William N. Wallace has viewed the American sporting scene in various poses, chiefly as a daily journalist for New York City newspapers.

Sigmund Freud once said, “The great question which I have not been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?'”

When it comes to American sports, organized athletics, the answer would seem to be “more.”

The recent 25th anniversary of Title IX, the 1972 amendment to the Civil Rights Act prohibiting gender discrimination in college athletics, coincided with the start-up of the WNBA. (The new women’s basketball league affiliated with the wealthy National Basketball Association.)

These two events, lightly linked, might have called for a celebration instead of a miasma of dissatisfaction in certain quarters.

Implementation of Title IX lags behind, according to the most important and strident leader in contemporary women’s sports. Donna Lopiano is executive director of the Women’s Sports Foundation and a former college basketball coach.

The WNBA may have had a successful beginning weekend, but its players are not being paid enough, claims another critic. Mariah Burton Nelson, a veteran of one of the five failed women’s professional basketball leagues of yesterday, cites the skimpy $15,000 minimum salary.

Even though the emancipation of women on many fronts is this century’s most distinctive imprint, Lopiano likes to holler about gender inequities in intercollegiate sports.

Her foundation is good at presenting studies like the 1997 Gender Equity Report Card, which made recent headlines by pointing out that funding for men’s intercollegiate sports exceeds that of women’s by a ratio of 3.4-to-1, that 80 percent of the coaching jobs are held by men and that women get $143 million less in athletic scholarship aid than do men.

Never mind there are fewer women playing these games than men, probably by choice.

An interpretation of Title IX is all colleges receiving any federal funds (which means almost every one) must meet the vague standards of athletic gender equity or lose the funding.

But it has never worked that way.

The Office of Civil Rights has never cited an institution for noncompliance, and the Department of Education does not have the money to do compliance reviews.

Lopiano recently said, “The law says as long as [colleges] are making progress, you’re in compliance. The problem is, people put it off.

“All the federal government would have to do would be to initiate proceedings to remove federal funds. That’s the great hammer of Title IX.”

There has been plenty of progress. Now more than 116,000 women participate in intercollegiate sports, compared with 30,000 in 1971.

Men still outnumber women participants, 188,399 to 116,272, even though enrollments are about equal.

The big problem is football.

Football programs involve over 100 male participants. To make up for that numerical imbalance, frantic athletic directors have been cutting men’s sports and adding women’s sports to achieve the theoretical 50-50 ratio in numbers.

But not all women in sports are hollering. Many are so grateful for opportunities that never existed before, and their experiences have been widely disseminated in the print media recently.

One voice of reason was heard in USA Today, in which Debbie Brown, the women’s volleyball coach at Notre Dame, wrote, “It would be helpful for all of us to tone down the inflammatory rhetoric that increasingly crops up in discussions of Title IX.

“While women’s programs worry over the lack of progress, and men’s bemoan budget cuts, both should remember this is an evolutionary process.

“We’re making tremendous progress.

“Since men have participated in collegiate sports for well over a century, it only stands to reason they demonstrate more interest than women. Give women fair time and opportunity, [and] they will show the same levels of desire and ability as men.”

As for the WNBA, its athletes are playing basketball for money only because they were able to hone their skills in college programs.

Attendance at opening games in Cleveland, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Salt Lake City totaled 50,756 on the opening weekend, and the overnight national TV rating of 3.8 exceeded projections.

Nevertheless, Mariah Nelson, the veteran of the failed women’s league of 1979-82, isn’t waiting for evolution.

She wrote in The New York Times, “I’m afraid the WNBA might become a ladies’ auxiliary, a semipro sideshow to the real game the men play.”