Tiger Mom Amy Chua, meet Pussycat Dad Robert Strauss

PRESIDENT OBAMA, who called for a "Sputnik moment" in his State of the Union address, must be loving what he hears about Amy Chua, author of "The Battle Cry of the Tiger Mother." (Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite, launched by the Soviets in 1957, caused a frenzy in America that we were losing the intellectual and cultural race with our Cold War enemy.)

Fear of being overtaken by call-center operators in India or sweatshop tailors in China may well be the motivating factor in the reaction to Chua's memoir about raising her two teenage daughters the "Chinese way":

No sleepovers and no playdates. A mandatory all A's on every report card. Extreme proficiency in violin or piano. Laugh at your peril. Perfection ensues - and no nasty takeover by this generation's evil foreign Sputnik-type upstarts.

I, like Chua (and Obama), am in the two-daughter-no-son club - mine are the same ages as Chua's. As it happens, I have also just written a memoir about dealing with their up-and-down athletic careers. Let's just say that it is more Pussycat Dad than Tiger Mom.

Unlike Chua, who wrote that she threatened to burn her daughters' stuffed animals in reaction to some imperfect life result, I preferred to see my kids' sports world through an impossibly rose-colored windshield and with glasses not just half-filled, but overflowing.

Daughter Ella once came in 26th - dead last - in a ripe-for-embarrassment 11-year-olds' diving meet at her schoolmates' home swimming pool. She manned-up almost immediately and joined the group for an afternoon of partying. Chua would have had to have mouth-to-mouth resuscitation were my daughter her child that day.

It doesn't hurt to take a look back at the whole issue. When I was growing up in South Jersey in the '50s and '60s, boys played sports and girls, well. . .

Girls played basketball in bloomers and there were six on the court - two of whom could play both ends of the floor, presumably because most couldn't take a whole game without keeling over. Lacrosse had one more girl on a team - and no stick-checking. Girls were banned from Little League, but could play softball, with one more player - and balls that were squishy.

As soon as my girls started sports, I was smitten. Sylvia was the goalie on a soccer team that scored all of one goal the whole season. I went to every game - and when the team lost only 2-0, I couldn't wait to tell my wife the "good news."

After one basketball game, I put my arm around Sylvia and praised her for being the high scorer - with 1 point. Someone made the mistake of fouling her as she lofted a shot at the halftime buzzer and she made one of two from the foul line. Her team lost 44-1.

Chua would probably have excommunicated Sylvia from the family for letting in two goals and missing the back-end free throw. Even though Chua relented when her younger daughter chose tennis over violin at age 13, Chua surreptitiously texted her coach (heaven forbid the girl could just play on her own) with instructions on how the practice regimen should go.

Forget Tiger Mother - this is Vulture Mom.

In her last two years on the Haddonfield High basketball team, Ella, at 5-foot-0, was perhaps the smallest player in the state. Everyone cheered when she came into a game, even though she rarely scored.

I imagine Chua would have retched. How dare a daughter not be the best? I beamed.

Ella once coxed a Haddonfield lightweight crew to 12th in a national race. No previous Strauss had been 12th in anything national - and probably wouldn't have even if that nation were Liechtenstein. Proud dad couldn't hug her enough.

There must be something wrong with me, but I've never been the desperate sports dad, screaming at refs and pouting over that 21st century youth-sports ill, "playing time," which for many parents like Chua, as wife jokes are to Henny Youngman, too much is never enough.

I still play basketball almost daily, and most often as worst guy on the court. One of my cohorts, an ex-Philadelphia Catholic League star with toddlers of his own, asked me how it was watching my kids play. I told him, "You see those other nine kids on the court. Well, they're in drab black-and-white, and your kid is in fabulous Technicolor."

IF SPORTS IS often a metaphor for life, then my turn through parenting there, in its own odd way, is as important as Chua's with her no-sleepover zone. My kids have learned organization, teamwork and that Dad will always catch their backs.

The Chua girls may have learned how to come in first. The Strauss girls have learned how to be 12th and 26th - and still be winners all the same.

Robert Strauss, a former Daily News reporter, is the author of the memoir "Daddy's Little Goalie," coming in April. The book is available for advance orders at Amazon.com and Barnes and Nobel online.