Photo by Scott Cunningham/NBAE via Getty Images
WNBA hoops is really fun. Always has been.
This must be what it sounds like to win gracefully. Silence, save for the moments when record-setting attendance applauds the most popular WNBA season yet.
I, and many other dudes like me, would not handle victory this well. I’d be launching smug GIFs at anyone who once went out of their way to harp on the WNBA, heaping comeuppance posts at Bill Simmons and Clay Travis’ Twitter accounts every time raving news of the WNBA’s success hit (had they not blocked me already). WNBA fans should be running five-women weave victory laps in the face of anyone who poked fun at the league’s right to try and make a business out of a good time, and a professional sport out of great basketball.
The 2024 WNBA rookie class didn’t set the league alight, it was already mostly on fire, but it did turn the WNBA into top-story news throughout the NBA’s playoffs, hepped a few holdovers toward what WNBA fans already knew: WNBA hoops is, like, really fun. And anyone who has a hard time with someone enjoying this is, to use a word gaining increasing prominence, weird.
That mid-2000s-styled chafing, thankfully shouted down since social media gave voice to the rest of the world, was only pervasive in the weirdest sportswriters, or the sportswriters who wanted to be famous, or the weird sportswriters who wanted to be famous. There was zero vexation from the majority chunk of normal straight, male sportswriters happily ruling their gig on the local women’s sporting beat without reflex, covering a sport as a sport.
The WNBA grew up in the nastiest of times, the aughts and worst parts of the last century. Right through Woodstock ‘99 culture, Olsen Twins countdown clocks, the bi-monthly stream of half-naked young women on the cover of Rolling Stone. National sports editors across the country asked by management to take cues from Maxim and why wouldn’t they, when a single Sports Guy has four of the five most-read pieces on ESPN.com, and the fifth is an AP writeup with “Kournikova” in the title.
I never read ‘The Book of Basketball’ but can bet it ain’t half-filled with women’s hoops. The Guy’s attitude — you should be annoyed by the WNBA, they are taking something away from you — didn’t permeate the perception, it only gave further voice to life’s loudest participants, the ones most eager to follow. Later they would realize they weren’t in the majority, and that fewer and fewer people by year thought what they were saying was cool.
To complain about the NBA, NBC and eventually ABC/ESPN’s vested interest in the WNBA is to seek a bad time. Sought during summer, when one could instead use those hands and mouth to construct and then eat a delicious, crunchy sandwich. Nothing on TV in August? Favorite baseball team on an airplane after a getaway day afternoon game? Watch a WNBA game. Post pictures of the sandwich.
As if ESPN itself didn’t blow twenty years of cash on Australian Rules Football and decades-old copies of ‘Home Run Derby’ before it became the Worldwide Leader. As if sending NBA teams to Europe for tournaments in the late 1980s made any immediate financial sense. As if the NBA itself didn’t take thirty years to turn a real profit; as if any of these modern NBA teams want to turn a profit anyway.
As if any of these complaints weren’t coming from VC bro-idolators or VC bros themselves, subsidizing cash-bleeding startups, numbers never rolling over into the black, probably because they didn’t consider half the audience. Listen to them choke on Taylor Swift, some dudes cannot handle it when they are not required to fill a stadium.
It wasn’t always like this. Professional women’s sports used to be something we tried once. Like Pet Rocks, or mass communication via citizen’s band radio.
Women’s soccer and tennis and basketball and football leagues of the 1970s and 1980s faded well before ESPN came around to codify sports’ Big Three. Any prevailing coverage of long-lost women’s sporting “events” was completely overrun by guys who couldn’t get over it, like the Sports Illustrated editors ready to ruin an otherwise-sensible Curry Kilpatrick column from 1975, driving the hammerstein home with the title “There is nothing like a dame.”
Kilpatrick’s journalistic charge was documenting the filming of ABC’s spinoff of its popular ‘Superstars’ competitions, this time with professional women athletes competing against other female pros. Billie Jean King participated among various golfers, swimmers, semi-pro football players, a horse jockey, and famed surfer Laura Lee Ching, fresh off her pictorial for another sort of magazine, altogether:
“I dig posing nude, man,” said Ching. “It’s a downer when people think chicks who do sports aren’t chicky enough. It’s a trip bein’ a chick, man. A groove. ‘Superstars?’ Far out, man.”
“I just figured this out,” said Marilynn Preston of The Chicago Tribune. “ABC only gets its kicks when the girls look like fools. This is the worst exploitation of women yet.”
That was two-quarters of a century ago. A quarter-century ago, 19-year old Anna Kournikova luxuriated on a Sports Illustrated cover, Frank DeFord stepping out of semi-retirement to wonder What It All Meant. By 2024? Nobody cares what men like me think. A gift to ears and eyes alike.
The takes of men like me are not required not simply because readers tired of the Same Old Sportswriting, but because of that meritocracy, baby, the same ol’ stuff doesn’t chart as well as it used to, nobody in 2024 pays Jay Mohr to joke about the Phoenix Mercury.
Modern sportswriting ranks are rife with fresh and eager insights, thoughtful opinions. This world is the angstiest it has ever been but the sports pages are still a breeze, sports social media fun to scroll through, singularly because there are more women covering sports than ever. Who woulda thought welcoming half the population would result in such a turn?
And the fellas, we needed this. We needed more sports on TV, more moves to watch and attempt on our own. If your personal handle didn’t go through a Ticha Penicheiro-phase immediately after its Jason Williams-phase in 1999, your handle wasn’t keeping up.
Then, when we grew older, we needed to listen to the children of this televised revolution when they told us it was important to them. Nobody needed to become a girl dad to recognize this, you just needed to become a man.
Kelly Dwyer covers the NBA for The Second Arrangement and the loudest sporting events he’s ever covered were, by far, the 2009 and 2012 WNBA Finals
