As a feminine journalist who has lined girls’s sports activities for years, I’ve lengthy dreamed of the day that feminine athletes would demand the extent of media consideration historically reserved for males.
Now that day is lastly right here—and it’s quite a bit much less satisfying than I imagined.
The arrival of a dynamite WNBA rookie class, headlined by the sensational Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, has prompted an explosion of protection of ladies’s basketball. However—and maybe I ought to have anticipated this—the surge in recognition has come at a price. Sick-informed male sports activities analysts are all of a sudden chiming in in regards to the league and its gamers, providing narratives untethered to information and sometimes making me lengthy for the times when the WNBA largely flew below the radar.
A lot of the discourse revolves round Clark, the previous College of Iowa star who turned the all-time faculty scoring chief this season and is likely one of the most exceptional gamers the game has ever seen. A persistent theme has emerged that WNBA gamers, notably the veterans, are jealous of Clark and resent the eye she has been getting, when they need to be groveling at her ft. Just a few weeks in the past, for instance, the Corridor of Fame former participant and beloved commentator Charles Barkley accused WNBA gamers of being “petty” and declared, “Y’all must be thanking that woman for getting y’all ass personal charters, all the cash and visibility she’s bringing to the WNBA.”
That narrative escalated over the weekend throughout a matchup between Clark’s group, the Indiana Fever, and the Chicago Sky, which options Reese, who has been Clark’s nemesis since they confronted off within the NCAA championship sport two years in the past. Throughout Saturday’s sport, Reese’s teammate Chennedy Carter leveled Clark with a physique verify throughout a stoppage in play. Reese, who was on the bench on the time, leaped as much as applaud a budget shot. (The Fever went on to win.)
Carter and Clark had been mixing it up all through the sport, however issues ought to by no means have escalated to that time. The hit was soiled and will have been flagged as a flagrant foul within the second quite than upgraded after a postgame overview. Reese’s response, whereas maybe unsurprising given her long-running private rivalry with Clark, was inappropriate. However as a substitute of analyzing the incident for what it was—intense competitors gone flawed—the male punditocracy rushed to assign collective blame to the legions of Clark’s supposed haters across the league.
The previous NBA participant turned analyst Austin Rivers, for instance, posted a video ripping feminine gamers for his or her lack of gratitude. “In the event you ladies have been Future’s Little one, she could be Beyoncé,” he mentioned. As an alternative of hating on Clark, he added, WNBA gamers wanted to “respect her. It’s about that point. We have to develop up and transfer on. Pay respect.”
In males’s sports activities, after all, robust protection, bodily play, trash speak, and private rivalries are celebrated, applauded, and marketed. NBA historical past is full of tales of non-public grudges, together with some that featured loads of soiled play and have lasted properly previous athletes’ enjoying days. (See: Michael Jordan and Isiah Thomas.) These tales are embraced and instructed with affection. In reality, one of many criticisms that some followers have of at present’s NBA is that the gamers have gotten too pleasant and the sport itself too delicate. Relating to hard-nosed play in opposition to Clark, nonetheless, male pundits appear unable to see girls as fierce opponents. They only see imply ladies.
(Reese herself has been on the flawed finish of some “Welcome to the league” fouls, most lately a throat-grab physique slam by the Connecticut Solar’s Alyssa Thomas. “They don’t give a rattling if I’m a rookie,” Reese mentioned afterward. “They’re not imagined to be good to me.”)
As increasingly more male pundits opine on girls’s basketball, a number of the evaluation is simply plain cringeworthy. In April, within the quarterfinals of the NCAA match, Clark put up 41 factors and 12 assists in a decisive victory over Louisiana State College, the defending champion. After the sport, the NBA Corridor of Fame participant Paul Pierce supplied scintillating evaluation on the Fox Sports activities 1 speak present Undisputed. “I’mma simply hold it 100 with you,” Pierce mentioned. “We noticed a white woman from Iowa do it to a bunch of Black ladies. That gained my respect.” His fellow panelists nodded in settlement.
A white lady dominating Black opponents in girls’s faculty hoops certain does sound exceptional—except you already know something in any respect in regards to the historical past of the game. Girls’s faculty ball has been affected by dominant white gamers. In 2021, the College of Connecticut star Paige Bueckers, a favourite to be the highest decide in subsequent 12 months’s WNBA draft, was the primary freshman lady to win the John R. Wood Award, given to the perfect participant within the nation. Breanna Stewart, the reigning WNBA MVP, gained 4 straight nationwide championships and three nationwide player-of-the-year awards at UConn. The NCAA girls’s file holder for many profession factors earlier than Clark was Kelsey Plum, a white level guard who now performs for the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces.
At the very least Pierce’s remark, nonetheless ignorant, was meant to be complimentary. The identical can’t be mentioned of the more moderen avalanche of male punditry, which drips with condescension and stereotypes about girls’s habits. After Clark’s group misplaced its first a number of video games of the season, for instance, some male analysts prompt that the league must be rigged to permit Clark to succeed, for the advantage of the game’s recognition.
“The WNBA is enjoying this all flawed,” the NBA journeyman Jeff Teague mentioned on his podcast, Membership 520. The league, he mentioned, ought to mimic skilled wrestling, pulling its punches in opposition to Clark. “It’s imagined to be like WWE. Y’all are imagined to play onerous in opposition to her however let her kill.”
The Fox Sports activities radio host Colin Cowherd made an identical argument on the air a couple of weeks in the past. The WNBA had erred, in his view, by making Clark play in opposition to robust competitors to start the season. “In order that they lastly have this second,” Cowherd mentioned. “Don’t put Caitlin Clark up within the first 4 video games in opposition to New York twice and Connecticut twice, the perfect defensive groups.”
What Cowherd could not notice is that the WNBA has solely 12 groups, and the highest eight qualify for the postseason. There simply aren’t lots of weak hyperlinks. Clark’s group is likely one of the few, which is why they’ve had the highest decide within the draft the previous two years. Within the WNBA, identical to in males’s sports activities, the perfect faculty gamers are inclined to must take their lumps for a couple of years on a awful group. Nobody was saying that the NBA ought to go simple on Victor Wembanyama’s lowly San Antonio Spurs this previous season.
Now, in equity, Cowherd wasn’t saying that the WNBA ought to pamper Clark simply because she’s a girl. In reality, he claimed, males’s skilled leagues pull these sorts of shenanigans on a regular basis. The NFL purposely gave the Chicago Bears a straightforward beginning-of-season schedule this 12 months, he mentioned, in order that their new quarterback, the No. 1 draft decide, Caleb Williams, might get acclimated earlier than dealing with robust competitors or showing on nationwide TV. Likewise, Cowherd mentioned, when Main League Soccer wished to make it possible for Lionel Messi ended up on a serious market group, it ignored salary-cap guidelines in order that Miami might signal him to a giant contract.
This evaluation was even sillier than his WNBA commentary. The Bears will probably be on prime-time nationwide TV within the second week of the season, dealing with the Houston Texans, a playoff group that gained its division final 12 months. As for Messi, the MLS has put aside non-salary-capped slots for star worldwide gamers since 2007. So a minimum of Cowherd didn’t restrict his wacky, fact-free theorizing to simply girls. Perhaps that’s progress. Perhaps the truth that the WNBA is lastly being subjected to the identical absurd, usually ignorant debates as males’s sports activities is simply what equality seems to be like.
Nonetheless, it rankles. After I hosted ESPN’s SportsCenter in 2017, any time I flubbed a reputation or statistic, legions of viewers would declare on social media that it was proof that ladies shouldn’t be discussing males’s sports activities. Males, against this, are allowed to snort and even brag about how little they know in regards to the girls’s sport. Final month, the ESPN talk-show host and former NFL punter Pat McAfee posted from the sideline of a New York Liberty sport: “Has this Liberty group ever misplaced?” he wrote on X. “This is likely to be the best group assembled of all time.”
I’m glad McAfee was having fun with “the W,” because the WNBA is usually known as. The Liberty are certainly an excellent group. So good, actually, that they made the WNBA finals final 12 months—the place they received smoked by the Aces, who’re going for his or her third straight WNBA title this 12 months. So, sure, this Liberty group has misplaced. When the WNBA analyst Carolyn Peck known as him out, McAfee replied sarcastically, “I and my present won’t communicate in regards to the W till we all know every little thing about it.”
Look, he may need some extent. Maybe longtime girls’s-sports followers ought to cease holding male pundits to even essentially the most primary requirements of knowledgeability. I imply, we wouldn’t need to seem ungrateful that males are lastly paying consideration. That might simply be petty.
