Faboulus For Jade And Jersey (shirt)

“It wasn’t important that a woman was a good pitcher, or a good first basemen, or a good catcher. It wasn’t important,” Falato, 78, said. “It was just fun.”

The Clementon native and a 1952 graduate of Lower Camden County Regional High School, now Overbrook Regional, never could have imagined the changes in uniform, equipment, and even the rules of the game in some circumstances, that her daughters and granddaughters would become accustom to.

“Who even knew that the girls were good because you never saw them,” Falato said of her early experiences with athletics. “You just heard about what the boys did.”

Title IX is a 1972 landmark legislation that bans sex discrimination in schools, whether it be in academics or athletics.

Thanks to that law, Falato’s daughter Dawn Falato Cauley, 50, and granddaughter, Paige Cauley, 22, have benefited through greater access, encouragement, and acceptance for women and girls in sports.

All three generations of women were encouraged early on to participate in sports through their parents and watching their older sisters play.

Falato, one of three sisters, was always competing with her siblings to see who could catch or run the fastest.

“When I had kids, there was no thought in my mind that they wouldn’t play sports,” Falato said. “I guess because the three of us were so competitive and loved sports so much.”

Falato Cauley, four years younger than her sister Sherrie, would keep score at her older sister’s games. By the time she was a freshman at Sterling High School in Somerdale, she was on the field hockey, basketball and softball teams, eventually being inducted in the school’s athletic Hall of Fame in 1992.

While Falato Cauley in part put her two daughters, Britt, 24, and Paige into sports to keep them out of trouble, she knew her daughters’ athletic talents could eventually be an opportunity to help with college.

By the time Paige was deciding which university to attend, she knew that “softball was my in.”

A three-year starter at second base at Mercy College in New York, she had previously started her freshman year at Iona College before transferring.

Signed into law, June 23, 1972, Title IX is often misunderstood and misrepresented. Encompassing 10 separate components, including math, science and sexual harassment, the original law did not explicitly focus on women’s athletics. But almost 40 years later, the advancements in women’s athletics are predominantly what the law is remembered for.

Today more than 186,000 women participate in college athletics, while fewer than 30,000 competed before the law was enacted. According to the Women’s Sports Foundation there were over three million female high school athletes for the 2007-2008 academic year, compared with 4.3 million high school male athletes.

“Often people think that if there are 10 women on the tennis team that there should be a male tennis team with 10 men getting scholarships. The law is not about a team-to-team comparison but it is more that there are equal opportunities for girls and boys across all of the teams,” Women’s Sports Foundation CEO, Kathryn Olson said.

“It is all in the spirit of equality, equal opportunity, and this is really about education for our youth,” Olson added.

In a 2003 Gallup poll, 30 percent of Americans acknowledged they had heard nothing about the policy. The year before Jennifer Capriati, a Gold medalist, Grand Slam winner, and former No. 1 ranked women’s tennis player admitted to having never heard of Title IX.

But the law is also often viewed as controversial, with some believing it perpetuates reverse discrimination on male athletes. And April 2011 reports by the New York Times demonstrated how institutions can evade the law and still be considered in compliance.

“What would be the ideal situation is that people don’t have to think day to day about Title IX because everyone is following the law, the compliance is there, and the focus is on the educational opportunities provided for the girls,” Olson said. “We are not in that state.”

For the Cauley and Falato families though, Title IX has been an important part of their story, even if they do not claim to know much about it.

“I really don’t remember hearing anything about it,” Falato Cauley, who was in middle school when the policy was signed into law, said. “I don’t ever remember talking about it, or our coaches talking about it.”

Just like her parents and grandparents before them, Cauley hopes to continue the pattern of keeping sports all in the family with her own children in the future.

“Because of how much I enjoyed it [sports] and how much it did for me, I want my daughter to have the same thing,” Cauley said.

“And I’ll be her coach.”

Cut the John Bull

“Criticism of such a selection policy highlights a lack of understanding of how the international game operates in this day and age.” Graham Jenkins writes

WRU in fresh caps controversy

“The WRU have announced all Welsh fans attending their Rugby World Cup warm-ups will be awarded full caps.” read the latest from The East Terrace

Ask John

Cap centurions, South Africa v East Africa 1961, Test full-houses, cross-coders and Ireland’s William Hall. Check out the latest edition of Ask John

Multi-national England

A headline-grabbing 27% of England’s Rugby World Cup training squad were born overseas – a fact ‘celebrated’ in the latest edition of Scrum Sevens

England’s foreign legion

In a region rich with baseball history, the Tampa Bay Rays have a wide selection of throwback jerseys worn by long-gone teams that have played in the Bay area over the past half-century.

The St. Petersburg Pelicans and the St. Pete Saints were represented on throwback days. Tampa Tarpons jerseys showed up on Rays’ players last year. But the jerseys chosen for the July 2 game – recreations of the Tampa Smokers design – aren’t exactly identical to the originals.

The beige home-field jerseys have Smokers written across the chest in red with a lit cigar stitched into the logo’s underscore. Not cool, some would say, since the team has in the past supported “Tobacco-Free Florida,” and other anti-smoking campaigns. Public service ads have aired during televised Rays games and some of the players have done commercials urging tobacco users to quit.

So, the Smokers’ stogie was unceremoniously un-stitched from the shirt.

The team issued this statement about the cigar omission:

“We have chosen to wear the Smokers jersey to celebrate the rich heritage and traditions surrounding baseball in Tampa Bay and this version of the logo is intended only to be a slightly more contemporary version of that wonderful history.”

Some are puzzled by the revisionism.

“It’s kind of embarrassing,” said Gary Mormino, a University of South Florida history professor and co-director of the Florida Studies Program. “I mean, embrace the past.”

Tampa’s love affair with the national pastime is equaled by its passion for making and smoking fine cigars, he said.

“Tampa still is known as Cigar City,” Mormino said. Prior to the 1950s, dignitaries who came to Tampa got the key to the city along with a box of fine cigars, he said, and mayors always were out in public, chomping on foot-long cigars.

Cigars, Mormino said, were a status symbol. “If you were a banker, you didn’t smoke a machine-made cheroot,” he said. “Cigars were a mirror of one’s standing.”

All that history aside, the cigar-less jerseys will be worn by the Rays on July 2 in a game with the St. Louis Cardinals.

The Tampa Smokers jerseys are from the 1951 Class B Florida International League season, when the Smokers won it all with a 90-50 record.

Since the Rays have been around for only 13 years, its own throwback jersey wardrobe is limited. So the team has reached back into history to pick jerseys from other professional, semi-professional and amateur teams that played here.

In 1999, a year into its existence, the Rays donned Tampa Tarpons jerseys, circa 1960. The next year, they wore the St. Pete Saints from the mid-1960s.

University of Tampa jerseys from the 1960 era were worn in 2005 and St. Petersburg Pelicans jerseys made their first appearance in 2007.

All of the Smokers’ game-worn jerseys will be auctioned off on www.raysbaseball.com following the game with proceeds benefitting the Moffitt Cancer Center and the Rays Baseball Foundation.

The 25-year-old woman walks off the dance floor and looks around. The music is loud, but the crowd is quiet. A few friends from a local military training base sit at a table. A group of regulars hovers around the outdoor bar.

It used to be like this all the time, says Jennifer Petruski. Then one day cameras showed up at the club.

Suddenly the music got better. The cover jumped.

A glance at the places on our “Jersey Shore” tour.

THE “JERSEY SHORE” HOUSE

Where: 1209 Ocean Terrace, Seaside Heights
Info: seaside-realty.com/jersey-shore-house-rental.htm

THE SHORE STORE

Where: 1209 Boardwalk (Boardwalk and Kearney Avenue),Seaside Heights
Hours: 10 a.m. to midnight daily; open later on weekends.
Info: shorestore.com; 732-830-6122.

THE BEACHCOMBER BAR GRILL

Where: 100 Ocean Terrace, Seaside Heights
Hours: 11 a.m. to 3 a.m. Sunday to Thursday; 10:30 a.m. to 4 a.m. Friday and Saturday.
Info: beachcomberbar.com; 732-793-0526.

RIVOLI’S

Where: 781 Fischer Blvd., Toms River
Hours: Noon to 11 p.m. daily.
Info: rivolis.com; 732-270-3634.

KARMA

Where: 401 Boulevard, Seaside Heights
Hours: 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. Wednesday (teen night); 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. Thursday (local night); 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. Friday; 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. Saturday; 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. Sunday.
Info: myspace.com/clubkarmanj; 732-830-3003.

And Karma became the hot spot to go on a Saturday night.

Call it the “Jersey Shore” effect. The MTV show – which averaged 9.3 million viewers during its most recent season – has been drawing locals and tourists to Seaside Heights ever since its debut 18 months ago.

A few weeks ago, we decided to spend a day at the “Jersey Shore.” We went to the house where cast members stayed, stopped by the T-shirt shop where they worked, ate chicken Alfredo from the restaurant where they dined and even visited the club where they partied.

So take a ride with us.

The cabs are here. It’s T-shirt time.

2:46 p.m., 1209 Ocean Terrace

The wood shingles are peeling. The white railing has been defaced with a black marker. Someone left a desk chair a few feet from the stairs – an awkward lawn ornament for a property that has no front lawn.

And yet people flock to this Seaside Heights home.

Four girls leave Great Adventure and come here. Three Toys “R” Us employees wander over to take a look. A married couple stops by to celebrate a fourth wedding anniversary.

“It seems like everybody comes down to do this,” says Catherine Torres, the woman commemorating her anniversary.

The parade to 1209 Ocean Terrace continues. A few people say the house looks smaller. Most say it looks filthy.

“That one there?” says Robert Delauro of Brooklyn. “That’s a [expletive] house.”

If you watch MTV, then you have seen “Jersey Shore.” And if you have seen “Jersey Shore,” then you know this house. It is the spot where the Situation wore the shirt before the shirt, the place where Snooki ate pickles, the house where Ronnie and Sammi fought. And fought. And fought.

The garage has been painted green, white and red – the colors of the Italian flag – so locating the house is easy. If you miss it, just roll down your window.

“Everyone knew where it was,” says Cheyenne Bauer, a 20-year-old from Clifton Park, N.Y. “They were like, ‘Kearney Street, take a right.’ “

This house has become a base camp for “Jersey Shore” tourists. Fans start here, gawk at the house, pull out their cameras – snap! snap! snap! – and then proceed to the next location. The show averaged 9.3 million viewers this winter. Now those viewers are making trips down to Exit 82, crossing the bridge into Seaside Heights. They visit the bars, the restaurants, stores and beaches that Paulie, Vinny and JWoww made famous.

“They want to get what they ate and they want to sit where they sat,” says Tony Rivoli, the owner of Rivoli’s, an Italian restaurant that the “Jersey Shore” cast made popular.

Some fans who visit these locations walk away with stories. Others go home with T-shirts.

3:20 p.m., The Shore Store

A young man walks inside the Shore Store. He passes the T-shirts on the left wall – the ones with every catchphrase uttered during the show’s 35 episodes.

Cabs are here

Come at me bro

Yeah buddy!

He makes his way to the counter.

“I got a question, man,” he says. “Are you hiring by any chance?”

Danny sizes up his prospective employee. He does not seem sold. The young man pleads with Danny.

“I’ll work as much as you need me to work,” he says.

Danny tells him to come back Sunday. At 10 a.m. He has a shift for him. And he will probably have a shirt for him, too. A few years ago, Danny says he had to beg his employees to wear the store’s official T-shirt. “Now it’s the hottest thing,” he says.

Danny – “The Boss” on “Jersey Shore” – does not like to give out his last name. MTV used his last name to promote the show a year ago. The next day, he says, 700 people sent him Facebook friend requests.

He and his brother own the house where all the show’s shenanigans take place. It’s located right next to the store that he runs. Up until a few years ago, not many people knew who he was.

“The first episode aired,” Danny says. “All of a sudden, people are in front of our door, knocking on our door. ‘Is Snooki there?’ It’s no longer our house. It’s now America’s house.”

Fans cannot go inside the house, but they do wander inside the store. Four girls from Bound Brook … a pair of travel agents from Atlanta …

“I have someone from Australia here every single day,” Danny says. “People that go to New York and Philadelphia now come to Seaside Heights [during] their trip. They’re cutting out Atlantic City. They are cutting out Atlantic City and they’re coming here.”

He poses for photos. He offers directions to other “Jersey Shore” hotspots. And he sells a ton of T-shirts.

“I’ve lived here my whole life,” Danny says. “I’ve worked in this store since I was about 14 years old. And this [Memorial Day weekend] was the busiest I’ve ever seen it.”

He finds it amusing, comparing the hoopla to the scene outside Carlo’s Bakery (“Cake Boss”) in Hoboken or inside Cheers in Boston. “Everything has its time frame,” he says.

But until that expiration date, he is enjoying the extra foot traffic.

“Everyone thought it was going to bring a bad element to Seaside,” Danny says. “It’s brought nothing but a good element. Mothers, fathers, kids that are 13 to 17. I’ve got to say they may have brought the best, best crowd to Seaside Heights. It was not the drunken, party animal you might have thought. It’s the teeny boppers.”

Those fans who are not teeny boppers go looking for a bar.

4:33 p.m., The Beachcomber Bar Grill

The chair has eyes – blue eyes – and purple eye shadow. A 23-year-old woman who grew up in Pompton Plains is sitting in it. Half an hour earlier, she was drinking at the Aztec with some friends. Then she made her way down the boardwalk to the Beachcomber Bar Grill.

“As soon as I walked in,” says Taralyn Lamont, “I was like, ‘Oh my God! This is the place where Snooki got punched in the face. This is terrible.’ “

But she did not walk out. Most people do not. Many visit the scene of the crime. Michael Carbone, the owner, does not discourage this. He seems to enjoy telling the story of that crazy night when a young man named Brad Ferro clocked Snooki with his right fist.

“He was standing with a bunch of friends,” Carbone says. “I didn’t even think he knew what he was doing. He just kind of reached out. I mean, there were security guards standing all around. There was no warning, no nothing. It just happened.”

So do people come in and ask about the punch?

“I see people all the time fake it at the bar,” Carbone says. “They’ll be taking pictures of them getting punched.”

He was the one who had blue eyes painted on the back of that barstool, labeling it “Snooki’s Chair.” Even after the punch, he said, the cast members continued coming here about three times a week.

“They’re here in town 24-7,” Carbone says. “So, you know, you only see a few hours on TV, but us people in the town, we see them every day.”

Even on vacation, Carbone cannot get away.

“I went to Belgium last year,” Carbone says, “and ‘Jersey Shore’ was on TV in Belgium in the hotel. That and National Geographic were the only two shows I could watch in English.”

Over in Snooki’s seat, Lamont mulls the price of the “Jersey Shore” house. She heard it costs $2,500 a night to rent.

“Dude, I would totally do it,” she says.

Lamont tries to line up investors. She turns to her two friends at the bar.

“Want to do it with me?”

They roll their eyes.

5:16 p.m., Rivoli’s

It’s a nine-minute cab ride from the beach to the restaurant on Fischer Avenue. One turn off Route 37 is a two-story building with a maroon façade and matching awning. There is a digital sign with red light bulbs out front.

Yup. This is it. Come on in.

The owner is wearing a white designer T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans. Tony Rivoli likes to have fun with that sign out front. When the show first aired, he used it as a campaign to lure cast members into Rivoli’s.

Hey Paulie. Stop here. Have dinner.

He is convinced it was the sign that changed everything. One day producers showed up with waivers to sign. Then the cast came in for dinner. A few months later, the episode aired on a Thursday night.

On Friday afternoon …

“The phones didn’t stop ringing,” Rivoli says. “Didn’t stop ringing.”

On Friday night …

“We ran out of food,” he says.

Business boomed. He hired eight more full-time employees. On the digital sign, he took a tongue-in-cheek jab at the president.

Jersey Shore created eight more jobs than Obama

“When I was growing up down here, I would always go to the Stone Pony on Sunday nights,” Rivoli says, “because most of the time Springsteen was going to be there playing with Cats on a Smooth Surface. It’s the same phenomenon with the ‘Jersey Shore.’ These kids come here thinking that the ‘Jersey Shore’ is going to be here. A lot of times, they do stop in.”

He said that “Jersey Shore” fans now account for almost 40 percent of his business here. Fans have come from Australia, Arizona, Illinois…

“On our Facebook, people from Somalia wanted me to mail them food,” Rivoli says. “I didn’t know they had Facebook in Somalia.”

On days when the cast members decide to pop in, he usually gets a half-hour notice. If they’re coming in on a Saturday, it gets tricky. Rivoli rearranges tables, shuffles seats around. So far, they have stopped in four different times with the cameras. Twice they sat in the front room, twice in the back room.

Rivoli has their usual orders committed to memory. JWoww likes grilled calamari with plum tomato sauce on the side. Vinny orders chicken stuffed with sausage. Ronnie gets “chicken paradise” (chicken stuffed with crabmeat). And Paulie orders chicken alfredo – a dish that Rivoli occasionally puts on the specials menu as “Paulie’s Chicken Alfredo.”

But ever since Vinny uttered that two-line poem – “Rivoli’s, Rivoli’s, where you can get cannolis” – fans have been clamoring for that dessert.

“I can go through eight dozen in two days,” says Lorraine Trippanera, the restaurant’s manager.

“That’s a lot of cannolis,” Rivoli says. “Especially [because] have you seen the size of the portions we have? I don’t even know how people can eat dessert here.”

His customers make room. Then they take a nap.

And then they go clubbing.

9:41 p.m., Karma

An older gentleman in a baseball cap walks out to the truck parked in front of the club. On the bed of the truck are four spotlights. He turns them on. They rotate clockwise, casting four beams of light into the sky.

At 9:59, a group of girls pull up across the street. They do not put any change in the six-quarters-per-hour parking meter. Instead, they hop out of the van and snap a quick photo. Seconds later, they’re gone, their van turning left on Webster Avenue, vanishing into the night.

Four minutes later, it’s a kid in a green shirt. His friends cross the street, but he lingers behind with his camera. He takes a photo, and then rejoins his friends.

Everyone wants a shot from the opposite sidewalk. Bathed in blue, the five letters on the front of this building have become iconic.

“This Karma sign is probably the second-most photographed [thing in Seaside Heights],” says Karma owner John Saaddy, “besides the MTV house.”

He is wearing a black track suit, holding a cigar in one hand, a few days removed from one of the hottest Memorial Day weekends since the club opened four years ago. On Saturday, 4,700 fist-pumping fans walked through the door.

This is where the cast members go – and in one memorable episode, this is where they go. One scene showed JWoww ducking behind an empty bar to relieve herself.

“All the bathrooms and everything else and you’re gonna go by the bar?” says Tim Anderson, a 42-year-old bartender who was working that night.

He laughs. He is tending bar with two women outside, but three bartenders might be overkill tonight. The place is empty. One of the other bartenders says that Memorial Day is a classic fake-out – the crowds that weekend are huge, but there’s a lull before the club picks up steam a few weeks later.

Even so, people are still taking photos. A few days earlier, Anderson says, there was a car accident in front of the club. A fan tried taking a photo while driving.

“Smashed into the back of another car,” Anderson says. “I’m like, ‘Dude, stop and take the picture.’”

So get your camera ready. Seaside Heights is ready for another close-up.

“It’s now the center of the Jersey Shore,” Saaddy says. “Before ‘Jersey Shore’ it was Point Pleasant, Long Beach Island. Now it’s Seaside Heights.”

E-mail: kerwick@northjersey.com

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Scores of frenzied Bruins [team stats] fans packed stores yesterday in search of B’s gear, but the most popular items — Stanley Cup hats, jerseys, car magnets and pennants — were gone within hours of the championship win.

“My son wanted me to get him a hat and a T-shirt, but there wasn’t one hat left by the time I got here at noon,” said Lisa Carr of Medford at Modell’s Sporting Goods yesterday. “At least I was able to get T-shirts so the kids won’t be disappointed.”

Kyle Charon, a New York City Modell’s manager who drove to the Medford store Wednesday night with eight others to assist 20 local associates on the sales floor, said he walked into organized chaos.

“It was a spectacle,” said Charon, adding that their Medford and Newton stores opened immediately after the game. “The line was around the corner all the way down the mall, and the store was filled with people, and we went through 500 hats in less than an hour.”

The championship hat made by Reebok and worn by the Bruins on the ice after the win features the Stanley Cup embroidered on white cotton twill along with the Bruins team logo.

The madness was the same at Dick’s Sporting Goods stores across New England, which opened at 5 a.m. to accommodate fans who couldn’t wait to get their hands on Bruins jerseys, hockey sticks, locker room towels, T-shirts and decals.

John Russo, 61, a disabled Vietnam veteran from East Boston, said he got a call from his 27-year-old son in California, who asked him to buy a Brad Marchand jersey.

“I told him it would be easier for me to get him a Cad-illac Escalade,” he said. “But I lucked out. They had one XXL left and I grabbed it.”

Imprint Graphics in Framingham scored an order from Reebok to churn out 3,500 championship T-shirts in children’s sizes overnight.

“The first pickup was at 1 a.m. It was really bizarre. They got about 100 shirts and they had to get them out to the airport for the team’s arrival,” said co-owner Steve Bremner.