TOUGH ENOUGH

The doctor finished fitting the cast, a real beauty, plastered tight from just below the fingertips, straight up to the elbow.

“Guess this means you won’t be in that football competition,” the doctor said.

At which point, two words came to Adrienne Alo’s mind.

They were words that, when it came to sports, 15-year-old girls never used to use. They were words dropped into her vocabulary by women she will never know, fighting battles she will never understand.

Some of sports’ thickest doors have been kicked clear off their hinges, so female athletes would be able to give meaning to these words.

“Why not?” Adrienne Alo thought when told she could not compete. “Why not?”

A day later, when her Carson High friends gathered excitedly around her cast with their pens, she shooed them away with a promise.

“Don’t bother,” she said. “I’m having it cut off to compete in Punt, Pass & Kick.”

On Friday, a quizzical doctor removed the cast, only two days after it had been plastered on.

On Sunday, Alo competed in the San Diego Chargers’ team championship against other qualifiers from Southern California, Nevada and Hawaii.

Today, she is being hailed as one of the grittiest competitors in the four decades of the venerable NFL event after winning the girls’ 14-15 regional championship.

By throwing a football nearly 30 yards.

With a broken hand.

By the time you read this, another cast will have been put on Alo’s swollen right fist, where it will remain until early January.

If you don’t read this until evening, chances are the cast will have already been filled up with signatures.

Guaranteed, at least one of them will echo the motto of its owner.

“Girl power,” Adrienne Alo said. “I believe in girl power.”

One could look at this tale as proof that, thanks to the recent sizable advancements in female athletics, girls and their parents are just as nutty and overzealous as the boys.

Or as proof that they are just as determined.

With every great or unique women’s sports triumph--World Cup, WNBA, Olympic softball--there is criticism that the media are too patronizing, too interested in searching for meanings other than the final score.

Simply, critics wonder why champion women are not covered exactly like the men.

This is because, simply, certain female champions mean more.

While women’s sports is still in its growth stage, certain achievements can have a greater effect than is recounted in a final score.

Although involving a simple girl from an average Carson home where she shares a bedroom with her cousin, this is one of those times.

Ten years ago, there weren’t any female divisions in Punt, Pass & Kick.

Five years ago, there weren’t any girls cutting off casts for a chance to win it.

“We’ve come so far,” said Rosie Martinez, athletic director at Carson High, where sophomore Alo plays softball and basketball. “In the past, by the time a lot of girls got to high school, they would shy away from sports or not make it their main thing.

“Today, because of role models like Dot Richardson and Mia Hamm, we have girls coming in here and saying, ‘I’m an athlete.’ ”

Alo is one of those girls.

She led her softball league in home runs and runs batted in last spring as a freshman, and already has letters of inquiry from Division I schools. She is a starter on the basketball team.

She also has appeared in the national Punt, Pass & Kick finals in each of the previous three years, winning the championship last year.

Even though she never plays football, doesn’t even particularly like football, and never really practices for the competition.

“I just like challenges,” she said with a smile that goes nicely with her unassuming 5-foot-4, 145-pound frame.

She was certainly handed one last Monday when an opponent bent back her ring finger and broke a bone in her hand during a basketball tournament.

The next day her hand was swollen and purple, but she thought it was just a bruise. A day later, during a routine physical exam, her mother asked the doctor to check it. He discovered a hairline fracture in a bone leading from the ring finger into the hand.

“I come home that night, she has a cast on it, and I said, ‘What?’ ” recounted her father Rick, a retired Navy petty officer who works in aircraft parts.

Adrienne had already asked the doctor about competing Sunday. He had told her he wouldn’t recommend it.

“So she asked me to call him,” her father recalled.

“There was not much pain, really,” she said.

Of course, she couldn’t use a pen, or comb her hair, or even brush her teeth.

When the doctor was contacted again, he gave her father the same answer.

“He said he wouldn’t do it if it was him, but he said it probably wouldn’t hurt anything,” her father recalled. “Adrienne really wanted to defend her championship, so we did it.”

A brace was put on the hand. Alo did not touch a football until she showed up on the Qualcomm Stadium field early Sunday morning.

The brace was removed, and her father taped her ring finger to her little finger. But even then, she could only throw with her palm. “So I told him to take the tape off, so I could try to throw like always,” she said. “And I asked him for two Advil.”

Only one throw was required. She backed up her usual three steps, ran to the line, tightened her jaw, and let fly.

“For the first time in all this, you could see the pain on her face,” her father said.

You could also see the ball sailing downfield. Although Alo didn’t throw it far enough to qualify for this year’s national championships, and about 10 yards fewer than last year, it was still good enough for the victory.

To those men who still haven’t bought the research that has proven women can withstand far more pain then they can, believe it.

“It really didn’t hurt until afterwards,” she said. “Then it hurt a lot.”

It hurt so bad, when the winners put on an exhibition at halftime of the Charger game against the Cleveland Browns, she decided to throw with her left hand.

The ball went only a few yards, and the stadium went silent.

“I was really embarrassed,” she said.

But not for long. By this afternoon, the word will be out at Carson that the toughest athlete on their competitive campus dresses in the girls’ locker room.

“The guys are all cool about it,” she said. “They’re like, ‘Why don’t you come play with us?’ ”

Careful. They probably all throw like boys.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.