WOMEN ATHLETES RACE PAST THE MEN.

Byline: Bill Wallace 

IF this Mia Hamm is so good, then why isn't she playing with the men's team? They could use the help.

Hamm is the star of the U.S. soccer team, the big favorite in the third women's World Cup tournament, which is in progress now.

This event, and the recent start of the third season for the Women's National Basketball Association, have placed female athletes in a spotlight with considerable glare.

No longer is opportunity for women in sports such a disputatious issue. Choices and chances are widespread and gaining, though equity with men in matters like prize money is incomplete.

Because Hamm and the other basketball and soccer players are established professionals, they are better measured in economic terms than those of gender.

Can the women's games grow audiences and turn profits in the ever-more-crowded field of sports entertainment? The women's World Cup tournament, among 16 national teams over 21 days at eight U.S. sites, might be the instrument that finally popularizes soccer in the United States.

That would be something.

The U.S. women's team, which won the gold in the first tournament in 1991, is acclaimed as the world's best, while the men's team failed to win a game at last year's World Cup in France.

Sponsors claim 400,000 tickets to this year's event have been sold, at prices from $20 to $110 and all 32 games will be televised. The championship will be decided July 10 in the Rose Bowl at Pasadena.

The women's team has a genuine star in Mia Hamm. Does it help that Hamm is attractive, like Michael Jordan, with whom she has shared a television commercial? Many say yes.

During the making of a karate segment of this commercial, the 5-foot-4-inch, 125-pound Hamm playfully flipped the 6-foot-6-inch, 190-pound basketball immortal to the mat.

That was in keeping with the contention of author Ellis Cashmore, who says sports superiority is no longer entirely a matter of muscle. His 1996 book, ``Making Sense of Sports,'' expounds on this premise.

So there are more steps for sports to undertake. Let's find out if women like Hamm and teammate Kristine Lily can play with men.

A further step would be to mix the sexes in appropriate team and individual sports. Mixed doubles in tennis deserves better stages, and mixed foursomes in golf needs a tournament format.

We need to discover how far we have progressed from that night in 1973, when the Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs tennis match in Houston's Astrodome had the attention of 50 million television viewers. (The 29-year-old King trounced the 55-year-old Riggs, who heralded himself as ``king of the male chauvinist pigs.'')

Women's teams in sports like ice hockey, lacrosse and soccer have demonstrated how appealing their athletes can be, but to limited audiences.

The rules for these games are slightly different, discouraging the physical contact that so corrupts men's pro sports. Among the women there is more passing, and thus sharing, of the ball or puck, more speed and finesse.

America is just discovering that women's games can be more fun to watch than the men's, as columnist Sandy Grady, a longtime sports observer, recently wrote in USA Today with regard to the WNBA product. ``The female pros seem to play a more unselfish, crisp, strategic game than the humdrum, regular-season NBA.''

The WNBA, in its second season, averaged almost 11,000 spectators a game, better than expected. Although profits were never revealed, there are reasons to suspect it is a good business.

The teams - 10 last season, 12 this season and 16 next season - are collectively owned by the parent, the all-male, National Basketball Association. The women play in summer months in arenas that would otherwise be dark most nights.

Their salaries, averaging $30,000 compared with $2.4 million for the NBA men, reflects the fact that their league is new, with shallow roots.

A competing league, the American, collapsed before completing its third season. So the WNBA, as the only pro game in town, has its own way when signing and paying college athletes, like Tennessee's touted Chamique Holdsclaw, now of the Washington Mystics.

The players' union managed to extract a labor contract from the league, the first in professional women's team sports, thanks to the guidance and help from the men's union.

What bothers women like Beth Bass, executive director of the Women's Basketball Coaches Association, is that the WNBA will always be dominated by the men's league.

The men's game is different from the women's,'' Bass says, ``especially in development.'' That's true. Mia Hamm and Michael Jordan would not fit well on the same basketball court.