As a feminine journalist who has lined ladies’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 so much 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 girls’s basketball. However—and maybe I ought to have anticipated this—the surge in reputation has come at a price. Sick-informed male sports activities analysts are instantly chiming in in regards to the league and its gamers, providing narratives untethered to info and infrequently making me lengthy for the times when the WNBA largely flew underneath the radar.
A lot of the discourse revolves round Clark, the previous College of Iowa star who turned the all-time school scoring chief this season and is without doubt one of the most exceptional gamers the game has ever seen. A persistent theme has emerged that WNBA gamers, significantly the veterans, are jealous of Clark and resent the eye she has been getting, when they need to be groveling at her toes. A number of 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 ought to 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 workforce, 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 examine 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 reasonably than upgraded after a postgame evaluation. 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 fallacious—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 women had been Future’s Baby, she could be Beyoncé,” he stated. As a substitute 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, in fact, powerful protection, bodily play, trash discuss, and private rivalries are celebrated, applauded, and marketed. NBA historical past is crammed with tales of non-public grudges, together with some that featured loads of soiled play and have lasted nicely previous athletes’ taking part in days. (See: Michael Jordan and Isiah Thomas.) These tales are embraced and informed with affection. In actual fact, 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. In terms of hard-nosed play in opposition to Clark, nonetheless, male pundits appear unable to see ladies as fierce rivals. They simply see imply women.
(Reese herself has been on the fallacious finish of some “Welcome to the league” fouls, most just 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 stated afterward. “They’re not imagined to be good to me.”)
As increasingly male pundits opine on ladies’s basketball, among 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 provided scintillating evaluation on the Fox Sports activities 1 discuss present Undisputed. “I’mma simply hold it 100 with you,” Pierce stated. “We noticed a white woman from Iowa do it to a bunch of Black women. That gained my respect.” His fellow panelists nodded in settlement.
A white lady dominating Black opponents in ladies’s school hoops positive does sound exceptional—except you recognize something in any respect in regards to the historical past of the game. Ladies’s school ball has been plagued by dominant white gamers. In 2021, the College of Connecticut star Paige Bueckers, a favourite to be the highest choose in subsequent yr’s WNBA draft, was the primary freshman lady to win the John R. Wood Award, given to the most effective participant within the nation. Breanna Stewart, the reigning WNBA MVP, received 4 straight nationwide championships and three nationwide player-of-the-year awards at UConn. The NCAA ladies’s document 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 least Pierce’s remark, nonetheless ignorant, was meant to be complimentary. The identical can’t be stated of the newer avalanche of male punditry, which drips with condescension and stereotypes about ladies’s conduct. After Clark’s workforce misplaced its first a number of video games of the season, for instance, some male analysts instructed that the league ought to be rigged to permit Clark to succeed, for the advantage of the game’s reputation.
“The WNBA is taking part in this all fallacious,” the NBA journeyman Jeff Teague stated on his podcast, Membership 520. The league, he stated, 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 laborious in opposition to her however let her kill.”
The Fox Sports activities radio host Colin Cowherd made an analogous argument on the air a number 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. “So that they lastly have this second,” Cowherd stated. “Don’t put Caitlin Clark up within the first 4 video games in opposition to New York twice and Connecticut twice, the most effective 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 plenty of weak hyperlinks. Clark’s workforce is without doubt one of the few, which is why they’ve had the highest choose within the draft the previous two years. Within the WNBA, similar to in males’s sports activities, the most effective school gamers are inclined to need to take their lumps for a number of years on a awful workforce. 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 actual fact, 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 yr, he stated, in order that their new quarterback, the No. 1 draft choose, Caleb Williams, may get acclimated earlier than dealing with powerful competitors or showing on nationwide TV. Likewise, Cowherd stated, when Main League Soccer wished to make it possible for Lionel Messi ended up on a significant market workforce, it ignored salary-cap guidelines in order that Miami may 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 workforce that received its division final yr. As for Messi, the MLS has put aside non-salary-capped slots for star worldwide gamers since 2007. So at the very least Cowherd didn’t restrict his wacky, fact-free theorizing to simply ladies. Perhaps that’s progress. Perhaps the truth that the WNBA is lastly being subjected to the identical absurd, typically ignorant debates as males’s sports activities is simply what equality seems to be like.
Nonetheless, it rankles. Once 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, in contrast, are allowed to snicker and even brag about how little they know in regards to the ladies’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 workforce ever misplaced?” he wrote on X. “This could be the best workforce assembled of all time.”
I’m glad McAfee was having fun with “the W,” because the WNBA is commonly known as. The Liberty are certainly an excellent workforce. So good, actually, that they made the WNBA finals final yr—the place they bought smoked by the Aces, who’re going for his or her third straight WNBA title this yr. So, sure, this Liberty workforce has misplaced. When the WNBA analyst Carolyn Peck known as him out, McAfee replied sarcastically, “I and my present won’t converse in regards to the W till we all know the whole lot about it.”
Look, he may need a degree. Maybe longtime ladies’s-sports followers ought to cease holding male pundits to even probably 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.
