Inspirational figure: Australian Opals star Liz Cambage. Credit:AP Oddly enough, or perhaps not, the moments that have cut against the grain have come from the participants themselves. When top players in many sports are interviewed, one after another has confessed that their heroes are men. They admit that they have always preferred watching the men's versions of their sports, not only when that is the only available offering but also when it is one of two alternatives. Only this week, the impressive Adelaide Crows football star and former Olympic basketballer Erin Phillips said her Australian Rules role models were her father, former Port Adelaide and Collingwood player Greg Phillips, and her brother-in-law, the current Hawthorn star Shaun Burgoyne. Amng Phillips and many other top performers who have been hitting the media, there was due respect for women's codes, but inspiration came from the men. What provides inspiration to a young player of either sex? It's a complex brew. In team sports, there is the quality of the spectacle and the drama of a memorable match. A nine-year-old cricket tragic I know, B. Harris, came away from a WBBL match at a suburban ground this summer saying he had just seen the best game of his life because it had all the theatre of a dramatic build-up to a classic climax. He'll never forget that the best cricket match he saw at that formative age was played by women.

Myself, I often prefer watching women's soccer to men's, because it is largely free of the cheap thespianism and outright cheating that can make the men's game so hard to stomach. I have a preference for women's pro basketball because it moves slowly enough to enable the patterns to be seen evolving. (You need a more trained eye and slow-motion replays to fully understand the skill of the NBA.) But watchability alone doesn't necessarily create heroes. Where are the personalities? Watching the world's top players in the women's Olympic golf tournament last year, it was quite stunning to see the superiority of their mental and mood control compared with the men's. The world's best women's golfers were models from a sports psychology textbook for how they handled pressure. Even Ian Baker-Finch was awestruck by how slowly and softly their hearts beat. But there is also the rub. Mentally, men are clearly the weaker sex, battling inner demons and losing their temper and their nerve, playing under the Damoclean sword of visible self-doubt. Off the field, they are prone to distraction and self-destruction. By contrast, the top women can seem so perfectly contained that they are almost robotic. The most magnetic personalities are those who are flawed. Serena Williams draws the eye because she's obnoxious, not in spite of it. The public eccentricities of Liesel Jones, the orneriness of Kathy Watt, going back to Dawn Fraser stealing the flag at the Olympics, were what made these personalities transcend their performances. If there's one flavour that doesn't sell, it's vanilla.

So was Ellis right, and the public has become conditioned to find passionate interest in scandal? Is mere excellence not enough? Are women's sports stars doomed to relative obscurity until they start simulating sex with animals, getting busted taking cocaine, assaulting their partners or strangers in bars, and fixing matches? (Filming themselves doing the bubbler would seem an atrocity too far.) Do they need to become as weak as men before they can enter the feedback loop of media attention, megastardom and thereby herodom to the young? It's going to take a generation to find out. The profile-raising of women's rugby, AFL, cricket, football, basketball and netball is only a first step. To be frank, so many of the established female stars say that their heroes are men because they grew up in households where Dad had the television locked on men's sport and on weekends they went out to watch their brothers play. If they were talented, these girls played against boys and probably exceeded them until, at age 13, they were told they couldn't play mixed-competition sports anymore, and from there on the boys were made to seem frustratingly, if only physically, their superiors. It's only natural that they grew up measuring themselves against boys and aspiring to be as good as men, for this was the social construct imposed on their sports. For many of us who have daughters, the success of the new waves of women's sporting codes won't be measured by this month's television ratings and attendances and how much sponsorship income is drawn in the current contract period.

It will be measured when our daughters are adults and they say their chief inspiration was not David Warner or Israel Folau or Lance Franklin or Steph Curry, but Meg Lanning and Charlotte Caslick and Erin Phillips and Liz Cambage. And Liz Ellis. And when the positive allure of scandal becomes a quaint echo, something that belonged to their parents' generation but not their own.