The WNBA and American Politics

I went to my first WNBA game the other night. Minnesota was at Portland. It was super fun. The Fire are not bad for an expansion team. 9th in a 16 team league is nothing to be ashamed about. Granted, it’s a big gap between 8 and 9, but that’s OK. They have weaknesses for sure, but that’s a respectable showing. The Lynx however are just so good. Napheesa Collier is a beast and Olivia Miles is going to be a very good player for a long time. They have so much depth, their offensive flow is fun to watch. They obliterated the Fire in the 2nd quarter. But then Portland had a serious 4th quarter comeback and while it was never a situation where you really expected Minnesota to lose, it was possible. Fun game, great league.

Unfortunately, the league is also beset by being at the forefront of the American culture wars and it’s so frustrating. It’s a black and queer league. Caitlin Clark’s rise as a superstar in college made her the Great White Hope for a lot of people who hadn’t paid attention to the WNBA before. This put a ridiculous amount of pressure on her that she did not want. She hasn’t always handled it super great. I actually respect her trying to stay out of the politics–sometimes she’s been tentatively progressive on things, or at least is urging people not let this stuff distract from the game, which fair enough.

However, her teammate Sophie Cunningham is a walking hot take, an Aaron Rodgers type figure who wants to push buttons, even if it blows up her own team. She’s a good role player, but she’s not that great of a player and it’s hard to see how she is worth this kind of distraction. Last month, she waded into the transgender debate in the most stupid and awkward way possible, talking about locker rooms and all that shit and then saying that actually she doesn’t hate and she’s not really anti-trans either and she loves everyone. But her hot take bullshit just took off in a way that has divided the league. For the far right, Cunningham is the Brave Warrior. For her own coach, this is all infuriating. For other coaches it is too. So there’s been confrontations with right-wingers at games, her coach has been booed for not “standing up for Sophie,” as if someone who says something that idiotic needs standing up for.

Again, Cunningham is an idiot:

Recently, Cunningham’s team has found itself squirming beneath an unrelenting spotlight because of something Cunningham said about trans women in sports. In an interview with ESPN, Cunningham offered: “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” Following those comments, her teammates and head coach have been dragged into the depths of this culture sewage. That means basketball hasn’t been the focus, much to Cunningham’s chagrin.

“The WNBA media, all we ever do is cover everything except basketball,” Cunningham said Wednesday morning. “It’s like, ‘What are we doing?’”

There’s no way Cunningham could’ve predicted that her fiery comments about something unrelated to basketball would spark a media inferno. This is a woman singularly focused on basketball — except, maybe, when she hosts a semi-regular podcast with a reality TV star. (One recent episode teased how co-host West Wilson would break his silence on why he stepped away from “Summer House.” Quite a contrast from The Athletic’s No Offseason podcast, which just talks about basketball and stuff.)

So, allow this story to attempt a rare thing with the Indiana Fever of the Women’s National Basketball Association, and mention the word “basketball” as much as possible.

….

It feels non-basketbally to bring up that Clark has refused to wade into the conversation that Cunningham sparked about trans women in sports. Initially, after the controversy began, Clark did not speak with reporters. When her absence from the frontlines of this cultural war was noted, and when pro-Cunningham demonstrations continued to overshadow the basketball, Clark finally said: “It’s for leagues and the governing bodies to work with their athletes to find solutions, but our focus is on basketball.”

Clark has since been torn down by members of the very community that had held her up as its representative. Cunningham, meanwhile, got a shout-out from Indiana’s Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, who once defended the purpose behind the Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787, which counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a human.

Beckwith said he was “proud” that Cunningham was a Hoosier, and his praise had little to do with her basketball skill set. People like him are not actually listening to Cunningham when she says let’s focus on sports, they’re using her. And they don’t actually care about basketball. Just listen to them.

“This is week three … covering the WNBA, and I have to say, I’m done. I hate the WNBA,” said Fox News host Jesse Watters. “I mean, I don’t mind women’s basketball. My girls play basketball, but I don’t want to cover women’s basketball. I don’t want to be a WNBA analyst. We get paid to have an opinion about everything. And this is something I don’t care about.”

In other news of conservative men supporting women, Outkick founder Clay Travis, who has called Cunningham “a rock star,” spent the week baiting the Aces, the defending WNBA champs, to a $10 million payday if they defeated a boys’ state championship team. Cunningham, for some reason, reserved her criticism for the WNBA media.

This is the problem that hounds the Fever. No matter how much the media, the fans and especially the players want to focus on basketball, the sideshow overshadows everything on the court. The protestors and politicians keep showing up. The blue check marks in Elon’s rage arena keep posting about this sport with impure intentions. It’s so exhausting.

For her part, Cunningham is trying to have it both ways. She throws gasoline on the complex discussion of trans women in sport, and fans those flames by spending time before the Aug. 2 game in Minneapolis, smiling and posing for photos with women wearing XX XY T-shirts. Then she complains when WNBA media notice what she stands for.

Cunningham wants all the good that comes with her proximity to a superstar like Clark, and the newfound fame she has built with her own outspokenness, but she wants none of the consequences. It would be nice for her if the world worked like that, just like it would be nice if the rest of us could stick to basketball.

As I said before, this is like having your nickelback be a political distraction. She’s just not good enough for this shit. She’s destroying her own team and giving white conservatives everywhere the opportunity to feast on anti-transphobia, while also hating all the black women and lesbians in the league. Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd should make out at midcourt just to shove it in their face. Meanwhile, whatever happens to Cunningham on the court, she has a lifetime on the wingnut welfare circuit if she wants it. Hell, Chuck Klosterman has predicted she’s going to be vice-president of the country!

This is a case where I really wish we could just focus on the hoops, which are so good right now.