SAN FRANCISCO -- Condoleezza Rice knows what it's like to be the only woman around a conference table. On Thursday in a San Francisco ballroom, she walked into a room filled with others who could relate.
The former Secretary of State during the George W. Bush administration (2005-09) was the keynote speaker of the first-ever NFL Women's Summit. Although politics and football might seem worlds away, Rice has become a bit of a revolutionary, albeit a quiet one.
Commissioner Roger Goodell glowingly welcomed Rice to the event.
"Thank you, Roger, for that wonderful introduction," Rice said. "You know, I've been asked from time to time if I do want to be commissioner, Roger, and I tell people that when I was struggling with the Iranians and the Russians every day, it looked pretty good, but from northern California, it doesn't look so good anymore."
As one of the first women to join Augusta National and sit on the College Football Playoff committee, Rice has been accepted into a space that hasn't been welcoming for women. It takes a fair amount of diplomacy to break that ground, but now that she is there, Rice didn't speak the language of compromise.
The Bush administration may have challenged Title IX, but on Thursday Rice, a former Stanford provost, staunchly defended the law.
"The provost of Stanford actually oversees athletics, and so I heard a lot of those arguments about why Title IX was just so expensive," Rice said. "But you know what? The cost of Title IX pales in comparison to what it is doing for young women in college and what it is doing for the preparation of women leaders who will end up, some of them in professional sports but most of them in boardrooms, in corporate C-suites. They will end up in government. They will end up in nonprofits -- better leaders because of the experience in sports, in team sports.
"And in this regard, I hope that all the women who are now benefiting from Title IX recognize how hard it was to get there, and recognize that it is a daily struggle to stay there, and recognize the pioneers who insisted, patriots who insisted that women were going to be treated equally on playing fields."
Billie Jean King couldn't have said it better herself. King was in the front row of this audience composed of women in football and leaders in their fields. On the surface, the contrast between the tennis legend and the stateswoman might seem profound: King was seen as a firebrand and a radical as she built the women's tour into the most lucrative sport for her gender, while Rice has worked to break barriers behind the scenes and praised the membership of the Masters for the way she has been welcomed.
Rice remains a controversial figure politically, of course, but the focus Thursday was on an appreciation of her contribution to sports, a sentiment that resonated among this group of professional women.
Rice attributed her success to sports. She was a competitive ice skater, but at 5-foot-8, she felt a little too tall to go far. The discipline of sports did instill some values that helped her later on -- trusting preparation, learning to do something hard rather than relying on what comes easily to you, and finishing the trial despite falling three times in the first minute of a 3½-minute program.
"I can tell you as Secretary of State, there are a lot of times when I just wanted to quit right then, right there," Rice said, "in the middle of a tough negotiation to say to the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, 'You know, I've had enough.' But you know what? You can't."
Rice talked about her upbringing in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, with parents who told her she'd have to work twice as hard as everyone else. Sports, she said, is a place you can see all those barriers vanish.
"It's really good that people can have a common endeavor that overcomes race and ethnicity and class," Rice said. "We need more common endeavors, and sports is a common endeavor."
At the same time, she said, breaking ground requires a certain toughness, a refusal to become offended over small things.
"[Sports instills] a responsibility to own both your successes and your failures," she said. "You can't blame someone else when something doesn't go right, you simply have to accept that it's on you. We could have more of that these days. There's a little too much victimhood out there for me. Because you know what happens when you start considering yourself a victim is you've given up control to somebody else. Your well-being depends on them. That's really not a good place to be."
There aren't many women who could have broken these barriers. When the members of Augusta National offered her the green jacket, it was an offer they might have made to any politically powerful member of the insiders club.
And that is how Rice became one of the most important women in sports, able to joke with the NFL commissioner about whether she'd have his job. And that would, of course, be another first for the list.
"You want simply to seek to do the things you enjoy, that you think you might be good at," Rice said. "And then once you're there, to make sure that you're not going to be the last. The obligation is, once you've been the first, is to make it possible for other people to do what you have done."