply not so.

Just because Hamm and Co. are making history, the media and marketing mavens, however well-meaning, don't have any business rewriting the history of women's sports in the latter half of this century.

``You go, girl!'' was a movement if not a mantra long before the first pony-tailed pixie donned a Hamm jersey and dragged her dad to a U.S. women's soccer match.

I'd hate for people to disregard the fact that before the U.S. national soccer team preached working as one to get a job done, the 1984 U.S. women's Olympic basketball and volleyball teams practiced it.

The volleyball squad, behind the brilliance of the late Flo Hyman, won the U.S.' first-ever medal in the women's Olympic competition, losing to China in the final while drawing some of the highest television ratings of the L.A. Summer Games.

Cheryl Miller, the charismatic equal to U.S. soccer's Julie Foudy, led the basketball team in scoring, rebounding, steals and assists as the Americans handed Korea a 30-point defeat to win the first of back-to-back Olympic gold medals.

It'd be a shame if people never knew that before soccer moms Joy Fawcett (never to be confused with Farrah) and Carla Overbeck, there were sprinting moms Wilma Rudolph and Evelyn Ashford.

Two years after having a baby, Rudolph won three gold medals at the 1960 Summer Games in Rome. It was the first Olympics to attract a global televsion audience and the world, beguiled by Rudolph's grace and beauty, could no longer claim that sports stripped women of their femininity.

Twenty-eight years later, Ashford would make her fourth Olympic team, in Seoul, after delivering a daughter that was growing inside her even as she set a world record in the 100 meters in August of 1984.

It's not right for people to be unaware that before Michelle Akers overcame chronic fatigue syndrome to play soccer at its highest level, Babe Didrikson Zaharias fought off colon cancer long enough to triumph in golf at its highest level.

Didrikson Zaharias, a basketball player and a double gold medalist at the 1932 Summer Olympics in L.A. (in the javelin and the 80-meter hurdles), became a founding member of the LPGA in 1949. In 1954 she won the U.S. Open by a record 12 shots after being treated for the colon cancer that would claim her life two years later.

(With apologies to Hamm, if ever there was a female athlete who could stare at a male icon and declare, ``Anything you can do I can do better,'' it was Didrikson Zaharias).

It'd concern me if people recognized Billie Jean King as the woman in the World Cup commercial who is goading President Clinton to attend next month's tournament final at the Rose Bowl and not as the driving force in the formation of the women's professional tennis tour that is flourishing today. King then punctuated women's participation in sports by beating Bobby Riggs in a watershed battle of the sexes.

Finally, I'd be mortified if people didn't know that before Donna de Varona became the chairwoman of the 1999 Women's World Cup Organizing Committee, she gave people like me a blueprint for success.

Starting at the age of 13, De Varona set 18 world records in four different swimming disciplines. She won 37 national titles and two gold medals at the 1964 Olympics. She was out of the sport before her 18th birthday but never out of sight.

In 1965 she became the first female sports commentator on network television when she was hired by ABC. Her high profile over the ensuing four decades has served as a constant, comforting reminder that sports is an option for girls, as a competitive outlet and as a career.

De Varona couldn't possibly have known the impact she'd have on one pony-tailed pixie who dragged her dad to a sporting event one summer to see De Varona and maybe snag her autograph. De Varona's pen proved no less than a beacon, illuminating the child's path to this day.

``To Karen,'' De Varona wrote on an inside page of ``Donna De Varona, Gold Medal Swimmer. ``May you always enjoy the sport, the people and the life of learning.''

CAPTION(S):

4 Photos

PHOTO (1) Babe Didrikson Zaharias

(2) Billie Jean King

(3) Wilma Rudolph

(4--Color) Mia Hamm

Photo Illustration by Eric Barrow/Daily News