United States
Though women have been pro athletes in the United States, since the early 1900s, paid teams, leagues and athletes are still uncommon and, as of 2006, paid far less than their male counterparts. For instance, the WNBA had its first season in 1997, 51 years after inception of the men's NBA. The WNBA (under the NBA Board of Governors) pays the top women players 60 times less than the top men. In 2005, the WNBA team salary cap was $0.673 million. The NBA cap was over 60 times higher, at $43.87 million. The Women's United Soccer Association became the first American women's pro league in 2001, but lasted only briefly because of financial sponsorship. Fans enjoyed women's pro soccer for three seasons before executives announced suspension of the league, despite the Women's national soccer team's rating as one of the world's top teams. Absence of a Women's professional football (soccer) league in the United States made it difficult for the Soccer women's national football team to find new players until Women's Professional Soccer was founded. A 2004 effort to revive the WUSA was launched. On September 4, 2007, a new North American women's professional football league, tentatively named Women's Soccer LLC, was announced, and ultimately launched in 2009 as Women's Professional Soccer.
Read more about this topic: Women's Professional Sports
Famous quotes related to united states:
“Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Canada are the horns, the head, the neck, the shins, and the hoof of the ox, and the United States are the ribs, the sirloin, the kidneys, and the rest of the body.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)
“Greece is a sort of American vassal; the Netherlands is the country of American bases that grow like tulip bulbs; Cuba is the main sugar plantation of the American monopolies; Turkey is prepared to kow-tow before any United States pro-consul and Canada is the boring second fiddle in the American symphony.”
—Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko (1909–1989)
“Hollywood ... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“The boys dressed themselves, hid their accoutrements, and went off grieving that there were no outlaws any more, and wondering what modern civilization could claim to have done to compensate for their loss. They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States forever.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The United States Constitution has proved itself the most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)