Tag Archives: women’s basketball

WNBA Basketball Needs Its Own Press Corps

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Angel Reese facing the camera; Caitlin Clark facing Reese and holding the ball

Laurie and Debbie say:

If you are not a sports fan, or a WNBA fan, here’s the groundwork:

The WNBA audience is currently growing astonishingly fast. This popularity is in part due to Caitlin Clark, a white player from Iowa currently playing for the Indiana Fever. Clark has set many records and has a huge fan base; she also does a great deal to promote the sport. Though Clark gets much more of the credit, Angel Reese is another key reason for the sport’s increasing viewership and excitement. Reese, a Black woman, plays for the Chicago Sky; she has also set many records and draws large crowds.

Jemele Hill is a reliably incisive and thoughtful Black sports reporter, currently running her own film and production company. In “The One Downside of Gender Equality in Sports,” she has Things to Say about the quality of reporting on Clark, Reese, the reputed feud between the two of them, and women’s basketball in general.  (Warning: the article may be behind the Atlantic’s paywall.) Aside from reading Hill’s article, I also heard her on the podcast A Word … with Jason Johnson, which I strongly recommend.

The arrival of a dynamite WNBA rookie class, headlined by the sensational Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, has prompted an explosion of coverage of women’s basketball. But—and perhaps I should have anticipated this—the surge in popularity has come at a cost. Ill-informed male sports analysts are suddenly chiming in about the league and its players, offering narratives untethered to facts and occasionally making me long for the days when the WNBA largely flew under the radar. …

A persistent theme has emerged that WNBA players, particularly the veterans, are jealous of Clark and resent the attention she has been getting, when they should be groveling at her feet. A few weeks ago, for example, the Hall of Fame former player and beloved commentator Charles Barkley accused WNBA players of being “petty” and declared, “Y’all should be thanking that girl for getting y’all ass private charters, all the money and visibility she’s bringing to the WNBA.”

Hill acknowledges the real rivalry between Clark and Reese, and goes into a recent incident which reveals some of the truth here. But …

In men’s sports, of course, tough defense, physical play, trash talk, and personal rivalries are celebrated, applauded, and marketed. NBA history is filled with stories of personal grudges, including some that featured plenty of dirty play and have lasted well past athletes’ playing days. (See: Michael Jordan and Isiah Thomas.) These stories are embraced and told with affection. In fact, one of the criticisms that some fans have of today’s NBA is that the players have gotten too friendly and the game itself too soft. When it comes to hard-nosed play against Clark, however, male pundits seem unable to see women as fierce competitors. They just see mean girls.

The commentary Hill critiques isn’t just about the supposed personal issues between the two players. One thing she said on the podcast is that the male reporters conflate competitiveness with jealousy. No one reaches the top of professional sports without being competitive, but you can be competitive without being either jealous or (one of the favorite words used about Reese and other Clark competitors) petty. Both jealousy and pettiness are stereotypically associated with women athletes — and with Black women.  These are, of course, as untrue and unfair as most stereotypes, and that (surprise!) doesn’t stop male reporters of any race from uplifting them as if they were facts.

And then there’s the not-quite-stated assumption that women’s sports are basically about theater, not excellence.

After Clark’s team lost its first several games of the season, for example, some male analysts suggested that the league should be rigged to allow Clark to succeed, for the benefit of the sport’s popularity.

“The WNBA is playing this all wrong,” the NBA journeyman Jeff Teague said on his podcast, Club 520. The league, he said, should mimic professional wrestling, pulling its punches against Clark. “It’s supposed to be like WWE. Y’all are supposed to play hard against her but let her kill.”

The Fox Sports radio host Colin Cowherd made a similar argument on the air a few weeks ago. The WNBA had erred, in his view, by making Clark play against strong competition to begin the season. “So they finally have this moment,” Cowherd said. “Don’t put Caitlin Clark up in the first four games against New York twice and Connecticut twice, the best defensive teams.”

Read the article to see Hill take that one apart.

Let’s close with Hill’s closing, in response to a male commentator being PO’ed because people expected him to know his facts.

Perhaps longtime women’s-sports fans should stop holding male pundits to even the most basic standards of knowledgeability. I mean, we wouldn’t want to appear ungrateful that men are finally paying attention. That would just be petty.

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Debbie occasionally posts on Mastodon.

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Pat Summitt (1952-2016): Sports Legend, Feminist Hero

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Debbie says:

pat-summitt

I’m ashamed that I didn’t know more about Pat Summitt before she died earlier this week.  Her name was only vaguely familiar to me; I’ve been reading up since, and I’m in awe.

Body image activists and thinkers are often uncomfortable with athleticism and competition because so many people can be marginalized by successes available to only a few. At the same time, appreciating the body has to include appreciating its highest achievements, without valorizing those achievements at the expense of everyone else. Pat Summitt represents a lifelong commitment to working first with her own body and then with the minds and bodies of competitive college-level women’s basketball players, and getting absolutely the best out of herself and everyone she worked with.

For any of you who are as out of this loop as I was, Summitt coached the University of Tennessee Lady Vols to nearly 1100 wins, making her the coach in all of basketball history with the most victories. In 36 years, she took her team to eight NCAA championships (a record at that time). The only thing better than her record of wins is her record of educational achievement: 100% of the students who completed their athletic eligibility during her tenure also graduated from college.

She died at age 64 of complications from early Alzheimer’s disease.

As Liz Magee said in her obituary at The Frisky, Summitt was “a truly great feminist in a beautifully non-performative way. She just did the damn thing.” In that context, Magee cites Summitt’s response when she was invited to coach the University of Tennessee men’s team: “Why would that be a step up?

When she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, she refused to step down, although she acknowledged that her mind was not working like it had been. With the help of associate coaches, she coached one more year before retiring in 2012.

She had a consuming passion, and she lived it to the utmost. One of her star players, Candace Parker, has become a WNBA star. After last night’s game, she spoke for a few moments about her beloved “Coach.”

Here’s a beautifully embodied quotation from Summitt on her own basketball career before she was a coach:

It’s difficult to explain to someone who has never competed, but a moment arrives in the life of a serious athlete when the game begins to live in you: It so occupies your mind and body that you almost become it. You gain a sense of such command over your own arms and legs that it can almost feel like flying, and you begin to crave that sensation daily. Everything else is just an interruption until you can return to it. That was me. I played, quite literally, in my sleep.