The annual ESPY Awards ceremony, ESPN's answer to the Oscars, is a real chameleon, with classy moments mixed with trashy ones, and generously sprinkled with film highlights and tons of audience-celeb shots.

The classiest moment of the 14th edition of the ESPYs, taped in Hollywood's Kodak Theater and televised July 16, came when the two-hour program paid tribute to the young girls who are playing organized soccer in post-Taliban Afghanistan despite threats from still-ingrained, ultraconservative Taliban elements.

Two of the girls, wearing traditional attire that was far dressier than the Taliban would ever tolerate, accepted the Arthur Ashe Courage Award from actress Ashley Judd, who presented it to them with a splendid introduction. Audience members, some moved to tears, gave the girls a well-deserved standing ovation.

This unfortunately contrasted to other moments in which edgy, so-called adult-style humor was employed to provide a risque element the producers apparently wanted. (They could have edited it out, but didn't.)

It seemed even more unfortunate that most of the back-room material was delivered in a monologue by Lance Armstrong, the show's host. This is hardly the sort of gig a seven-time winner of the Tour de France should accept without all due consideration for what using off-color jokes might mean for his public image.

In fairness to Armstrong, he did a commendable job overall, and exhibited some real stage presence as the first athlete to host the awards.

By the way, golfer Annika Sorenstam won the Female Athlete of the Year award for the second straight year – the only woman ever to do so. She also gave a model acceptance speech (in a taped video clip) that other athletes could learn from – short, sweet, and to the point – that was as good as her in-person acceptance the previous year. Armstrong, incidentally, picked up his fourth straight Male Athlete of the Year prize, which was presented by singer Mariah Carey.

Here's the complete list of ESPY winners.

Touching other bases

•That was a nice gesture by new Wimbledon champion Amelie Mauresmo to hug Justine Henin-Hardenne's coach as well as her own after beating Henin-Hardenne in the final. Mauresmo has truly paid her dues in getting to the tennis summit (she's now won two of this year's Grand Slam tournaments, including the Australian Open), and for anyone who values artistry as well as athleticism, her ascendancy is most welcome. As various slow-motion replays showed during the Wimbledon telecast, the Frenchwoman is poetry in motion. It will be interesting to see what she does in the year's final Grand Slam tournament, the US Open, where she's made the semifinals only once (2002) in seven tries.

•I don't know about you, but I often find sports movies hard to enjoy. Why? I guess it's because when you're knowledgeable about a particular sport, you want to see it presented accurately, with no Hollywood hyperbole or alterations of actual fact. Maybe because I'm less conversant with soccer than other sports, I'd rank "Bend It Like Beckham," a soccer movie, among the most enjoyable sports flicks I've seen. The footage of a team practice was a personal highlight for the way it showed me what soccer drills look like.

•Speaking of "Bend It Like Beckham," English soccer star David Beckham, whose fame inspired the movie's title, finds his name coming up in American soccer circles these days. Reports have circulated that the LA Galaxy of Major League Soccer may try to lure him to the US and that he'd consider making the jump to either Los Angeles or New York. Given that he has a daughter named Brooklyn, you might think he'd opt for the Big Apple. On the other hand, he and his glamorous wife Victoria could make a wonderful addition to the Hollywood party scene.

•To address a controversy over the questionable academic status of some incoming college athletes, the NCAA has identified certain prep and nontraditional school that don't pass muster. Wouldn't you too be suspicious of grade transcripts that establish eligibility from schools with names like Celestial Prep, Goliath Academy, and Martinez Adult Education?

•David Ortiz, the clutch-hitting slugger of the Boston Red Sox, is known for his dramatic, home-runs, not for his speed afoot (he carries 230 pounds on a 6 ft. 4 in. frame). So when the husky Dominican stole only the sixth base of his nine-year career against the Kansas City Royals on a nifty hit-and-run, "Big Papi" was so overjoyed that after the game he collected second base as a souvenir.  In case you were wondering, Ortiz has 209 career homers as July 17.

•Recently I got to chewing the fat about sports with our mailman. When I expressed amazement that the Oregon State University baseball team, and not some Sun Belt college, had won this year's College World Series, he chalked up the unexpected result to recruiting. He figured OSU must have brought in a bunch of ringers from California. But when I checked the team's 43-player baseball roster, I discovered it was load with Pacific Northwest players, including 26 from Oregon and only three from California. In winning its first World Series crown in the multiteam playoffs, the Beavers recovered from an 11-0 opening-game loss to Miami (Florida), beat the University of North Carolina in the finals, and staved off elimination six times during the course of the two-week tournament.

Before committing the '06 World Cup soccer tournament to the mental archive, here are some final thoughts:

As an American baby boomer who grew up in the 1960s, I've never been anchored in soccer. Barely tethered might best describe my relation to real football.

Still, the World Cup soccer tournament, which concludes Sunday in Berlin and has monopolized international sports headlines for a month, has gotten me to thinking about my atypical life in soccer, not that there's a lot of "in" there.

Mostly it's been a flyby experience with occasional connections to the game, the latest as a sit-at-home spectator of this year's World Cup. I plan to tune in the championship game between France and Italy, because no one who calls himself a true sports fan (as I do) should miss it, but I can't claim to know the game the way younger office colleagues do, who keep track of game broadcasts on their computer screens.

They truly know the game and understand things like yellow cards and the offside rule because many of them have played it, even if just informally. I, on the other hand, didn't grow up with soccer the way millions of American children do today. We had no youth leagues, nor any school soccer. Not even a high school team. And during 13 years in Indiana public schools I never once remember playing a single game in gym class. If we wanted a change of pace from the meat-and-potato p.e. offerings, the game of choice was "Bombardment," or what others might call dodgeball. Back then, soccer was as alien as a taco.Times indeed have changed.

As I was preparing to graduate from high school, though, I became aware that some classmates were playing pick-up soccer games. This was all well and good, but when I used my "Athletes' Feats" school sports column to suggest that American fans weren't ready to watch the game as played by the upstart North American Soccer League, I got raked over the coals in a rebuttal column written by the newspaper's featured columnist, a johnny-come-lately soccer enthusiast.

I've never felt you could graft soccer onto the American sports culture and expect instant success, and the demise of various soccer leagues, including the NASL, has proved that. To its credit, Major League Soccer has shown exemplary patience and persistence in modestly growing the pro game with a commitment to long-term goals.

I'd like to see soccer succeed as a spectator sport, and I truly think it will over time, especially given America's changing demographics. But I confess I haven't felt compelled to attend a college game since I was a freshman at Indiana University in the fall of 1967. That semester, as part of my p.e. requirement, I eagerly enrolled in a soccer class taught by Jerry Yeagley, the coach of the school's club team. It wasn't a varsity sport back then, but Yeagley had assembled a pretty good squad, drawing on the talents of a number of foreign students.  Little did I know or even suspect at the time that IU would eventually become a soccer powerhouse under Yeagley, who guided the Hoosiers to six NCAA national championships before retiring in 2003.

As a postgraduate I hooked on with The Christian Science Monitor and wound up writing sports for 18 years. The opportunity provided some interesting opportunities to reconnect with soccer at various times.

I made my first acquaintance with the World Cup in 1974 via closed-circuit telecasts in the old Boston Arena. Four years later, the venue was the luxurious Music Hall in the city's downtown theater district, where Argentine fans celebrated their team's victory by shooting off firecrackers – in the theater. In 1980, the Spanish-language telecasts landed in the Bradford Hotel, a sleepy establishment with a siesta tempo. It wasn't until 1994 that I got my first in-person look at the World Cup when it came to the US, where I caught some of the action in Foxboro, Mass., at the home field of the NFL Patriots.

My sportswriting career provided many other soccer memories as well. Here, are some of the highlights:

• In 1975, I was at Boston University's Nickerson Field, the former site of Boston Braves major-league baseball games, to see Brazilian great Pele and the New York Cosmos play against the Boston Minutemen of the North American Soccer League. A crowd of 30,000 spectators overflowed the stands, and, if I recall correctly, some who couldn't buy tickets climbed the stadium walls to get in.

• In 1978, when the Cosmos were the toast of the the NASL as the league's star-studded flagship franchise, I attended the league's championship game – the Soccer Bowl - at Giants Stadium in the New Jersey Meadowlands. New York beat the Tampa Bay Rowdies. Dick Young, a noted New York Daily News sports columnist, was in the press box, and after the game, Atlantic Records executive Ahmet Ertegun, a team co-founder, circulated around the Cosmos locker room, offering his congratulations. To this day, a Soccer Bowl '78 mug, a table favor from the only black-tie dinner I ever attended in a New York ballroom, graces a bookshelf at home.

Then there were the opportunities to interview some of soccer's luminaries on the American sports landscape, including:

• Phil Woosnam, who presided over the NASL as the league's commissioner. During my 1980 visit to his mid-Manhattan office, he predicted that pro soccer would be the sport of the '80s in the United States as pro football, showcased by television, had been the sport of the '60s. Average attendance at NASL games at the time was about 15,000 (similar what MLS games draw today), but Woosnam envisioned that figure growing to 40,000 or 50,000. He cautioned, however, that some teams were incurring financial losses and that the league needed to be "careful in going forth. We can't allow other people to force us forward too quickly." The NASL folded after the 1984 season.

• Kyle Rote Jr., the first US-born professional soccer star of the NASL era, once shared a restrospective of his career with me during a 1994 interview. Rote, the son of a famous football player, angered many fellow Texans in the '60s when he switched from football to soccer. Here's how he described the local reaction: "Most newspapers wanted to reinstate the McCarthy hearings to see where the Communist tendencies entered my family."  Rote was the top pick of the NASL's Dallas Tornados in 1973 and won the league scoring title as a rookie. By his own estimation, though, his most important contribution to the sport may have come in winning back-to-back made-for-TV "Superstars" competitions against stars from various other sports, including Reggie Jackson and Julius Erving. This, he says, proved to US-centric viewers that soccer players were great athletes.

• In the mid 1980s, I caught up to Ricky Davis, one of Rote's successors as the poster boy of American soccer. It was after a practice in suburban St. Louis for the Steamers, an indoor pro team. Davis reflected on a missed opportunity in World Cup qualifying play the previous year, when, if he'd been able to head a crossing pass into the net, the US would have landed a berth in the '86 Cup tournament in Mexico. "I almost became a recluse for two or three weeks after our elimination," he recalled. "There really wasn't anything anyone could tell me to ease the pain."

• Maybe the most enjoyable group of players I ever interviewed were three members of the US women's national team - Mia Hamm, Kristine Lilly, and Carla Overbeck – at their training complex outside Orlando, Fla. in May, 1996. Each was polite, cooperative, and thoughtful, to say nothing of being wholesome All-American types. One of my few regrets is that I didn't make to Athens, Ga., when they won the inaugural Olympic gold medal in women's soccer at the 1996 Centennial Atlanta Games.

Lilly continues to play and now has made more international match appearances (300) than any player, woman or man, in history. She maintains a delightful website that includes a personal journal of her travels. If I had a vote, she might well be my choice for athlete of the year.

Readers hardly accept every word inscribed in this space as the sports gospel, so their comments are always welcome, especially ones as insightful as those from Helen Wheelock of Woodside, N.Y. Helen wrote in about a "We're Just Fans" blog that carried the headline "WNBA reaches double digits, but where are the women coaches?"

Ms. Wheelock calls herself a fan of and writer about women's basketball. As such, she applauded the coverage of the women's game, which she contributes greatly to by maintaining Women's Basketball Online ("the most comprehensive women's basketball site on the net").

Still, she wished I'd dug deeper into why only three of this season's 14 WNBA head coaches are women. She said that I'd touched on a "very complicated and rich issue." I invited her to elaborate, and here's her response:

In 1997, seven of the eight teams participating in the WNBA's inaugural season had women head coaches, and all of the coaches were drawn from the women's college basketball coaching ranks. But you didn't have the elite of the elite – the Pat Summitts, Marsha Sharps, or Jody Conradts – applying for jobs. No surprise, really. Why on earth would they leave the security and stability of their successful fiefdoms for the uncertainty of a pro league?

Even a decade later that question lingers. And as the merry-go-round that is the WNBA head coach position (for both men and women) continues, it is a reflection of the new frontier that is coaching women's professional basketball.

Elite college coaches can get a hefty, long-term contract with snazzy perks (Kristy Curry, formerly of Purdue, will earn a base salary of $425,000 as Sharp's successor at Texas Tech). The budget-conscious WNBA can't come close to matching that. While winning is important to a school, the concept of "building a program for the future" is understood. Like its brother organization, the NBA, there's little patience for that in the WNBA.

College teams travel across the country in first-class seats, while coaches have all but year-round access to their athletes. In the WNBA, it's economy class all the way, and a coach is lucky to see all his or her players for the entire two-week preseason camps. The WNBA squeezes 34 games into three months, while the college coach guides teams though a 30-game regular seaon spread over five months. Conference championships and the NCAA provide opportunities for success, as opposed to the WNBA, where the 14-team league can make every game a "must win" situtation.

A college team might survive a player's injury, but at the pro level, an injury can have seismic implications. Equally unsettling, a pro coach can find her once-promising lineup decimated because a player decides to stay in Europe to earn more money.

Add in all the differences between coaching the college athlete vs. the pro athlete and it becomes clearer why, even though opportunities exist for female coaches in the WNBA, those most suited to the job might be reluctant to step forward.

That being said, the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport did give the WNBA top marks in its annual racial and gender diversity report card. Equally significant? The 14 female WNBA assistant coaches who are displaying a commitment to working at the pro level.

The pool of professional female coaches is expanding – too slowly for many tastes – but, as they say, good things come to those who wait. The WNBA doesn't yet have the money or status of the NBA. But, to be fair, the NBA has a 40-year head start.

– Helen Wheelock

Helen Wheelock's website can be found at http://womensbasketballonline.com.